Nawal El Saadawi, a major figure of Egyptian and Arab feminism, was born on 27th October 1930 in Kafr Talha. Novelist and human rights activist, she is a also a psychiatry physician who graduated from the University of Cairo in 1954, then from Columbia University in 1966. She was soon to pay the price for her ideas: in 1955, by order of the Minister of Health, she was dismissed from her duties as a physician at Qasr Al Ayni Hospital for writing Women and Sex, a book dealing, among other things, with what in Egypt is the taboo par excellence, Female genital cutting. Also some of her books on the status of women, on fundamentalism and police brutality have led to her prosecution and coercion to exile.