I was confused when I started this book because I was expecting a more conventional narrative. However, the style and beauty of the writing was captivating. Full of flashbacks, trains of thought and bits of remembered conversation, if you read it with the view of immersing yourself in the world of the heroine, the story makes complete sense and stays hauntingly in your memory. One of the surprises is that, though you think the heroine is the only one harmed by the religious conventions of her day, you come to realize that her husband has been equally harmed. Terribly sad and beautiful, but vivid and fascinating.

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This terrific book challenges the assumptions of white male patriarchy, and does so with such inventive, eagle-eyed perspicacity. Fedwa Malti-Douglas is of course absolutely right when she observes that the assumptions about gender in the Starr report betray and dis/cover chilling aspects of the United States. Especially important is her analysis of the Clinton-Vernon Jordan relationship, and the thoughtless deployment of Betty Currie as a recording device unable to speak for herself. As a radical who empathizes with the Other, I am combatting the criminalizing of independent thought in this country, of which the Starr Report is a typical and, alas, familiar example.

Saadawi (b. 1931) is an Egyptian woman, a medical doctor, a prolific writer, and the Arabic-speaking worlds most outspoken and radical feminist. Without exaggerating, Malti-Douglas writes that No Arab woman inspires as much emotion as Nawal El Saadawi. No woman in the Middle East has been the subject of more polemic. Certainly, no Arab womans pen has violated as many sacred enclosures. Malti-Douglas then devotes over two hundred pages to analyzing Saadawis overheated rhetoric and bad novels, calling on all the usual feminist tropes (title and subtitle give their flavor, as do such chapter headings as Paradigms of Violation and Rewriting Patriarchy).

This predictable feminist lionizing of one of its own holds little interest to the general reader, but Malti-Douglas does raise an intriguing issue when she reports on the clash between Saadawi and her equally leftist intellectual (male) opponents in the Middle East. They would have her stay quiet about the appalling female condition in their countries and try to delegitimize her writings as Orientalist feminism. To which Malti-Douglas replies that Anti-imperialism can easily become a trap through which nationalism, while seeking to defend the native against the outsider, really defends those in power in the native society. Saadawis feminism, in other words, proves a source of unusual sympathy for the West. The importance of these epithets? Another sign of the intellectual lefts weakness: caught up in a web of its own inconsistencies, it (unlike the fundamentalist right) cannot even figure out its outlook on the West.