NGO and Individual Support

Support from AHRIMAN Publishing House, Germany

Your present persecution

Dear Dr. El Saadawi,

With great indignation we have learned of your present persecution in Egypt and we want to express our solidarity with you.

We are a publishing house based in Freiburg in South Germany which since its foundation in 1983 provides a forum for the classical psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, the undistorted Marxism and other contents and publications which would otherwise not be accessible in Germany. You can find comprehensive information about our program and publications, including a number of titles in foreign languages, on our Internet page: http://www.ahriman.com. Our e-mail address is: ahriman@t-online.de

We have written to the Egyptian Minister of Justice to express our dismay about your persecution and to demand that you be protected and your rights be safeguarded. We have also written to your publishers in Germany, Switzerland and Great Britain for the purpose of coordinating measures of solidarity.

Since obviously the most important step is to inform the public, we further have published an article on your persecution in our own periodical Ketzerbriefe - Flaschenpost für unangepaßte Gedanken (“Heretical Letters - Bottle post for non-conformist thoughts”), which we distribute in the German speaking countries. We attach to this message an English translation of that article, which also contains our aforementioned letters to the Egyptian Minister of Justice and your publishers. You are welcome to display the article on your home page with our Internet and e-mail address; we could also provide you with the original German version.

We hope to contribute to bring about a stop of the persecution which you presently suffer in your country.

With solidarity yours,

E. Seidel AHRIMAN Publishing House

English translation of an article from Ketzerbriefe No 101 (June/July 2001)
(AHRIMAN Publishing House, Freiburg, Germany)

"... lay hold of them and kill them wherever you find them ..."
Qur'an, chapter 4, verse 91

While these days Annemarie Schimmel is celebrated for her "merits" concerning the understanding between Islam and the Christian religion by the award of the German Reuchlin (!) Prize of the City of Pforzheim and while an aged pope is on his way in Greece on account of the new Eastern policy of the Roman Catholic Church, there are e. g. committed, in the name of Islam, in approximately 25 Islamic countries, particularly in Africa, daily "circumcisions" of young girls. It was the merit of the esteemed Egyptian doctor and writer Nawal El Saadawi, not only by making public at the end of the seventies these grave bodily injuries, to which she herself fell a victim (cf. Taslima Nasrin. - The Death Order and its Background by Peter Priskil, AHRIMAN 1994, p. 98), but also by taking away from them the ideological deodorant of "tradition" and "religious custom", to define them clearly as what they are: the crime of genital mutilation. For thirty years she has been consistently fighting for social and intellectual freedom, equality and the right of self-determination and against indoctrination by the State and religious organisations. From the beginning of the seventies on she has been, besides practicing as a doctor, chief editor of a health journal, Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association in Egypt, Director of Public Health in the Ministry of Health and the United Nations Advisor for the Women's Programme in Africa and the Middle East. Because of her uncompromising refusal to bow to colonial and religious oppression, she evoked the envy and hostility of political and religious authorities and thus became a thorn in the side of the Egyptian system as well as of a globally standardised, "multiculturally" contaminated culture which aims at engendering "tolerance" towards any kind of barbarism. Only because of her statements at that time
- that at least 90 percent of the girls in Egyptian villages are victims of genital mutilation (meanwhile it has been stated by the United Nations that 97 percent of all Egyptian women are victims of genital mutilation. And what about the human rights in that respect?) and
- that this mutilation is a punishment for being born as a woman,
she was dismissed from all her public positions and prohibited from exercising her profession as a doctor. Under Anwar Sadat's regime she was repeatedly arrested and in 1980 imprisoned for several months. At the end of the eighties Dr. Saadawi supported, as head of a delegation, national self-determination of the people of Iraq against the emerging aggression of the Yankees. For that the Egyptian government shut down the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, which she had founded in 1981, and diverted its funds to the Women and Islam Association. Since her writings were banned in Egypt, they had to be published since then in Lebanon. The Egyptian State drove her into a five-years-exile from which she only recently returned to Egypt.

Now she is being put on trial, as among others the German daily Badische Zeitung reported on 26 April 2001. On the basis of this news, the AHRIMAN Publishing House sent the following letter to Dr. Nawal El Saadawi's publishers in England, Switzerland and Germany (Zed Books Ltd, London; Unionsverlag, Zurich; Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich; Kunstmann Verlag, Munich; Links Verlag, Berlin):

Freiburg, 28 May 2001

Dear Sir or Madam,

Since you belong to the publishers of the doctor and writer Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, we turn to you today because of the latest attacks against her. As reported in the German Press, proceedings have been initiated in Egypt against Dr. Saadawi, on the ground of some critical statements on Islam, to divorce her forcibly from her husband next month, in order thus to abandon her - then as an "apostate" Muslim - to the religiously motivated murderer gangs.

As we remember, in the almost identical case of the "apostatical" Egyptian literary scholar Professor Abu Zeid precisely six years ago, the victim was able to save himself from assassination by religious fanatics only by fleeing to the Netherlands.

We demand that the Egyptian State is given support in its fight, often led with courage, against terrorists with religious motivation in its own country by international letters of protest. That will make it likelier that new assaults of those criminal gangs, which are acting always more impudently, are prevented.

We would be grateful to you if you could inform us about the steps you have taken hitherto to protect your author, so that we are able to co-ordinate together, in the case of Dr. Saadawi, a concerted action as efficient and powerful as possible.

We would also be grateful to you if you could make it easier for us to interview Dr. Saadawi by informing us about her address, for example during her travels to Europe.

As friends of the undistorted human rights of 1789 we remain yours sincerely,

E. Seidel
AHRIMAN Publishing House

We hope that in the present case - unlike than in former cases (cf. Ketzerbriefe No 27, p. 66) - the publishers concerned will not make the victim a perpetrator and are, on the basis of the human rights, conscious of their joint responsibility for the protection of Dr. Nawal El Saadawi's life and will act accordingly.

The following letter of protest was sent to the Egyptian Minister of Justice Mr Farouk Seif El Nasr:

Freiburg, 28 May 2001

Dear Sir,

We are dismayed and appalled to learn that an Egyptian court, under the pretence of having to clear up a question of civil law, is supposed to inquire into the "orthodoxy" of Mrs. Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, which is only meant to give Islamic fanatics of your country a pretext to trouble or even murder this intrepid fighter for human rights.

We can understand if your government, which in its fight against religiously motivated murderers and criminals does by no means always receive the necessary international support, can be put, again and again, in the awkward situation of retreating before the pressure of reactionary forces in its own country, in order to keep those forces, which already did, not only in Luxor, enough harm to your country and to foreign citizens, from causing even further damage.

We request you not to give way to this temptation, so that, on the one hand, the violation of the human rights of Dr. Saadawi will not impair the reputation of your country and because, on the other hand, experience teaches, since Pharaoh Narmer, that compliance with reactionary forces never pays.

We admire the strength and determination, with which Nobel Prize Winner Nagib Machfus, whom also we highly respect, withstood the religious criminals, thereby setting, also for us and for you, an example of dignity, worthy of imitation. We request you to show the world, in his spirit and that of Mohammed Taha, that the Egyptian judiciary is not prepared to do a favour to religiously motivated gangs of murderers, but will counter them with firmness.

We shall closely observe the course of the matter, and shall do all we can to bring the affair before the public in our own country and the neighbouring countries, as we have previously done in the cases of S. Rushdie, T. Nasrin and A. Nesin. And we will support you, Mr. Minister, against any pressure put on you by elements hostile to human rights among your own countrymen, with all the small strength we have.

Yours sincerely,

E. Seidel
AHRIMAN Publishing House

Please send your letter of protest to the following address:

Minister of Justice
Counsellor Farouk Seif El Nasr
Lazoughly Square
Justice and Finance Building
Cairo
Egypt

Please send a copy to our publishing house:

AHRIMAN-Verlag
Postfach 6569
D-79041 Freiburg
Germany

http://www.ahriman.com
ahriman@t-online.de