The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World is a chef-d’oeuvre book by Nawal El Saadawi, which incorporates the elements of critical analysis and a memoir of Arab culture and Islam, specifically on matters concerning women. The author is a medical doctor and a feminist, who has had firsthand experience with the various atrocities meted against women in the Arab world, especially in Egypt where she worked in villages, cities, and various institutions. Her resolute stand against perception and treatment of Muslim women led to her sacking from the Ministry of Health in Egypt in 1972 and eventual imprisonment and she remains one of the famous and consistently outspoken Arab feminists. She writes this book with all the directness that characterizes new feminism by highlighting all the horrors that Arab women undergo including the most heinous ones, without yielding to the usual patriarchal arguments seeking to justify such atrocities. The value of this book lies in its ability to reveal the kind of suffering that Islamic women undergo openly, cogently, and uncompromisingly. This paper is a review of this informative and revelatory book by Nawal El Saadawi. Summary This book is divided into four major sections – The Mutilated Half, Women in History, The Arab Woman, and Breaking Through. The first section, “The Mutilated Half” is mainly an elaborate definition of women in the majority of Arab cultures and societies. The first chapter gives a gripping and horrific account, in the first person, of a six-year-old girl who underwent clitoridectomy (also known as women circumcision), which is a bizarre custom geared towards taming the allegedly uncontrollable sexual passion among women. Additionally, this practice is meant to make women passive and subjective by conforming to the norms of the society around them. El Saadawi (2015) writes that once a woman’s clitoris is removed, she “will have a bright and happy face, and is more welcome to her husband, if her pleasure is complete” (p. 81). In other words, female circumcision prepares a woman for her husband – it is never about her and how she feels or what she wants. This section vividly describes the lifelong trauma of circumcision on women, which is so widespread in Egypt that it occurs in 97.5 percent and 66.2 percent of girls from uneducated and educated families respectively. The second and third sections, “Women in History” and “The Arab Woman” are an in-depth analysis of women’s roles in society, specifically with reference to the ancient Middle Eastern culture. According to El Saadawi (2015), women mainly acted as goddesses, matriarchs, and political leaders. Women in ancient times were treated fairly, and they occupied positions on merit, just as their male counterparts before patriarchy took over and changed how society defined women. She posits that the important “positions occupied by some goddesses were symbolic of the relatively higher prestige enjoyed by women in Arab tribal society, and a reflection of the vestiges of matriarchal society that still lived on and were prominent in some of the tribes” (El Saadawi, 2015, p. 259). However, women started losing their independence and positive personality traits gradually through systemic socio-economic conditions set deliberately to silence them. Even thoug