Quote by Nawal El Saadawi: “God is the first feminist. He created woman with strength.”

This deliberately provocative claim challenges religious patriarchy from within its own logic. If God made women strong, then using religion to suppress women is a contradiction — a betrayal of what the divine act of creation actually shows about female capacity and worth.

El Saadawi made this statement in interviews around the time of the Arab Spring's early stirrings, when debates about women's roles in Muslim-majority societies were intensifying globally. She consistently argued that patriarchy, not Islam itself, was responsible for women's oppression.

Egyptian feminist writer, physician, and activist whose work challenged patriarchy, religious fundamentalism, and political repression across the Arab world. Her 1975 book Women and Sex led to her dismissal from the Egyptian Ministry of Health, and she was imprisoned in 1981. She published over fifty books in her lifetime.