A War Against Intellectuals.(Egyptian dissenters under fire from government and militant Islamists)(Brief Article)

Searching for the Arabic word for "dissidence" a few years back, Egyptian writer Nawal el-Saadawi was stumped. In the end, she discarded al-ihtijaj (protest) and al-muarada (opposition), settling on al-nidal, struggle. The translation seems more apt by the day. Egyptian dissidents and intellectuals are under fire from two very different forces: the government and militant Islamists. In the 1990s, Parliament passed a series of laws cracking down on political activists. At the same time, fundamentalists launched a war on secular culture, agitating for censorship and prosecution of writers who criticize the Islamic status quo. Over the past decade, writers have been imprisoned for their political beliefs, and injured or killed for angering Islamic militants. Says Hisham Kassem of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights: "It's not safe to think in this part of the world."

Saadawi knows the dangers. She's been writing for half a century, and her fierce critiques of Egypt's political and religious establishments have meant she's been sacked, imprisoned, featured on Islamic militants' death lists and exiled. Earlier this spring, Egypt's mufti said that Saadawi's remarks to a Cairo magazine "ousted her from Islam." In a wide-ranging interview with the Cairo news magazine El- Midan, she allegedly said that hajj, or pilgrimage, was "a vestige of pagan practices."

Saadawi says she was misquoted. "They took my words out of context and wrote very provocative headlines," says the feminist activist. After the mufti's statement an Islamist lawyer, Nabih el-Wahsh, filed complaints with the prosecutor general, demanding that Saadawi be divorced from her husband. His argument: she is an apostate, and Muslims cannot marry apostates. Saadawi isn't the first intellectual threatened with forced divorce. In 1995 the Arabic-literature professor Nasr Abu Zeid was ruled an apostate by an Egyptian court, after a campaign by radicals offended by his writings on the Quran. Rather than separate from his wife as the ruling demanded, he went into exile in the Netherlands. Late last week the court threw out the apostasy case against Saadawi. But a second case, determining whether she should remain married, is due to be heard June 18.

Saadawi was luckier ...