Neck of the woods
Was Tahiyya Kathim, the woman of Iranian origin and wife of Gamal Abdel Nasser a Shi’a originally but abandoned her sect and her Persian roots? That is the question of the Saudi semi-official Alarbiya network asked. Alarabiya is obsessed with two things more than anything else: fending off an imagined spread of Shi’ism and destroying the memory and legacy of Egypt’s late president Nasser. Nasser came closer than anyone else to overthrowing the al-Saud regime. He even charmed and got several princes to defect to Cairo and denounce the al-Saud clan. The princes have not forgotten this even over 40 years after his death. Nor have the Muslim Brotherhood who tried to assassinate him more than once in the 1950s. The Muslim Brotherhood leaders went into exile in Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf states. Yet they returned to Egypt largely unconvinced of the Wahhabi doctrine, which put them at odds with the Saudi regime later on, especially after they tried to challenge Hosni Mubarak politically.
Tahiyya Kathim was an Egyptian of Iranian origins, but then there are many Egyptians of Iranian origin, more than you would think. A simple DNA test could prove this. Egyptians also come from many other origins, including Arabs and ancient Egyptians and Jews and Italians and Greeks and Turkish and Albanians, among others. So all this is no big deal.

All this is not the point. The point is that Alarabiya, which specializes in stoking sectarian fires mostly along the Gulf GCC states but also across the Arab world, may be tying the legacy of Nasser to the al-Saud’s more modern target, Shi’ism. The report does, however, introduce an interesting history of her ancestors and how they migrated from Rasht in Iran to Egypt. I did learn a bit of history from it.
Cheers
mhg
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