She will never forget the day when doctors removed the bandages from her shattered, swollen face and handed her a mirror so that she could look at herself as she lay in her hospital bed.

“I suddenly wanted to vomit,” recalls Rania al-Baz, remembering the sensation of not recognising herself.

“I had been a pretty woman,” she says, “now I was a monster.”

Her husband had beaten her to a pulp in a fit of rage, smashing her head repeatedly against the marble floor of their home. Although she had defied doctors’ expectations by living to tell her tale, her days as a presenter on Saudi Arabian breakfast television were over.

Instead she has emerged as a champion for battered Saudi women and in between numerous operations on her skull has written a memoir. Her efforts to publicise it in Britain in the coming weeks will throw the spotlight on the rampant abuse of Saudi women by men who, like the Taliban leaders overthrown in Afghanistan, believe that wife-beating is not wrong — and certainly not a crime to be punished under the law.

“In Saudi Arabia,” says Baz when I met her in Paris last week, “women do not have much of a place besides the kitchen and the bed. A wife is just a pleasure object for a man. The man can do whatever he wants with her with impunity. But now things are starting to change. Little by little, women are demanding more rights. I am happy to be involved in that noble cause.”

It is brave talk from a woman who hopes to resume work in a country that has little tolerance for dissenters, let alone female ones. Already her activism has made her unwelcome on television and she is wondering what job to try next. She has recovered her good looks but suspects the deepest scars, the mental torment she suffers after being almost murdered by a man she once loved, will never heal.

Her face was once among the most famous in the land: Baz enjoyed the distinction of being the only young, attractive female television presenter in a country where women cannot vote, drive a car, leave home without a chaperone or admit themselves to hospital without the permission of a male relative.

It made her a symbol of progress for thousands of women who watched her daily programme, The Kingdom this Morning. Then one day in April 2004 her face vanished from the screens.

Rachid, her husband, had savagely assaulted her in a jealous rage. Apparently convinced that he had killed her, he put her on the back seat of the car, dumped her outside a hospital and fled.

She regained consciousness after four days. “I was in a pitiful state,” she says. “I could hardly breathe. My family, friends and colleagues came to my bedside. They all said the same thing: you must do something. Take advantage of the fact that you are well known to teach this man and others like him a lesson.”

Soon her disfigured face was all over the newspapers. It was the first time anything like it had happened in Saudi Arabia whose religious police, the mutaween, are swift to stamp on any lapses by women — those who appear with their heads uncovered in public risk being arrested — but who generally turn a blind eye to the worst male excesses. Assaults on women go on all over the world but in Saudi Arabia Baz had shattered an age-old taboo by talking about it.

What happened to her husband was also unusual. He was sentenced to a public flogging and six months in jail only to be released after three months. Baz had earlier pardoned him in exchange for him granting her a divorce and, more remarkably, full custody of the children. She has had no contact with him — “thank God,” she says — since the attack. Nor does she contemplate remarrying. “I am not going to make that mistake again,” she laughs. “I live now just for my children. They are everything to me.”