Egyptian icon and novelist Nawal El Saadawi has died .Known for her courage and liberal thoughts and ideas , she created a controversy amongst her genre. She died   at the age of 89, after a lifetime spent fighting for women’s rights and equality.

Her fifty five books amongst them novels with brave titles for a Muslim author(God Dies by the Nile and many others) shocked the reader even from the start with comparisons that were and still are taboo. She was forced to  undergo  clitoridectomy at the age of 6 and that has been the spotlight in all her books.

A trained doctor, El Saadawi championed the cause of women in the Arab world foremost. For her it was a matter of ethics and existence. She campaigned against women wearing the veil, polygamy and inequality in Islamic inheritance rights between men and women.

Saadawi was imprisoned in 1981 by Sadat (president of Egypt then)  for not" fitting in" along with other intellectuals and writers . Even in prison ,in an act of rebellion she managed to write her experiences on a roll of toilet paper .She also lost her job in the ministry of health. Hated and abhorred by Islamists and fanatics she never withdrew from the battleground.

For decades, Western countries, led by the United States, have been creating an appropriate climate for investment in terrorism and making it a means and pretext for waging wars.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Washington took advantage of the international circumstances that were formed after the attacks to form multiple alliances under the pretext of combating terrorism.

The US-led collation occupied Afghanistan and waged the wars and interventions against Iraq, Libya, Syria and other countries in the world.

There is nothing new about exploiting religion for the sake of influence. All religions have done this starting from the crusades and even  before and ending with what is happening now in the region of the Middle East. Exploited and misconstrued Islam has become the Halloween mask used to scare, to coerce and to bully.

Syria and for the past ten years has been witnessing horrendous events that started with protests but quickly took a different tangent, borrowing the mantle of religion and the sword of faith.

Distancing themselves as much as possible from the Islam ( in their practices) yet professing to ride under its banner, extremists flooded from the four corners of the world into Syria. Their aim was Jihad (to fight for God). Sadly , theirs was a narrative that scarred the face of Islam and did much to abort the good that moderate Islam had done in Syria and the Middle East.

Fortified by money and provided with logistics by the west, the US, Turkey and Saudi ,extremists strengthened their backbone and began their fight against culture, humanity and most of all against women.

Reneva Fourie a South African political analyst living in Syria has written an enlightening article about the complexity of what is happening in the Middle East and the unholy alliances erected in this area. Below is her article in full:

Conflict in West Asia has escalated over the past decade, resulting in over 2.5 million deaths to date.  Yemen is in tatters as the war there is largely ignored. Peace in Afghanistan remains elusive. Troops of the United States of America (USA) remain in Iraq. The Palestinian/ Israeli conflict is no closer to an end given Trump’s pitiful peace plan that awards disparate pieces of land to Palestinians, which when aggregated amount to less than 20 percent of historical Palestine. Bloody battles ensue as Syrian government forces are close to taking back West Aleppo and Idlib (the last remaining towns controlled by non-government forces) and attention is now on Lebanon as concerns increase around whether the protests will lead to war.