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| Book cover (c) Princess Melekper Tousson / Nomad Publishing. |
The remarkable story of the young King Farouk, a ruler widely maligned and deeply misunderstood.
King Farouk came to the throne in 1936, at the tender age of 16. The young monarch’s rule was to the be the last in a dynasty that had run this ancient land since 1805 – a relatively short time span beneath the long shadow of Giza’s pyramids.
Melekper Toussoun’s account is a history told from the inside, as someone who was part of that final dynasty. In a country whose history is fascinatingly complex and tumultuous, theirs was a family at centre stage, buffeted by joys and tragedies as intense as any that had gone before. They held the helm until the monarchy was toppled in a coup d’état in 1952 – a coup d’état that would probably not have taken place had the young king not suffered an accident that affected the neuronal pathways in his brain.
Toussoun’s evocative and highly personal narrative is a window into a secret garden. At its core is the story of the young monarch, and the account pivots on one central event that was to change everything – Farouk’s car accident on a country road in 1943.
- Revolutionary insight into the medical condition that changed the very personality of the young king
- A rebuttal of the racist and colonially motivated British propaganda of the ‘veiled protectorate’ over Egypt.
PREFACE: Incorporating November 1943 -“Maktoub”
SECTION ONE – BACKGROUND
- CHAPTER I A Short History of Modern Egypt
- CHAPTER II A Lifetime Has Gone by
- CHAPTER III Her Youth and Marriage
- CHAPTER IV Back to Cairo
- CHAPTER V My Mother’s Origins – Chirines and the Crimea
- CHAPTER VI Government, Society and Customs in the Crimea- the end of the Tatars
SECTION TWO – KING FAROUK’S LIFE
- CHAPTER VII Farouk’s Lonely Childhood
- CHAPTER VIII Beginnings 1936
- CHAPTER IX Colonialism : The Story of a Ballad
- CHAPTER X “He Reigns but does Nothing Rule”
- CHAPTER XI Events Leading up to Abdin
- CHAPTER XII The Abdin Incident
SECTION THREE – THE UNDERLYING CAUSE – A FRONTAL LOBE SYNDROME
- CHAPTER XIII Frontal Lobe Syndrome
- CHAPTER XIV “Why Farouk was no longer Farouk”
- CHAPTER XV The Accident and why, “Farouk could not help himself because he was no longer himself”
AFTERWORD
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| King Fuad II of Egypt, Princess Melekper Toussoun, and her half-brother Prince João Henrique |
About the Author: Melekper Toussoun spent her early childhood in Cairo and at the age of 14 moved to spend a year with her aunt, Emine Toussoun, in Washington DC. She went on to join her mother, step-father and younger brother in Rio de Janeiro. There she completed her schooling, moving to live in Paris at 21, where she became a French citizen and has resided ever since. After a period working in the hotel business she became a trilingual interpreter (French-English-Portuguese) at the agency for the “Programme d’invitation des personnalités d’avenir” at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
