A court on Monday rejected a lawsuit aimed at annulling the marriage of a leading Egyptian feminist on grounds she had abandoned her Muslim faith, reported AFP.
The Cairo Family Affairs Tribunal rejected the complaint against novelist Nawal Al Saadawi, saying the lawyer who lodged it had failed to follow proper legal avenues.
The lawyer, Nabih Al Wahsh, had first accused Saadawi in April of defaming Islam in a media interview, but his request for the prosecutor's office to file a suit against her was dismissed in May.
He then went ahead and filed his own suit with the family court, arguing that Egypt's penal code permits the state to order Saadawi's divorce from her husband, Egyptian intellectual Sherif Hetata.
"The ruling is a victory for freedom of opinion against backward trends which are hiding behind religion in a bid to suppress free opinion," Hatata, who had awaited the ruling from a coffee shop outside the court, told the agency.
Saadawi was not present inside or outside the courtroom.
The charges relate to an interview by Saadawi in the Al Midan weekly in which she was quoted as calling the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, a vestige of paganism, according to the news service.
She was also quoted as calling for the abolition of an Islamic inheritance law in Egypt that gives female heirs half what men receive.
Egyptian Grand Mufti Sheikh Nasr Fraid Wassel, who listened to tapes of the interview, called on the writer to renounce her views.
But she said that the journalist had distorted the whole interview, and that she had merely been stating historical facts.
Saadawi has courted controversy before with her writings on women's issues.
In 1981 she was imprisoned by the late President Anwar Sadat for political activities, and some of her books were banned at January's Cairo Book Fair.
Saadawi is a leading Egyptian feminist, socialist, medical doctor, novelist and author of a classic work on women in Islam, The Hidden Face of Eve.
She had a distinguished career as director of health education in the ministry of health in Cairo, until she was dismissed summarily from her post in 1972, as a consequence of her political writing and activities.
In 1981 she was arrested, together with thousands of others, for alleged crimes against the state. She was released only after the assassination of the president Anwar Sadat.
Egypt has witnessed a string of high-profile human rights trials in recent months, including that of an Egyptian-American who earned a seven-year jail term for accepting foreign funds without official permission.
A deluge of US government and press criticism has followed, in a sharp turn from previous "see-no-evil" polices apparently conditioned on warm Egytian ties with Israel – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
