Volume-XII, Issue-II, March 2026 |
Muslim Feminist Consciousness: Reading Nawal El Saadawi's Memoirs of a Woman Doctor Isma Hamid, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Islamic University of Science and Technology, Jammu and Kashmir, India |
Received: 23.03.2026 | Accepted: 30.03.2026 | Published Online: 31.03.2026 | Page No: | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.12.issue.02W. | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
The paper analyses Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1988) by Nawal El Saadawi as an early and forceful critique of gendered power in modern Egypt wherein her memoir positions female selfhood at the crossing point of body, class, medicine, religion, and nation. It also emphases that the memoir exposes how patriarchal authority borrows the language of morality and religion in order to naturalize women’s subordination, while never reducing Islam itself to oppression. Further the paper explores reveals how the modern female doctor is produced inside institutions shaped by colonial modernity, class hierarchy, and state reform, so that professional advancement never fully frees the woman doctor from masculine power. Saadawi’s memoir is thus not only a narrative of personal awakening but also investigates how the female body becomes a battleground on which patriarchy, modern science, and national respectability struggle for control. | ||
Keywords: patriarchy, Muslim feminism, writing back, life writing, memoir |