Fawzia of Egypt

Fawzia of Egypt - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Fawzia of Egypt

Fawzia of Egypt (Egyptian Arabic: فوزية; 5 November 1921 – 2 July 2013), also known as Fawzia Pahlavi or Fawzia Chirine, was an Egyptian princess who became Shahbanu of Iran as the first wife of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran. Fawzia was the daughter of Fuad I, seventh son of Ismail the Magnificent.

This profile of Fawzia of Egypt covers Early Life and Family Background, Marriage and Family Life, Queen of Iran, Later life and Death and Legacy.

Her marriage to the Iranian Crown Prince in 1939 was a political deal: it consolidated Egyptian power and influence in the Middle East, while bringing respectability to the new Iranian regime by association with the much more prestigious Egyptian royal house. Fawzia obtained an Egyptian divorce in 1948, under which their one daughter Princess Shahnaz would be brought up in Iran. Fawzia, who was known as the "sad queen" in the press, lived in isolation and silence after the 1952 Egyptian revolution and never published her memories of the court of Iran and Egypt. In 1949, Fawzia married Colonel Ismail Chirine, an Egyptian diplomat, with whom she had a son and a daughter.

Early Life and Family Background of Fawzia of Egypt

Princess Fawzia was born Her Sultanic Highness Princess Fawzia bint Fuad at Ras el-Tin Palace, Alexandria, the eldest daughter of Sultan Fuad I of Egypt and Sudan (later King Fuad I), and his second wife, Nazli Sabri on 5 November 1921.

In addition to her sisters, Faiza, Faika and Fathia, and her brother, Farouk, she had two half-siblings, Fawkia and Ismail, from her father's previous marriage to Princess Shwikar Effendi.

Fawzia was raised by multiple nannies, including Anne Eugene, an English nanny, with whom she and her sisters kept contact after the royal family were overthrown. She was homeschooled from age of 4. Among her teachers: Lady ‘Alia Abdel Karim,’ who taught her religion; and Lady ‘Karima El-Saeed,’ the sister of Amina El-Saeed, who taught her general knowledge. Fawzia had lessons in Arabic, English and French.

She complained to ‘Naima Youssef,’ the sports instructor, that Queen Nazli blamed her for her lack of desire to learn any sport. Princess Fawzia only learned tennis and table tennis, in which she achieved great success.

In 1937, Fawzia travelled outside Egypt for the first time, accompanying her family on a tour of Europe.

Marriage and Family Life of Fawzia of Egypt

The marriage of Princess Fawzia to Iran's Crown Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was planned by the latter's father, Reza Shah. A declassified CIA report in May 1972 described the union as a political move. The marriage was also significant in that it united a Sunni royal, the princess, and a Shia royal, the crown prince. The Pahlavis were a parvenu house as Reza Khan, the son of a peasant who entered the Iranian Army as a private, rising up to become a general, had seized power in a 1921 coup. He was most anxious to have the House of Pahlavi married to the House of Muhammad Ali, which had reigned over Egypt since 1805.

The Egyptians were not impressed with the gifts sent by Reza Shah to King Farouk to persuade him to marry his sister to the prince Mohammad Reza. When an Iranian delegation arrived in Cairo to arrange the marriage, the Egyptians took the Iranians on a tour of the palaces built by Isma'il Pasha, known as "Isma'il the Magnificent", to show them proper royal splendor. King Farouk was not initially interested in marrying off his sister to the Crown Prince of Iran, but Aly Maher Pasha, the king's favorite political adviser, persuaded him that a marriage alliance with Iran would improve Egypt's position within the Islamic world and against Britain. At the same time, Maher Pasha was working on plans to marry off Farouk's other sisters to King Faisal II of Iraq and to the son of Emir Abdullah of Jordan, intending to forge an Egyptian-dominated bloc in the Middle East. To prepare for life in Iran, Fawzia was assigned a tutor to teach her Persian.

Fawzia and Pahlavi were engaged in May 1938. But they saw each other only once before their wedding. They married at the Abdeen Palace in Cairo on 15 March 1939. King Farouk took the couple on a tour of Egypt, showing them the pyramids, Al-Azhar University, and other famous sites. The contrast between the Crown Prince Mohammad Reza, dressed in the simple uniform of an Iranian officer, and the lavish opulence of the Egyptian court typified by the famously free-spending Farouk in his expensive suits, was much remarked upon at the time. After the wedding, King Farouk had a twenty-course meal to celebrate the nuptials at the Abdeen Palace. At the time Prince Mohammad Reza lived in awe of his overbearing father, Reza Shah, and was dominated by Farouk, who was considerably more self-confident. Afterwards, Fawzia departed for Iran together with her mother, Queen Nazli, on a train trip that saw the electricity break down several times, causing the two women to feel like they were going on a camping trip.

When they returned to Iran the wedding ceremony was repeated at the Marble Palace, Tehran, which was also their future residence. As Mohammad Reza spoke no Turkish (one of the languages of the Egyptian elite, the other being French) and Fawzia was described as being only "competent" in Persian, the two talked to each other in French, in which both were fluent. Upon arriving in Tehran, Reza Shah had the main streets of Tehran decorated with banners and arches, and had a celebration at the Amjadieh stadium attended by 25,000 of the Iranian elite with synchronized acrobatics by students being followed by bastani (Iranian calisthenics), fencing, and football. The wedding dinner was a French-style dinner with "caviar from the Caspian Sea", "Consommé Royal", fish, fowl and lamb. Fawzia disliked Reza Khan, whom she described as a violent and thuggish man prone to attacking people with either his whip or riding crop. In contrast to the French food she had grown up with in Egypt, Fawzia found the food at the Iranian court sub-par. In the same way, Fawzia found that the palaces of Iran could not be compared to the palaces that she had grown up in in Egypt.

Queen of Iran

Following the marriage, the Princess was granted Iranian nationality. Two years later the crown prince succeeded his exiled father and was to become the Shah of Iran. Soon after her husband's ascent to the throne, Queen Fawzia appeared on the cover of the 21 September 1942, issue of Life magazine, photographed by Cecil Beaton, who described her as an "Asian Venus" with "a perfect heart-shaped face and strangely pale but piercing blue eyes." She led the newly founded Association for the Protection of Pregnant Women and Children (APPWC) in Iran.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawzia_of_Egypt), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.