Farouk's engagement to be announced

February 10, 1951

The "long-awaited announcement" of King Farouk of Egypt's betrothal to Miss Narriman Hanen Sadelk, a 17-year-old commoner, will be announced to the Egyptian people tomorrow of occasion of the King's thirty-first birthday, reports the New York Times.
No date for the wedding has been announced.

The official statement is as follows:  "Rendering praise to God, His Majesty's Cabinet is happy to announce to the noble Egyptian people the good news of the betrothal of their King, who has given them his heart and love.
"On this blessed day when the country celebrates with gladness and joy the glorious anniversary of the royal birth, there took place by the grace of God the betrothal of our well-beloved Sovereign with the descendant of an illustrious and noble family, Miss Narriman Hanem, daughter of the late Hussein Fahmy Sadek Bey.
"In announcing the news of this happy betrothal of the great Farouk, the Cabinet thanks Divine Providence for its beneficence and prays that it may surround His Majesty with its high solicitude and make of this blessed betrothal a source of happy omen for beloved Egypt and for the august royal family."

United Press reports that the announcement of the king's engagement brought to a "climax a courtship swathed in mystery and censorship for more than a year."
The popular version of the story is that Farouk first saw Narriman in a Cairo jewelery store, "shopping for an engagement ring with another young man, Zaki Hashem, a young United Nations diplomat."
Farouk's engagement came less than forty-eight hours before the marriage of the Shah of Iran with another commoner, 18-year-old Soraya Isfandiari.
The two rulers were divorced from their first wives within "a few days of each other in 1948."  The Shah of Iran's first wife, Princess Fawzia, the mother of his only child, a daughter, is Farouk's eldest sister.   Farouk's first wife, Queen Farida, gave birth to three daughters, and not the required son.
Narrriman has spent the last year in Europe, "buying her trousseau."
News about Egypt's royal family is not "bandied about," and most news about the family must go through filters of censorship.   It seems likely that Farouk and Narrimann have met for only a dozen times since their first meeting.   Both traveled to Europe, "but so far as can be learned, their paths did not cross."

[Farouk went into exile in a bloodless coup staged by the military on July 26, 1952.   The New York Times reported that the coup which removed Farouk from his throne had "launched a drive against the corruption that has so long gone unpunished in Egypt, that land of vast wealth and mass poverty."  The coup leaders (as were the Egyptian people) were very anti-British as the British had "moved into the country" seventy years earlier.  There was also a keen desire to acquire the water rich and "prosperous" Sudan.  Farouk saw himself as the King of Egypt and Sudan.  Egyptians rioted for some weeks before Farouk and his family -- his wife had given birth a son a few months earlier -- went into exile.  In the early stages, Farouk replaced cabinet and government officials, but it was all for naught.   Egypt has been run by dictators for 5000 years.  The country does not have the civic infrastructure to put together a democracy.  It took Poland ten years to build a democratic state. ]