Nawal El Saadawi Named Guest of Honor at Tangier’s Twiza Festival

The 13th edition of Tangier’s Twiza festival for Amazigh culture will host the Egyptian feminist writer Nawal Al Saadawi as its guest of honor.

According to the foundation of the Twiza festival, El Saadawi will attend this year’s edition between August 11 and 14.

Entitled “The need for the intellectual”, the event will feature a discussion between El Saadawi and the Berber activist Ahmed Assid.

A prolific writer, a physician, a psychiatrist, and a feminist whose activism in the latter has had its echoes transcending the Middle East to Europe and North African countries, El Saadawi has long been a prominent voice for social and political change in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries.

El Saadawi is a fierce opponent of female circumcision—a practice still living in some parts of Egypt—as well as of the patriarchal hegemony present in Egypt and in other Arab-Muslim countries.

In 2004, El Saadawi was awarded the North-South Prize for her commitment, her prodigious achievements and her generation in the fields of Human Rights, while in 2012, she received the Stig Dagerman Award for “her role in the Egyptian revolution.”

The expected guest of honor has written volumes on women and their suffering in patriarchal societies, discussing and clarifying some issues such as virginity, which have in her eyes been misunderstood in society due to mistaken assumptions regarding human anatomy