Ayoon Wa Azan (Some honesty from Egypt)

One Hundred Fifty Days in the History of Egypt, a book by Brother Osama Haikal, Egypt’s former minister of information, has a section titled “Truth in the Time of Lies.” I am confident about Haikal’s honesty, regardless of any friendship or personal relations we have. The man collected testimonies from ministers and military officers, and I did not hear that any of them went on to deny what was attributed to them in the book. In Lebanon, we have a saying that those who lie, lie to the dead, or quote them, something that Osama Haikal definitely did not do. The book chronicles an important part of the history of the revolution against the regime of Hosni Mubarak. The author had made his way up through the ranks of the Al-Wafd newspaper, from editor, to deputy editor in chief. Then a few days before the revolution, his colleagues elected him as editor in chief. Under the government of Dr. Essam Sharaf, Haikal served as minister of information, after the ministry was abolished causing a crisis in Maspero, home to the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU) and 43,000 employees. I do not know how the minister survived 150 days in his post, as every page of his book describes a different crisis, and no sooner than one ended that another began. Recall the following events, for instance: - The Maspero demonstrations in October 2011, in which 25 Egyptian Copts and one soldier lost their lives. - The incidents in Abbasiya and the attack on the army. After the slogan of “The army and the people are one hand,” the revolutionaries started chanting “Down with the rule of the military.” - Egyptian soldiers were killed near Eilat after Israeli soldiers fired at them from the other side of the border. - Closure of Al-Jazeera Mubashir in Egypt, after it was found to be operating without a license. - The attack on the Israeli embassy, and raising the Egyptian flag in its premises. - Occupation of thousands of new apartments in October 6 City by thugs. There were other incidents, but I want to note two particular pieces of information from the book. It seems that Lt. Gen. Sami Annan proposed Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei’s name as prime minister to succeed Dr. Sharaf, to calm the situation down. But Field Marshal Tantawi strongly rejected his proposal. The second piece of information was that Amr Moussa visited the field marshal, as his name was also proposed for the premiership, but the Muslim Brotherhood told the military council that they were completely opposed to his nomination. The book is an important work, and its author is a fair witness to that crucial and decisive period in Egypt’s modern history. Staying with Egypt, I stumbled upon an interesting book titled The Prince, the Princess, and the Perfect Murder, by Andrew Rose, a former British barrister. Perhaps I would not have ordered this book, had I not read in its review the name of the ‘prince’, Ali Fahmy, and his wife Munira. The book is intriguing and tells the story of a French prostitute named Marguerite Alibert, who was also known as Maggie Meller. She had a baby when she was just 16 years old, and married and divorced repeatedly, moving up the ranks among the rich and wealthy, until she managed to entrap a rich Egyptian man, who claimed to be a prince. The man was Ali Fahmy, who inherited 800,000 thousand pounds sterling from his father, or the equivalent of a hundred million pounds a day. His wealth increased considerably when Egyptian cotton prices soared following the Great War (World War I). Ali Fahmy saw Maggie for the first time in the Semiramis Hotel, and then in Paris. He invited her to Cairo in 1922, and they got married at the end of the year. They had one civilian ceremony and another religious one where her dowry was two thousand pounds in advance, and six thousand pounds in the event of divorce. She took the Arabic name Munira. There are interesting chapters in the book about old Egypt, such as the Prince’s palace in the island near the Boulac Bridge which leads to Zamalek, a chalet on the beach, and the high society in the 1920s. The French wife shot her Egyptian husband dead in a corridor at the Ritz Hotel in London. The court acquitted her after the lawyer succeeded in smearing the husband and made claims about how he mistreated his French wife. The book’s author claims that the crime was covered up because Maggie had a sexual liaison with the Prince of Wales before marriage, the same prince who later became Edward VIII and abdicated the throne to marry the divorced American woman Wallis Simpson. I think the Arab reader will find that the book will take him on a beautiful historic tour, on the sidelines of the ‘perfect murder’. Finally, there is another book I read about titled Sex and the Citadel, by academic and journalist Shereen El Feki. The book is well documented, but its theme is not fit for this column so I content myself with the title for the benefit of the readers. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.