When I am in Egypt, I am phoned because I am listed in the medical directory under "Mental Health and Psychiatry." And of course, I see very few people, because I give much more time to writing. So I cannot say that I really stopped medicine, but I practice medicine - or psychiatry - in a very different way. In an artistic way!

The family code in Egypt is one of the worst family codes in the Arab world. Polygamy. The husband is having absolute power over the family.

You know, I look to myself mainly as a creative writer all my life and a medical doctor.

I never stopped writing. I started writing when I was twelve years of age. And I was writing all the time. But nothing was translated until thirty years after I started writing, when The Hidden Face of Eve was translated in 1980.

Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.

The feminists who are aware of the effects of patriarchy realize that we are all in the same boat from the dangers of patriarchy, and that the oppression of women is universal.

I've lived in Egypt among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia.