SOURCE: El Saadawi, Nawal, and George Lerner. “Nawal El Saadawi: ‘To Us, Women's Liberation Is the Unveiling of the Mind’.” Progressive 56, no. 4 (April 1992): 32-5.

In the following interview, El Saadawi expresses her opinion on the strides toward equality that women have made in the Middle East, discusses the political climate in Egypt, and excoriates American interference in Middle Eastern politics, finding that American involvement adds to increased fundamentalism and therefore more oppression of women.

Nawal el-Saadawi, the author of more than two dozen books, is a champion of the women's liberation movement in Egypt. A physician by training, El-Saadawi, sixty, has used her experiences treating women of all social classes as a field study of Egyptian women.

In many novels and in such path-breaking nonfiction works as Women and Sex and The Hidden Face of Eve, el-Saadawi has decried the male domination of society and the practice of...