You might think of a royal court as a place of pomp and ceremony, where well-groomed courtiers tend to blue-blooded royalty whose dignity and composure reassures the nation that the country is in capable hands. But behind this facade, which generations of royalty and courtiers have been trained to maintain, humanity resides with all its faulty passions, misjudged ambitions, untimely rebellions and simple frustration, even with the privileges palace life brings. Egypt under the former monarchy was no exception. The Mohamed Ali Dynasty ruled Egypt between 1805 and 1952, and is credited with turning Egypt from an Ottoman backwater into a functional constitutional monarchy with international influence. As far as the public could tell, the king was in charge, the princesses married into the best of families and courtiers offered sound advice. The nation basked in the glow of regional admiration and international respect. The country's cities glittered with the latest Western architecture, department stores vied with the best in Europe, and a burgeoning movie industry attracting talent and cash from the entire Arab region. But it was all a fairy tale. To this day, the period continues to be spoken of with reverence by nostalgic admirers, critics of the 1952 Revolution, and anyone who is weary of the population explosion and runaway urban growth Egypt has experienced since the 1960s. The truth, in fact, was more humbling, more human and even more dramatic than a fairy tale. The life of Queen Nazli is one example. She was the second wife of King Fouad, the mother of King Farouk, the lover and wife of a senior courtier and, eventually, a pauper living in California. Her life was a rollercoaster worthy of a Hollywood feature film. Her search for love and acceptance was as pathetic as it was fascinating, and not nearly as clandestine as the royal family would have liked. In her heyday, when she was de facto guardian of a young king and a merry widow of great beauty, she was lovingly called Egypt's “queen mother”. There was a street in Cairo to prove it, Malika Nazli Street, today known as Ramses Street. However, her passion for freedom undermined the monarchy, embarrassed her son, King Farouk, and eventually led to her being stripped of all royal privileges, including her title. In 1946, Nazli told her son she needed medical treatment abroad for a kidney condition. She took all the money and jewellery she could lay her hands on and travelled to France. Once there, she began an odyssey of adventure and scandal that was to continue for the next three decades. She was never to see her homeland again. Unable to get proper treatment in France, Nazli went to America. She was accompanied by two of her daughters, Fathia and Faika, and the man who would make their lives a misery, a former Foreign Ministry official called Riad Ghali, with whom Fathyia was madly in love. In 1950, against the palace's wishes, Fatihya married Ghali, a Coptic Christian. She also converted to Christianity, as did her mother, and renamed herself Mary Elisabeth. The conversion did not sit well with the Egyptian palace or public. Historian Samir Raafat notes that Nazli's great-grandfather, known in Egypt as Soliman Pasha Al-Faransawi, had converted from Catholicism to Islam in the 19th century. Shortly after her daughter's wedding, to appease the Egyptian court, Nazli reportedly donated $5,000 for the building of a mosque in San Francisco. However, the move failed to placate the court, which took immediate moves to ostracise her, stripping her of her titles and cancelling her monthly allowance. For a while, Nazli appeared to flourish in her new life. She bought large houses in Beverley Hills and Hawaii. But then she made a mistake she would live to regret: she asked her son-in-law, Riad Ghali, to run her financial affairs and gave him power of attorney. It is not clear whether the queen's son-in-law was a crook or just inept, but Ghali managed to lose the family's fortune through poor business decisions. Nazli was forced to declare bankruptcy and moved to humble quarters in West Hollywood. In 1973, Fathia finally divorced Ghali and reportedly started working as a cleaning lady to pay her debts. Her mother then sent a petition to Egypt's President Anwar Al-Sadat, asking for the family's passports to be returned. In 1976, just a few days before Fathia was due to leave the US for Egypt, Ghali shot her dead and then shot himself but survived. Nazli died in 1978, aged 84. Ghali died in 1987. The three are buried in the Catholic Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, Los Angeles. Path to the palace: Nazli's rise to fame, and infamy, didn't begin with romance. She became the second wife of King Fouad, a man 20 years her senior and with a history of treating women badly, after he divorced his first wife, Princess Shwikar. Fouad was a jealous man with a violent streak. He banned her from leaving the palace and is said to have once flogged her with a whip. A tall and beautiful woman with a winning smile, Nazli could have found a better match. But it was not customary for families to turn down royal suitors. On her mother's side, Nazli was a great-granddaughter of Suleiman Pasha Al-Faransawi, a former French general and army chief under Mohamed Ali Pasha at the beginning of the 19th century. Her father, Abdel-Rahim Basha Sabri, was governor of Menoufiya at the time of the wedding. He was promoted to agriculture minister immediately afterwards. Her mother, Tawfiqah Khanum, was the daughter of former prime minister Mohamed Sharif Pasha, who also has a street named after him in downtown Cairo. After Fouad's death in 1936, Nazli felt liberated. Her oppressor now no longer on the scene, she was the most powerful woman in the country. Before long she had started a love affair with the talented and enigmatic Ahmed Hassanein Pasha, her son's mentor and the palace chief of staff. Some claimed that Hassanein's death in a mysterious car crash on Qasr Al-Nil Bridge in 1946 was due to intrigue, perhaps on the orders of the king himself. The king was said to have a death squad that carried out killings for him, and he was known to be resentful of Hassanein's charisma and authority. As the queen mother, Nazli was not above meddling in political affairs. Immediately after the death of her husband, she asked Ahmed Hassanein Pasha to get the regency council to give Farouk full legal powers at the age of 17, not 18, a ploy that was possible by calculating the king's age by the lunar-based Muslim calendar, which is shorter than the solar-based Georgian calendar. She then obtained her son's permission for her to marry Ahmed Hassanein Pasha in a common-law ceremony called gawaz orfi. The marriage lasted for nearly nine years, until Hassanein's death. A forty-something beauty at the time of her marriage, Nazli kept Hassanein on a tight leash. When she suspected that he was having an affair with Asmahan, an attractive young singer of Druze origins, who was later to also die in a mysterious automobile accident, she was incensed. To punish the singer, Nazli got Prime Minister Hussein Serri to order Asmahan out of the country. But Asmahan wasn't someone to trifle with. One of her friends was top journalist Mohamed Al-Tabei, and he managed to use his contacts to keep Asmahan in Egypt. Swift to take offence, the queen was not above making trouble for others. She decided to go for a vacation in Palestine, for example, where she stayed at the famed King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Rumour has it that she had multiple affairs while there, and the king had to order her back to Egypt. Farouk asked Wafd Party leader Al-Nahhas Pasha and his wife to go to see the queen in Jerusalem and ask her to come back to Egypt. She told them she would go home when arrangements were made to give her an official welcome at Cairo's main train station, Mahattat Masr, and that the king himself must be there to greet her. During a trip to Europe, Nazli met up with Riad Ghali, her future son-in-law, who acted as her escort her during the trip. It is possible that the two were romantically involved, although Ghali was soon to fall in love with Nazli's daughter. The Foreign Ministry, wary of Ghali's escapades, summoned him back to Cairo. But he refused to return and entered the queen's employment abroad, earning far more than his government salary. Nazli's position became untenable when gossip columns in the US and Europe starting referring to an alleged ménage-à-trois involving Ghali, the queen mother, and princess Fathia. One day, the queen summoned Ghali. “I know what is going on between you and Fathia behind my back,” she said. Ghali admitted the affair and promised to convert to Islam and marry the princess. Nazli gave the marriage her blessing. However, worried over the possible consequences for his throne, Farouk again asked Al-Nahhas Pasha, then prime minister, to intervene. “This marriage will be the first nail in the throne of your son and perhaps the first nail in his coffin as well,” Al-Nahhas reportedly told the queen. But it was too late. The rebellious Nazli was in no mood to be disciplined by commoners. And by this time even Farouk had given up. On the day of Fathia's wedding to Ghali, Farouk told the Egyptian papers to publish the story of the marriage in detail, censoring nothing. A short while later, he asked a meeting of the court council chaired by Prince Mohamed Ali to convene and strip Nazli and Fathia of their titles, possessions, passports and pensions. The one-way journey to notoriety was by now irreversible. Ghali, a man King Farouk had long suspected of being an opportunist, turned out to be exactly that. Cairo's Abidin Palace: The palace in which much of this drama unfolded was the brainchild of the Khedive Ismail, the monarch with Western tastes who dedicated his 16 years in power (1863-1879) to turning Cairo, Alexandria and the various cities he had created along the new Suez Canal into fashionable, Western-style urban centres. The khedive had his planners clear an area of 35 feddans (150,000 square metres) to build the palace and a large square just to its west. The new palace, into which the khedive moved immediately from his old home in the citadel, now too old-fashioned for his tastes, replaced a smaller one. The older palace was owned by Hosnshah Khatun, the widow of Mohamed Bey Abidin, a Mamluk prince. The khedive bought it from her heirs in exchange for 180 feddans (750,000 square metres) of agricultural land in Daqahilya. In order to build the new palace and accommodate a new section of the city modelled on Haussmann's Paris and called Ismailia, now commonly referred to as downtown Cairo, the planners filled up many of the nearby lakes, including Al-Nasriyah, Al-Saqqayin and Al-Fawwalah. The Abidin district soon became the hub of hotels and restaurants, elegant department stores and government offices. The country's top newspapers and publishing houses were also headquartered there. Al-Moqattam was on Qawalah Street, Al-Ahram was on Mazloum Street and the publishing house Dar Al-Hilal was on Qadadar Street. It was in Abidin that court life acquired its glamour and sophistication. It also acquired occasional resentment. Just a generation before, there had been no press or educated class to exchange gossip, and no middle class to voice resentment and march in the streets in political protest. The switch from an oriental-style monarchy housed in a stone fortress in the shape of the citadel to a Western-style monarchy that appealed to the public for approval, and at least ostensibly followed the ground rules of constitutionality, proved too tricky to manage. Nazli's conduct could have been kept a secret, or nipped in the bud, if it had been exhibited by a member of the royal family in the previous century. But in the 1940s the repercussions were hard to contain. The throne was already vulnerable to a bad press. Court life may have been detached from the streets, but Egypt's middle class, now congregating in the fashionable cafes of downtown Cairo, was eager to follow the gossip and to listen to calls for reform. One of the men who appealed to the sense of discontent the nation was experiencing in the first half of the 20th century was Abdallah Al-Nadim (1896-1942). A contemporary of Nazli, this Alexandria-born poet, novelist, self-styled journalist, orator and activist exposed the affairs of the ruling classes and did not spare the royal family his sharp wit. In one of his poems he attacks a courtier named Khalil Agha, who worked for Walda Pasha, the mother of the Khedive Ismail: Observe the Agha in luxury Cute as the bull on a farm; If he were property of mine A saddle I'd put on his back. In order to appreciate the full havoc that Nazli wreaked on her son's ambitions, it should be recalled that at the same time the queen mother was waltzing her way around Europe and America seeking male and non-Muslim company, Farouk was desperate to gain regional approval. He had plans to marry off one of his sisters to the future shah of Iran, a marriage that in the event did not last long. He was trying to marry another of his sisters to an heir to the Iraqi throne, and a third was promised to a member of Jordan's Hashemite dynasty. Had these alliances worked out, Farouk would have been able to declare himself caliph of the Muslim world, or at least first among Arab and Muslim equals. Sister one, Fawziya, would marry the Iranian crown prince. Sister two, Faika, would marry the custodian to the Iraqi throne. Sister three, Fayza, would marry one of the sons of Jordan's King Abdallah. And sister four, Fathia, would marry the Saudi heir apparent. It was a dream worth pursuing, but not one that Nazli had patience for. When Farouk's plans were relayed to the queen, she simply scoffed. “Unbelievable,” she said. “He is not only a thief, but a mad man into the bargain as well.” As Al-Nahhas had predicted, the throne did not survive the pressure of the Fathia-Riad affair. Two years later, in 1952, King Farouk was forced to abdicate the throne in favour of his infant child, making a hasty exit to Europe, where, like his mother, he became a celebrity refugee. In 1953, Egypt was declared a republic. It is not known if Farouk and his estranged mother ever made it up before the former king's death in Rome in 1965.
