Like Britain's Princess Elizabeth, Egypt's Queen Farida was once an enthusiastic Girl Guide. Unlike Elizabeth, she never bore a son, and in Egypt, where only male heirs count, that can be important.
Born Sasi Naz Zulficar, the daughter of a prominent judge in Alexandria's Mixed Court of Appeals, Farida ("Peerless") had other drawbacks as a queen in Islam. Before her marriage she had shocked orthodox Moslems with her Western ways. She dressed in the latest Paris fashions, swam and danced with vigor, and mixed freely with the cosmopolites in Alexandria's foreign colony. Her courtship by Egypt's young King Farouk had...
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