I met her through her writing, so powerful and impassioned a plea for truth and justice that I had not come across before. I was thrilled by the intimacy of her thoughts, marveling at her unflinching depiction of female oppression in a society dominated by corrupt men. She also powerfully delineated the subversive space inhabited by her heroines, such as Firdaus. Where had I seen those eyes before? How did I know that pain and passion? Why did the world of Woman at Point Zero feel like a familiar yet strangely distant dream? My world was not that world, after all. I was born into a middle-class, urban, educated Pakistani Muslim family—a far cry from a women’s prison in Egypt.
My quest for answers led me, several decades ago, to track Nawal’s whereabouts and wait for the perfect opportunity to present itself—which it did, to my great delight. Fall had...
