Princess Nazli Fazl

Nazli Zainab Hanim (1853–1913) was an Egyptian princess of the Muhammad Ali dynasty and the daughter of Prince Mustafa Fazl Pasha, and one of the first women to revive the tradition of the literary salon in the Arab world, holding hers at her Cairo palace from the 1880s until her death. ^{1 2}

Her salon gathered the intellectual and political elite of her day, Egyptian and foreign; among its regulars were Muhammad Abduh, Saad Zaghloul and Qasim Amin, and her documented influence touched the course of two of the most famous of them, Abduh and his pupil Qasim Amin. ^{1 3}

Nazli was born in 1853, the eldest child of Prince Mustafa Fazl Pasha — son of Ibrahim Pasha and brother of the future Khedive Isma'il — by his Anatolian wife Dilazad Hanim; the sources disagree on the place: the French article and Wikidata give Constantinople, while the English article says she was born in Cairo. ^{1 2 4}

In 1866, aged thirteen, she left Egypt for Constantinople after her father's falling out with his brother the Khedive over the succession, and there she received an education exceptional for the time, receiving foreign visitors and entertaining them in their own languages. ^{1 2}

She spoke Turkish, Arabic, French and English, and the Arabic and French articles add Italian and German to her languages. ^{1 3 2}

In October 1872 she married Khalil Sherif Pasha, one of her father's cousins and an Ottoman ambassador, and moved with him to Cairo in 1875; when he became the Porte's ambassador to France she shared his postings across several European capitals, and her political and social formation benefited from his diplomatic experience. ¹

It was not a happy marriage, and their one daughter, Hayya Hanim, died in infancy; on Khalil's death in 1879 Nazli returned to Cairo and settled in a palace near the royal Abdeen Palace, named "Villa Henry", with her stepdaughter Leila, the child of her husband's first marriage. ^{1 2}

Throughout her widowhood from 1879 she refused several marriage proposals — one from a government minister, another from a prince — preferring, in the English article's account, the liberty of widowhood to the constraints of marriage. ¹

In the early 1880s she founded the first cultural salon run by a woman in Egypt, at the Villa Henry behind Abdeen Palace — a palace named, the Arabic article says, for Sir Henry Layard, the archaeologist and British ambassador whom she had met in Istanbul. ³

She was thereby among the first to revive the literary salon in the modern Arab world, receiving male guests unveiled, against the strict gender conventions of the time, while the company debated political and social questions including "the woman question". ^{1 2}

The salon's regulars included Muhammad Abduh, Saad Zaghloul, Qasim Amin and Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, and among foreigners Lord Cromer, the effective ruler of Egypt, and Lord Kitchener; Huda Sha'arawi belonged to its circle in a later period. ^{1 3}

It was at her insistence that Lord Cromer coordinated Abduh's return from exile in 1888 — the Arabic article adds that she herself asked Khedive Tawfiq for his pardon. ^{1 3}

Abduh presented two of his pupils to her, and her mark on both was deep: she took Saad Zaghloul as her legal adviser, encouraged him to learn French, and proposed his marriage to Safiya, daughter of the prime minister Mustafa Fahmi Pasha — and her portrait still hangs in his bedroom at the House of the Nation museum, the Arabic article says. ^{1 3}

Her effect on Qasim Amin was a turning of his thought: in 1894 he had published his French book "Les Égyptiens", a reply to the Duc d'Harcourt defending the veil and the separation of the sexes; Nazli — then almost the only Egyptian woman who received men in a salon — took the book to be aimed at her and was furious, and after Abduh and Zaghloul brought him to apologise at her salon he reversed his position and wrote "Tahrir al-Mar'a" (The Liberation of Women), printed at her expense and under her patronage. ³

Nazli first travelled to Tunis in 1896 to visit her sister Princess Ruqayya, wife of the Tunisian notable Tahir ibn Ayyad, and again at the beginning of 1899; the French authorities suspected her journeys were a cover for work on behalf of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and the French police followed her movements minutely. ^{1 3}

In Tunis she mixed with Tunisian reformers and joined their activities, was made honorary president of the Khalduniyya cultural association, and, the French article adds, held the honorary presidency of the Muslim Sports Society of Tunisia from 1906 to 1913. ^{3 2}

On her second Tunisian voyage she met the young civil servant Khelil Bouhageb, son of the judge and reformer Salem Bouhageb and a future prime minister of Tunisia, twenty years her junior, and decided to marry him: the English article dates the marriage 22 April 1900, registered at the French consulate in Cairo, while the French article gives 1898; with French permission the couple settled in Tunis. ^{1 2}

She made her house at La Marsa, the Villa Ramses, a cultural centre for the Tunisian intelligentsia and the pivot of relations between Tunis and Cairo: there Muhammad Abduh met the Tunisian elite, and through her, leading Egyptians made contact with the Young Tunisians. ¹

This section sets out the positions of her contemporaries as the sources report them; it is not a verdict by the museum.

Her admirers saw the salon as a beacon of the Nahda and of enlightenment whose spirit passed to its guests; the Arabic article credits her with an influence on the intellectual development of Abduh, Zaghloul and Qasim Amin, men themselves of great cultural weight. ³

Against her, some contemporaries accused the famous salon of spreading calls to westernisation and the loosening of women's constraints, and Muhammad Farid's memoirs describe her as a supporter of the English — a charge that sits alongside the French authorities' suspicions about her Tunisian journeys. ^{3 1}

From the memoirs of her acquaintances, the English article reports that she had a quick wit and loved photographs, champagne, cigarettes and her pianola. ¹

On 13 October 1913 she fell while walking, and the consequences were fatal: after being transported to Cairo she died there on 28 December 1913 — the French article gives cardiac arrest and the date 12 December, and the Arabic article dates her death 28 January 1914 — and she was buried in the Fazil Mausoleum by the Imam al-Shafi'i mosque in Cairo. ^{1 2 3 4}

She had received the Order of Compassion (Shafqat), first class, from Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and was honorary president of the Alliance of Eastern and Western Women and an honorary member of the New England Conservatory of Music, according to the English article. ^{3 1}

Egyptian television has portrayed her in the series "Qasim Amin" (2002), "Imam Muhammad Abduh" (2005) and "Saraya Abdeen" (2014), according to the Arabic article. ³

• English Wikipedia article on Nazli Fazil (revision 1380998170); Arabic Wikipedia article «نازلي فاضل» (revision 74032311); French Wikipedia article "Nazli Fazıl" (revision 238028955); Wikidata item Q7244764.
• Recorded conflicts: birthplace (Constantinople in the French article and Wikidata; Cairo in the English article); date of death (28 December 1913 in the English article and Wikidata; 12 December 1913 in the French; 28 January 1914 in the Arabic); year of her second marriage (1898 in the French article; 22 April 1900 in the English).