Mrs Tahia Kazem was the wife of late President Gamal Abdel Nasser. She is a great Egyptian woman whose origins were said to be Iranian. The Egyptians saw her in the day of the departure of the great leader as a sad widow who lost life and hope at the same moment. She is the lady whose husband refused, during an official visit to Athens, to let the Greek King Paul put his arm around his wife or let the Greek Queen Victoria put her arm around him, as this was a part of the protocol he did not accept. I still remember that in the fall 1962, at the start of my career at Cairo University, a number of my colleagues and I did not know that her daughter, Mrs Huda, was studying with us among a limited number of students at the Department of Political Science of the Faculty of Economics. We discovered that Huda was late President Nasser's daughter only when we noticed that a security man was guarding her while an officer from the President's secretariat was sitting in the office of the faculty's commander of guards. When Mrs Tahia Abdel Nasser traveled to Saudi Arabia to perform the Islamic pilgrimage years after the departure of Nasser, late Saudi King Faisal bin Abdulaziz - may God have mercy on him - phoned her on a daily basis although Nasser had been his archenemy (rivalry among the great and disagreement among the powerful). The same thing happened with Jordan's late King Al-Hussein Bin Talal, who met my colleague, Dr Huda Abdel Nasser, and her husband, Professor Hatem Sadek, during a visit of theirs to Amman. Tahia Abdel Nasser was hosted by Mrs Indira Gandhi at the Great Hall, in which the Indian president used to host internationally distinguished personalities. That day, all Indians greeted the great widow coming from the land of the Nile as a tribute to Nasser, who changed the course of history and staged the greatest revolution in the Middle East. I remember Arab ambassadors rushed to ask for an invitation to a dinner at my home in honor of Tahia Abdel Nasser although their countries had cut diplomatic relations with Egypt due to their disagreement with late President Sadat over his policies and national vision of the Egyptian role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. I also remember when the Kuwaiti ambassador announced that the dinner would be in honor of the wife of the Arab struggler, who defended Kuwait's independence against late Iraqi leader Abd al-Karim Qasim's ambitions.
Tahia Abdel Nasser has lived away from the limelight. She is the wife of a leader who devoted all his life to his homeland and nation. Indeed, Nasser is a model for the era of social justice.
