Tahiyya Gamal Abdelnasser's memoir "Nasser My Husband"was our book club selection for June 2015,
Find more information on the book and readers' comments on the book's page.
Tahia Gamal Abdel Nasser also spelled Tahiyya , born Tahia Kazem in 1923, married Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1944 and lived with him until his death in 1970, raising five children. She died in 1990.
Tahia Nasser or Tahia Mahmoud Kazem in 1923 into a prosperous family in Cairo, Egypt. After her parents died and one of her two sisters married, she went to live with her only brother, who owned a rug factory near the Abbassia military academy. She soon met Gamal Abdel Nasser, an instructor at the academy and a friend of her brother's who often visited the Kazem household. The somber and independent-minded soldier, who had lost his mother as a boy, was drawn both to Tahia's kindness and to her domestic abilities and soon asked her brother for her hand. Although he was rejected for quite some time, he continued to request her hand until finally his proposal was accepted. They were married in 1944.
She became first lady of Egypt in 1956 and voted in elections regularly after Egyptian women were given the right to vote that year; seldom attended public functions and appeared in few official photographs, enjoying a personal freedom known by few wives of national leaders in the 20th century.
Tahia wrote her memoir in 1973 (three years after Nasser's sudden death) and did not intend to publish it. More than twenty years after she passed away in 1990, Nasser's family agreed to publish the memoir, revealing rare photos and a glimpse into an unknown side of the first Egyptian President.
