Nawal el-SaadawiEgypt 
Nawal El Saadawi was the first woman in Egypt to be accused of apostasy and threatened with a forced divorce for allegedly insulting Islam. If found guilty, she would have been forcibly divorced from her husband of 37 years and she also risked a three-year prison term. Under Islamic law, an apostate cannot be married to a Muslim. In the 2001 trial, a Muslim lawyer alleged that the outspoken novelist had committed apostasy in a newspaper interview in March. Dr el-Saadawi had been quoted by an Egyptian newspaper as saying that the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca was "a vestige of a pagan practice" and that Muslim inheritance laws which favor males should be abolished. 
Dr el-Saadawi's lawyers told the court that the writer's comments had been taken out of context. An earlier attempt to have Dr el-Saadawi charged with insulting Islam was rejected by the Egyptian prosecutor general.
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