This predictable feminist

Submitted by Maurice (United States), Dec 6, 2007 at 23:25

lionizing of one of its own holds little interest to the general reader, but Malti-Douglas does raise an intriguing issue when she reports on the clash between Saadawi and her equally leftist intellectual (male) opponents in the Middle East. They would have her stay quiet about the appalling female condition in their countries and try to delegitimize her writings as "Orientalist feminism." To which Malti-Douglas replies that "Anti-imperialism can easily become a trap through which nationalism, while seeking to defend the native against the outsider, really defends those in power in the native society."

Saadawi's feminism, in other words, proves a source of unusual sympathy for the West. The importance of these epithets? Another sign of the intellectual left's weakness: caught up in a web of its own inconsistencies, it (unlike the fundamentalist right) cannot even figure out its outlook on the West.

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