Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi has done it again.
About 3000 copies of El Saadawi's latest book "God resigns the Summit Meeting" have been destroyed in Egypt before going on sale, the Gulf News reported earlier.
Al Arabiya.net more recently closely examined the reasons for this move. The causes of censorship were, according to Al Azhar, are the insult to the divine persona, giving human qualities to God, and the personification of various prophets. Al Azhar backed its
rationale by stating that it is Islamically forbidden to personify the divine self and the prophets in literary works and TV serials. The Alarabiya report lists the passages of objection in El Saadawi's play.
While most media outlets, especially Western ones, were quick to blame the incident on religious fanatcism and its stifling of freedom of expression, they had actually missed the point.
Constructing the narrative of this incident as "religious extremism" versus secularism simplifies the story and ignores another level of complexity. They disregard El Saadawi's long history of being at odds with the State. She was imprisoned briefly during President Sadat's time, accuses the State of using religion to oppress the people, and ran in the last presidential elections (but boycotted them later), and resists Egyptian alliance with the US whom she considers a foreign imperialist.
The censorship of her book is thus not simply a matter of religion, but also a political backlash against this anti-government activist.
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