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Surely, this couldn't be our Harrods Fayed? NARSCO was Adnan Khashoggi's company. Strong words for Khashoggi to use against a 'Fabulous Pharaoh.' I learned that Mohamed Fayed was employed by El Nasr after he met Khashoggi's sister, Samira, swimming on Alex's Stanley beach, where she fell in love with the Pepsi Cola salesman. He was recruited by a school friend, Tousson Barawi, a neighbour and friend of Khashoggi, then a small businessman. Mohamed married Samira in July 1954. Their son, 'Dodi' was born in April 1956 and they divorced the same year. Mohamed's youngest brother, Ali, had also been employed as Khashoggi's secretary, but both were dismissed, and vanished in July 1957.
According to the Sunday Times: 'The Fayed brothers were already wealthy men when they left Egypt.' There was only one way to trace the Fayed family -- through records. There is no Somerset House in Egypt. To obtain birth certificates, you have to make an application in writing, be a member of the family or explain your reasons, providing the full name of father and mother.
The Alexandria telephone book is printed in Arabic, and has not been updated for more than 10 years. This is useful when you are looking for a dead man.
Aly Aly Fayed, father of the three 'fabulous Al-Fayed brothers,' died around 1979. His last address is still listed on 462 as No. 1, Street 45, in the district of Sidi Bashr. For a neo-Pharaoh, the elder Fayed lived in restrained style. Street 45 is long and dusty, litter strewn and pot-holed, filled with the sepulchral noon shadows of monotonous, decaying concrete houses, laced together with telephone wires and spiked with television aerials. It has been renamed, without visible improvement, Elshahid Mohamed Youssef Ghaly Street, after an Egyptian-Israeli war hero.
Aly Aly Fayed is still remembered by some of his former neighbours. But not for being part of one of Egypt's 'most distinguished families,' nor for inheriting a cotton empire. He was kind to old ladies: 'He was a very nice man. He helped me a lot when my husband, also a teacher, died,' widow Tabl told me, gesturing reverently towards her ceiling. Aly Aly and his second wife lived above her head on the first floor, in a four roomed flat which must have been similar to her own: bare plaster walls, rickety window frames, wooden shutters keeping out the daylight and a distant view of Alexandria's coastal road.
'He was a teacher, then a school inspector. Two of his sons -- who, he said, lived in Victoria -- visited him often.' As an inspector, Aly Aly must have earned 80 Egyptian pounds (£40) a month. At 6 Ghaly Street, up concrete steps on the fourth floor, I talked to Om Ehsam, and her son, Ahmed Mafoz, in their neat little living-room. They still have contact with Salah Fayed, and the two elder sisters, Soad and Safeya. 'They are married to a professor of calligraphy and a merchant, and we are often getting presents from them and from Salah. When their father, Ali, died about seven years ago, they all came to the funeral except Mohamed.'
Further research revealed that his father Ali had obtained his teacher's certificate in 1917, and that he had worked in El Bousery School in the poorest Alexandria district of El Gomrok ('Customs') near the harbour. I guessed that he would have lived near his school. Mohamed had given his birthdate as 27 January 1933 in company entries and the Financial Times. I asked a restaurant owner, who was unaware of the Fayed's present history, to obtain Mohamed's birth certificate. It was dated 27 January 1929. Can't even the registrars get it right in Egypt? Alternatively, I have happy news for Mohamed: he is two years younger than he thinks, while his brothers appear to be two years and even 10 years younger.
But if the father of the 'fabulous Fayeds' religiously followed the family dictum and 'displayed a lofty disdain for the nouveaux riches of the Arab world,' it was nothing compared to the cosmic indifference shown by their illustrious grandfather.
It was grandfather Fayed, according to the denizens of Park Lane, who was the founder of the family fortune, who kept the mills of Europe, especially of Lancashire, spinning before the First World War, with Egyptian cotton ferried in his own freighters. This venerable Fayed was so adept at disdain, so successful at avoiding the nouveaux riches that, even today, two distinguished generations later, it is hard to find anyone in Egypt who remembers him.
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