Nawal El Saadawi is a significant and broadly influential feminist writer, activist, physician, and psychiatrist. Born in 1931 in Egypt, her writings focus on women in Islam. Well beyond the Arab world, from Woman at Point Zero to The Fall of the Imam and her prison memoirs, El Saadawi’s fiction and nonfiction works have earned her a reputation as an author who has provided a powerful voice in feminist debates centering on the Middle East.

Off Limits presents a selection of El Saadawi’s most recent recollections and reflections in which she considers the role of women in Egyptian and wider Islamic society, the inextricability of imperialism from patriarchy, and the meeting points of East and West. These thoughtful and wide-reaching pieces leave no stone unturned and no view unchallenged, and the essays collected here offer further insight into this profound author’s ideas about women, society, religion, and national identity.

Nawal El Saadawi is the author of many books, including Woman at Point Zero, A Daughter of Isis, and The Hidden Face of Eve. She is founder and president of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association and cofounder of the Arab Association for Human Rights. Nariman Youssef is a London-based translator. Her translations include The American Granddaughter and Cigarette No. 7, as well as prose and poetry contributions in Words Without Borders, The Common, and Banipal Magazine.