Nawal (نوال) is the Arabic word for "gift" or "attainment of something cherished." A traditional Arabic feminine name.
Nawal El Saadawi (1931-2021), the Egyptian feminist writer and activist, was the most internationally known bearer.
Nawal does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Nawal reduce to 6, The Nurturer. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.