Ibnat Al-Dictator (The Dictator’s Daughter) by Mostafa Obeid, Al-Dar Al-Masriya Al-Libnaniya Publishing, Cairo, 2024, 292 pp.

It is a known fact that, during the sixties of the last century, sovereign agencies employed several actresses to put foreign dignitaries under control.     

The novel’s narrator is Dr. Fairuz Al-Sawi, a medical doctor working at Al-Mansoura University Hospital, who is extremely eager to get a good recommendation from her superior to help her receive an English university scholarship.

Fairuz belongs to the 2011 Revolution generation, who witnessed its demise; subsequently, she is determined to travel abroad.

At the same time, she is closely connected to Ahmed Nasr-El-Deen Ayyub, her maternal grandfather, who brought her up in Egypt after he persuaded her father to take her back to Egypt from Kuwait following her mother’s death.

Fairuz’s grandfather played a pivotal role in shaping her character, behaviour, and cultural makeup.

On receiving a phone call from an unknown person, Ayyub’s health deteriorated severely to the extent that he could not talk. Before this, he kept saying “Forgive me Sanaa.”

With the help of Mona, Fairuz’s intimate friend, she discovered that her grandmother’s name was Sanaa, not Thurayya as her grandfather used to confirm to her and her father.

Fairuz was obliged to travel to Cairo to meet Husn, her grandmother’s maid, who gave her Sanaa’s memoirs.   

Strangely enough, all the online available data on Sanaa Bakkash was very scarce and confined to her being a writer of books and films in the fifties of the last century.

Fairuz resorted to an author to authenticate the memoirs, who was none but Mostafa Obeid, the real author!

Sanaa’s memoirs were written during approximately three months in 2001 in which she wanted to state what happened after many of the 23rd July Revolution figures disavowed what she had done, considering it her “last triumph” and as a humble gift to her Nubian maid for gaining money from buying it.

Inflicted with cancer in her urinary tract, Sanaa confirms that she has beaten all her enemies except time.

Sanaa was born into a needy family in the Nile Delta. When she was seven years old, her feet slipped in the mud on a rainy day and she lost consciousness. She woke up on a bed in a police officer’s house, Yusuf Bek, and his Irish wife. She was sent to a Quran school.

Reaching thirteen years old, she fled this house after she had an illicit relationship with Yusuf Bek, who was transferred to Cairo.

Once she arrived with her stunning beauty at his office in the Ministry of the Interior, he recruited and taught her the art of seduction and writing reports to the Political Bureau.

With her irresistible charm, he unleashed her on the intellectuals to know their weaknesses and if possible put them under control.

Yusuf Bek published a book carrying Sanaa’s name as a pretext to infiltrate the world of the intelligentsia. He also gave her the surname Bakkash, which belongs to a famous conservative Azharite Upper Egyptian family.

Later, Sanaa met Hassan Pasha Refaat, head of the Political Bureau, who commanded her to focus her efforts on politicians and instilled in her the motto that emotions or ethics have no place in their work as long as they protect the homeland.

Hassan Pasha Refaat was overly generous with Sanaa providing her with a villa, an office, a secretary, and a car with a chauffeur. As a cover, she founded a magazine called New Writers.

Sanaa set up a network of ambitious women hungry for fame and money and unleashed them on the entertainment, press, and politics spheres to know their leanings during WWII.

When her right-hand assistant Maleeha, a Palestinian girl (strangely she was not affected by the 1948 Nakba), decided to quit, marry a journalist, and immigrate to America, Sanaa thwarted this attempt of rebellion in the most obnoxious way forcing her to continue in the service.

Meeting Ismail Pasha Sedky, the renowned robust Egyptian prime minister, was the most important event in Sanaa’s life. It was a scene that Obeid drew dexterously and brilliantly.

He treated Sanaa like a father and asserted the importance of discarding ethics and ideals because politics has no ethics.

The novel’s title emerged when a photo showing Sanaa arriving at Sedky’s house captioned The Dictator’s Daughter was published alluding to Sedky’s ruthless iron fist rule against the press and the opposition.

Another scene which was drawn with brilliance is Sanaa’s meeting with Mustafa Amin, the well-known Egyptian journalist, where he seemed to be a charismatic, shrewd man.

The Political Bureau stopped its female activities in 1947 because of the cholera epidemic.

During the pains and repercussions of cancer, Sanaa added another reason for writing her memoirs, to warn ordinary people not to enter this world.

Obeid inserted newspaper clippings during the royal era and the following one, which witnessed huge cooperation between Sanaa and one of the sovereign agencies, to dismiss any accusations of fabrication.

This agency trained Sanaa well to memorize numbers and endure physical pain. It also pulled some strings resulting in Sanaa winning three literary awards in the same contest!

On seeing huge crowds in Beirut chanting President Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s name during a signing event for her book about him, Sanaa added a new shade of meaning of the dictator’s daughter, saying: “What a beautiful thing to be the dictator’s daughter if this was his share of people’s love.”

In its last third, the novel was moved to a romantic and somewhat spiritual side between Sanaa and an infatuated fan in the form of Ahmed Nasr-El-Deen Ayyub, who told her she appeared to him in three visions asking for his help. He told her they would marry, have a girl, and will call her Nadia! They did precisely so, but such a marriage could not last.

Ahmed’s presence in Sanaa’s life might be viewed as a golden chance to save her from such a filthy career. Afterwards, Ahmed fled Egypt taking their daughter with him, leaving a letter to Sanaa that he dreamed that she was sleeping with another man. Sanaa admitted to Husn that he did the right thing by taking Nadia away from Egypt.

Sanaa was assigned to recruit a girl to control “Egypt’s strong man” field marshal Abdel-Hakim Amer.

Obeid described the fierce conflict between different security agencies in Egypt in the sixties of the last century in a delightfully literary manner.

Naturally, everything collapsed after the 1967 Defeat and Sanaa was forced to close her magazine.

At the memoirs' end, Sanaa affirmed that dictatorship was the worst catastrophe that befell the Arab countries, and simultaneously she was proud of her nickname “the dictator’s daughter”!

In her record of victories, Sanaa participated in exposing the Brothers of Freedom society (a real society), founded by British intelligence to recruit Egyptian spies through the Egyptian Standpoint newspaper.    

Sanaa's religious side was evident in giving alms, especially to her family, and expressing her desire to perform the lesser pilgrimage.

Describing the destituteness she lived served as a flagrant condemnation of the royal era concerning the peasants’ lives. It was confirmed when she met her brother, whose hair became grey while still a young man receiving alms.  

Fairuz discovered a letter from her grandfather, in which he admitted working for a shadow agency assigned to monitor the sovereign agency that Sanaa was working for.

He was assigned to infiltrate her network and marry her. He loved her truthfully. However, when he knew she accepted to be photographed naked beside a man in a certain assignment, he decided to flee Egypt along with Nadia and change his name from Ahmed to Hamad.

He resorted to the shadow agency to “persuade” Fairuz’s superior to write favourably about her to get the scholarship.

This entirely surprising end reveals that the sovereign agencies have the upper hand in the citizens’ lives and are spying on each other.

Moreover, Ahmed’s confession of his reality to his granddaughter, which Sanaa was ignorant of until her death, is a reality similar to the matryoshka dolls. It seemed as if it was a battle of memoirs.

The novel's shortcomings
 

The novelist devoted more than thirty pages to Fairuz’s love for her colleague and conversations with her friend, which could have been condensed into fewer pages.

The author also appeared again without providing the reader with any new information.

Obeid portrayed Sanaa Bakkash as an assertive character and Fairuz Al-Sawi as a feminist par excellence. However, her colleague Hossam seemed unconvincing in his abrupt change from being timid to being confrontational with their superior.

The novelist presented a clichéd portrait of the religious personality of Dr. Wagdi, who must be religiously ignorant and suffering from duplicity, while Dr. Hossam, who drinks alcohol on duty, is acceptable to Fairuz since he is a bookworm.

Obeid also quoted many lesser-known songs by famous Lebanese songstress Fairuz.