An unexamined life was not worth living

Socrates said that an unexamined life was not worth living.

I believe that the key mission of every human being is to develop reflective and critical thinking skills.

Nawal el-Saadawi, in her book The Hidden Face of Eve (1980), has battled against the injustices of religious fundamentalism and a male-dominated society, even enduring imprisonment for promoting her cause.

The old maxim that "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads" is no longer true!

In Egypt, where even the Tales from the 1001 Nights is banned, the government censors most new fiction.

Censorship has followed the free expressions of men and women in Algeria, China, Iran, South Africa.

In her novel Women of Algiers in their Apartment, Assia Djebar takes the first steps towards reconciling the effects of the postcolonial world with the history of women’s participation in the struggle for Algerian independence

She said that , "Women of Algiers are indeed in their apartment but the apartment that they are in is one that is erected with social boundaries, the concrete of mental asylums, compulsory veiling, and reinvention of Maghreb Islam."


Leila said it only yesterday: I was a voiceless prisoner. A little
like certain women of Algiers today, you see them going around
outside without the ancestral veil, out of fear of the new and
unexpected situations, they become entangled in other veils,
invisible but very noticeable ones… Me too: for years after
Barberousse I was still carrying my own prison inside of me. (48)

Women of Algiers in their Apartment by Assia Djebar