Finding Fawzia Fuad: Egypt’s Last Princess

If you walk up to any person in Egypt, they will know Fawzia Fouad. Younger people may discuss her life in a more detached way, the way people my age talk about Princess Diana — as someone who we knew existed and was loved, but who they may not have a strong personal connection to. The older your interviewee is, however, the more personal the discussion becomes. People born around the 1920s or 1930s will regale you with tales of the great Princess of Egypt, more beautiful than Hedy Lamarr and Vivian Leigh combined, her lavish wedding to the Shah of Iran, the iconic photographs of her dressed in haute couture and shimmering jewels. In some way or another, we all think we know her, but do we really? We certainly know the bullet points of her life, but the human being underneath it all is still a mystery to much of the public. Perhaps this mystery comes from the deliberate elusiveness she possessed when it came to the press. Even as her images zoomed across the world on the cover of magazines, she rarely shared anything beyond that with the masses. Regardless of the glamorous fairy tale of Fawzia the princess that dominated the press, we’re able to see the reality of the pain she experienced for years by analyzing some of those iconic photographs, and thus attempting to discover the dramatic and quietly tragic inner life of Fawzia the human being.

However, this is not something one can do alone. To help fully break down Fawzia’s public image, I’m enlisting the help of two seminal texts on the power of photography, namely Susan Sontag’s “Plato’s Cave” and bell hooks’ “In Our Glory”. Both these pieces discuss the ways that photography shapes culture, but with two distinctly different approaches. Their individual views on this topic will immensely deepen my understanding of Fawzia’s photographs, and thus what they reveal.

Sontag takes a more general approach that’s tinged with jadedness, discussing photography (particularly of others) as an inherently predatory and exploitative act and often drawing a comparison to physical or sexual assault. Her interpretation of photography is a cynical one, one that views it as something that. “levels the meaning of all events,” (Sontag In Plato’s Cave pg. 7) and turns people into objects one can hold and manipulate, as something that’s changed the world, though not entirely for the better. hooks, on the other hand, is more optimistic about the impact of photography on society. She discusses the emotional impact of images, their ability to capture someone in their best state, and marvels at “what our snapshots reveal, what they enable us to remember” (hooks In Our Glory pg. 64). “Such is the power of photography, of the image,” she says, “that it can give and take away, that it can bind” (hooks In Our Glory pg. 56). To hooks, photographs can be a tool for emotional exploration, for analyzing your own evolution, for learning new things and thus developing new relationships with your loved ones, and most importantly, for immortalizing people, as is the title of her piece, “In our glory”.

I wonder what photo Fawzia would pick to show her in her glory, for ever since her birth in 1921, she’s had an absurd amount to choose from. There are publicly distributed photographs of her at what looks to be eight years old, donning pigtails and a dress far too fancy for an average young child to wear around. But Fawzia was never an average child. Born to one of the last kings of Egypt, King Fuad the First, Fawzia grew up in the Ras-El-Tin Palace in Alexandria, learning Arabic, English and French simultaneously. She was also educated in Switzerland, a classic status symbol, and just a few years after her return, the then crown prince of Iran asked for her hand in marriage. Surprisingly, Fawzia’s father did not jump at his offer, citing the perceived difficulties of marriage between a Sunni and Shiite. However, this marriage would be mutually beneficial to them both, since it would be both an opportunity for Fuad to assert some of his power while under British occupation and a way for Iran to gain prestige from the older and more well-known Egyptian monarchy. Thus, the marriage was arranged, with the 19 year old crown prince set to marry Fawzia, who at the time was only 17.

This is one of the few (if not only) solo photos of Fawzia at her weddings (yes, there were two, one in Egypt and one in Tehran), seemingly unposed as she sits for dinner. In this photo, with her neck draped in glimmering jewels, wearing a stunning ball gown, her hair and makeup impeccably done, she looks like the epitome of glamour. And yet: she slouches. Her smile is hopeful, yet awkward. She’s leaning on the table, looking at nothing in particular. Remove the fancy get-up and diamond tiara, and I’d see a regular Egyptian teenage girl sitting at the dinner table with her friends, not a future Empress of Iran about to be wed and shipped to a country that was entirely foreign to her. Because, of course, that’s what she really was: a teenager, forced to be a wife, a princess, a queen. There’s a strange vulnerability in this photograph, especially comparing it with the ones that came after it. There’s an element of innocence lost, of childhood ending. In Sontag’s opinion, photographs are uniquely able to capture this bittersweet nostalgia, for in her words, “Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt” (Sontag In Plato’s Cave p. 11).After the weddings, Fawzia was escorted by her husband to his palace in Iran, thus leaving all her friends and family behind. She would not be able to see them again for several years. Sadly, she would not go on to find a new community in Iran. Despite being the family that pushed for this marriage, her in-laws had disdain for her (the exact reason is still unknown), and they argued often. Her sister-in-law even reportedly broke a vase over Fawzia’s head in one of these arguments, and it seemed her husband never attempted to defend her from his family’s scorn. She was also not fully accepted by the people of Iran, due to her breaking age-old tradition that Iranian Empresses must be of Iranian descent. A legal paper had been drawn up pronouncing her essentially “Iranian because we said so,” but she was still seen as an oddity at best and an intruder at worst. Her royal servants, most hailing from Egypt and thus her only connection to her homeland, were all sent away behind her back, and her homesickness would contribute to her falling into a deep and years-long depression. Throughout all this, though, she was still constantly being photographed.

On camera, Fawzia was the epitome of glamour and grace. Off camera, she was suffering from a deep depression, rarely leaving her room, experiencing neglect from her husband, and barely eating. Her time away from home and her support system took an immense toll on her, with the conflict in her new family only worsening her pain. To add insult to injury, she wasn’t even given the privilege of privacy throughout her mental health struggles. Her now-iconic image was being sent across the world on the covers of Arab and Western magazines alike, while their uninformed judgments of her character rested within the pages. The press’s opinions of her differed depending on the region, with Arab journalists putting her on a pedestal as the example of the ideal modern woman and Western journalists mostly seeing her as a political pawn locked in a castle with no agency of her own, but neither depicted a real person. Most reporting on her in the West completely skipped over the charity efforts she participated in even while being in extremely poor health, such as joining nurses to assist injured Palestinians after the Nakba of 1948. Rather, Fawzia remained an image, a thing, someone to be envied or pitied or celebrated but never really understood.

It was during these few years of her life that Fawzia’s relationship with the camera was at its most predatory, with photos of her taken at her worst moments becoming irreversibly planted in the zeitgeist on a huge scale. Sontag is correct in saying that “After the event has ended, the picture will still exist,”(Sontag In Plato’s Cave p. 8) so Fawzia’s moments of depression and despair and numbness are immortalized for the world to see, forever. This quote from Sontag also comes to me, as I picture her posing in dark rooms and dark gowns in front of uncaring photographers as her physical and mental health deteriorated: “a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a”good” picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting…even when that is the interest, another person’s pain” (Sontag In Plato’s Cave p. 9).

I’ve always wondered what it took to make Fawzia decide that enough was enough. She never gave interviews, and seemingly no one else wanted to tell, so we’ll never really know what point of no return had finally been reached to make her leave after years of suffering in Iran. But regardless, in 1945, breaking all conventions for women in the royal family, she filed for divorce from the Shah. Sadly, Fawzia returning home was not as easy as it sounds. She still had to receive permission from her brother, King Farouk, to authorize the divorce, and Iran was not eager to let her go, going so far as to force Fawzia to leave her daughter Shahnaz behind to be raised in Iran. Farouk was apparently surprised by his sister’s actions, but that surprise soon turned to concern when he and Fawzia met in person for the first time in years. At this point, she’d been essentially starving herself and it showed, with a courtier Farouk had sent to check on her saying that her shoulder blades “jutted out like the fins of some undernourished fish.” Horrified by the state of his sister, Farouk not only approved the divorce, but ordered her to come home immediately. And thus, even though it would take until 1948 for the divorce to be recognized in Iran, Fawzia came home, and the Empress of Iran became the Princess of Egypt once more.

With her life essentially reset to square one, Fawzia spent a number of happy years back in Egypt heading the royal court. She was back with her family, her country, her people, and after a few mainly quiet years back in the Egyptian aristocracy, the press eventually stopped the media circus they’d created around her in Iran. She even remarried, for love this time, to Egyptian high-ranking Navy official Ismail Cherine, and they ended up having two children together. Overall, her life back as a royal was rather uneventful, but in just a few short years, it would be completely turned on its head.

It’s 1952, and the sound of revolution is reverberating throughout Egypt. The Free Officers, a group of fed-up army men led by future president Gamal Abdel-Nasser, have succeeded in dethroning the monarchy by way of a non-violent coup. Farouk, rather than be forcefully exiled, has boarded a yacht to Italy with no plans to return. Egypt is now a democracy, and the members of what used to be the royal family have been plunged into unexpected, disconcerting normalcy, including now former-princess Fawzia.

Few photos demonstrate the immense changes in Fawzia’s life than this one from a photo-set with her husband Ismail, which seems to have been taken soon after her family was ousted from their thrones. Just a glance at Fawzia’s background shows how much her surroundings have transformed. The room she’s in is clearly not a royal abode, and appears to be a regular apartment that you’d see most well-off civilians living in. The couch she’s sitting on is beautiful, but more subdued than ones she’s been seen lounging on in previous years. Even her clothes, though obviously high quality, are clearly not the straight-out-of-the-fashion-house couture she was known for; they look a bit old for the time, and lack a considerable amount of the glitz and glam of her older attire. The entire photo-set sends a clear message: Fawzia is comfortable, wealthy even, but she’s no longer a princess, and will never be again. It was in that strange limbo state of former prestige that Fawzia would live the rest of her life, before dying at the age of 92.

Earlier on in this essay, I offhandedly raised the question of what photo Fawzia would pick to show her “in her glory.” Being in one’s glory is a concept that hooks doesn’t really define, but it seems to be focused on a given individual being shown at their best, their most self-assured, their most full of wonder, their happiest. But when was Fawzia at her happiest? Would it be at her early years as a youngster in Ras-El-Tin, or as a grown woman, back home once more? We can already rule out her years in Iran, but her life after the revolution gets a bit muddier. Even photos, that ever helpful code to understanding someone long dead, aren’t much help here. As hooks says about a photo of her father, “Although my sisters and I…see the same man, we do not see him in the same way” (hooks In Our Glory p. 56), and such is the situation with photos of Fawzia. Some photos of her within which I see a smile on her face in her new more humble home read to others as pursed lips, disappointment, discontent. She had her family, a loving relationship with her husband, and a sensible life in Alexandria, but who knows if she was truly content after losing so much. “Twice in my life, I lost the crown,” she famously said when visiting Ras-El-Tin palace as an older woman, and when she follows it up with “It’s all gone now. It doesn’t matter,” it’s unclear if she means it.

After all, when we get down to it, none of us will ever truly know Fawzia. For all we know, her definition of happiness might be entirely different from our own, shaped by experiences the cameras didn’t catch and that thus will be lost to time. For what is happiness, really? Is it being above it all in the glass cage of royalty, glamorous and untouchable? Is it being a symbol for an entire nation? Is it being an instantly recognizable image, or walking down the street every day, unnoticed, in a tiny town by the sea? Does it flit somewhere in between, like an anxious hummingbird unsure where to land? It’s truly too bad that outside of the snapshots that memorialize her, we’ll never know what Fawzia’s answer would be.

Works Cited

Cope, Rebecca. “Princess Fawzia of Egypt: Remembering the Royal with Movie Star

Good Looks on Her Birthday.” Tatler, Tatler, 5 Nov. 2020, www.tatler.com/article/princess-fawzia-of-egypt-life.

Fathi, Mostafa. “Princess Fawzia, an Unconventional Royal.” Raseef22, raseef22.net,

30 Aug. 2019, raseef22.net/english/article/1074941-princess-fawzia-an-unconventional-royal.

Hansen, Suzy. “The Slow Disappearance of Queen Fawzia.” The New York Times, The

New York Times, 21 Dec. 2013, archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/news/the-lives-they-lived/2013/12/21/queen-fawzia/.

Hooks, Bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New Press, 1995.

Mansour, Thaer. “Egypt’s 1952 Revolution: Seven Decades of Military Rule.” The New

Arab, The New Arab, www.newarab.com/analysis/egypts-1952-revolution-seven-decades-military-rule. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.

Rafat, Ahmad. “Shah’s First Wife, Princess Fawzia of Egypt, Is Remembered in Cairo

Exhibition.” KAYHAN LIFE, 7 July 2023, kayhanlife.com/authors/ahmad-rafat/shahs-first-wife-princess-fawzia-of-egypt-is-remembered-in-cairo-exhibition/.

Seaman, Anna. “Portrait of an Egyptian Princess Who Lived Her Life through a Lens.”

The National, www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/art/portrait-of-an-egyptian-princess-who-lived-her-life-through-a-lens-1.894895. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Penguin, 2019.

Zeinobia. “Kodak Agfa Presents : Some of Princess Fawzia’s Jewelry at Alexandria’s

Royal Jewelry Museum in Photos.” Kodak Agfa Presents : Some of Princess Fawzia’s Jewelry at Alexandria’s Royal Jewelry Museum in Photos, 10 Nov. 2021, egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2021/11/kodak-agfa-presents-some-of-princess.html.