Egypt's last queen Nariman was only 17 years old when she was first engaged. Her fiancé was a successful lawyer named Mohamed Zaki Hashem. He took her to a high-end jeweller to choose a traditional engagement gift known as a shabka. The jeweller, Ahmad Pasha Naguib, happened to have another powerful customer that same day, King Farouk. The king took notice of the attractive teenager, and before long he made her an offer she could not refuse. Would she like to be queen of Egypt? The two got married in May 1951. The jewellery shop where the couple met for the first time was on Queen Farida Street, now Abdel-Khaleq Tharwat Street, in downtown Cairo. Nariman was born on 31 October 1933 to Hussein Fahmi Sadeq, the deputy minister of transportation, and Asila Hanem Kamel. She went to a government school conveniently located near the family's home and grew up to be an attractive young woman who had many suitors. Nariman was Farouk's second wife, after Farida, whom he had divorced three years. Farouk and his first wife had three daughters, Ferial, Fawzia and Fadia. The king's popularity had ebbed after his divorce, but his second marriage seemed more promising, and the young king was hoping for a male descendent to ensure his bloodline. Nariman's first appearance in public may have been orchestrated to gain public sympathy. Dressed in elegant black and driving in a red Cadillac, she went to the Rifaie Mosque to visit the tomb of her husband's father, King Fouad I. It was a gesture of respect and commitment that was well received by the media and the country as a whole. Farouk and Nariman honeymooned on the Mahroussa, the royal yacht. The legendary honeymoon lasted for three months and cost nearly LE300,000, perhaps close to $30 million in today's money. The king, 13 years older than his bride, is said to have lavished love and attention on Nariman, making her daily gifts of pears and rubies as they cruised around the Mediterranean. One of the surviving photographs of that period shows the couple relaxing on a beach wearing swimming suits. During the honeymoon, Nariman had a dizzy spell and was found to be pregnant. Farouk put her on a passenger ship, deemed steadier than the yacht, and she went back to Egypt to wait for her baby. On 16 January 1952, Ahmad Fouad was born and a joyous country celebrated the birth of a crown prince weighing 7.25 pounds and delivered in a natural birth a month short of full term. “Bravo, Nani,” the king is said to have shouted at the birth of his first son. To show his joy, the king bestowed the rank of pasha on the medical doctor supervising the birth. From then on, the king is said to have spent hours in the room of the infant, and he continued to shower love and gifts on Nariman. Two men are said to have been saddened by the birth of the crown prince. One was Prince Mohamed Ali, then 75 years old, who had been first in line to the throne. The other was Prince Abdel-Monem, 52, who had been second in line. This did not disturb the happy couple much, but other more portentous perils were in the air. Two weeks after the birth of Ahmad Fouad, a police unit in Ismailia was all but decimated by the British for refusing to hand over their weapons. The next day, 26 January 1952, Cairo went up in flames. Many historians think of the Cairo Fire as being the beginning of the end for Farouk, and from that moment on his grip on power seemed to be slipping. First, he lost control of the Officers Club, and then he failed to reach a compromise with the army, which eventually deposed him on 26 July 1952. But Farouk's rule may have been on the rocks even earlier. The king had already employed underhand methods to stay in power, and his credibility had suffered accordingly. The Iron Guard, a secret unit with a licence to kill, was believed to take orders from Farouk personally, for example. Members of this secret unit would leave the palace in a black car armed with machineguns and explosives to kill the king's adversaries. The unit is credited with killing Amin Othman, a government minister, and trying to kill Wafd Party leader Mostafa Al-Nahhas and parliamentarian Rafiq Al-Tarzi. In July 1952, Nariman had to leave the country with her husband aboard the same yacht she had spent her honeymoon on only a year or so before. Her son, the infant Ahmad Fouad, was declared king, a position he retained for almost a year until the monarchy was ended on 18 June 1953. The royal family left Egypt for Italy, where they stayed for three days. In Capri, Farouk checked into a hotel, describing himself in the register as “Prince of Egypt.” But life in exile proved too much of a strain on the young queen, and three months after their departure Nariman returned home alone to Egypt, leaving her son in the care of his father, one of the conditions the former king had made for letting her go. She wasn't to see her son again until 1955 when Farouk finally permitted her to do so. The Free Officers regime that had assumed power in Egypt gave her an Egyptian passport to travel, and the former queen was also allowed to go inside some of the sequestrated royal palaces in order to collect her personal belongings. In spring 1954, a Heliopolis-based Egyptian court granted Nariman a divorce from the former king on the grounds of mistreatment. She had to give up any claim for alimony as part of the deal. Three months after the divorce, Nariman met an Egyptian medical doctor from Alexandria named Adham Al-Naqib who had studied in Cambridge. The two married in May 1954, and for a while everything seemed to go well for the former queen. Nariman told friends that she was happy to live the life of an ordinary person and that true happiness was to be found not in a palace but in an ordinary home. The couple had one son, Akram. However, the initial infatuation did not survive the pressures the couple experienced as a result of the regime's hostility towards royalists. Shortly after the couple moved into Adham's villa in Alexandria, trouble started, blamed by Adham on the heavy-handedness of the new regime. “The revolutionary regime began to harass both of us,” he said. Adham's father, Ahmad Pasha, was put on trial and sentenced as a result of his previous career as court doctor. After his marriage to Nariman, Adham also had trouble pursuing his career. “I couldn't practice medicine and couldn't even work in my clinic,” he said. The marriage ended in 1964. The former queen tried her luck once more, meeting her third husband, an army doctor named Ismail Fahmi, in 1967. Recalling their first meeting, Fahmi said, “Her cousin, Ali Abdel-Fattah, asked me to visit Nariman in her Heliopolis villa to take a blood sample for tests. Two days later, the results came back and I took them to her. We chatted for a while and I found her to be quite engaging.” The two got married in August 1967 at a small family gathering. But the couple's happiness wasn't to last. In January 1969, Nariman suffered a brain haemorrhage and was hospitalised for a month before undergoing surgery in Paris. She came back to Cairo in February 1969. Shortly afterwards, she started to have repeated headaches and suffered from irritability, which the doctors said was normal after such a procedure. The headaches continued throughout the 1970s, but the couple managed to stay together. In 2005 she suffered a stroke and died in a Cairo hospital. Nariman did not write her memoirs, and she had no interest in talking to the press. Details of her unusual life have thus come almost exclusively from her family and friends.
