The princess who does not want to die

On November 1, 1922, the Parliament of Ankara, created in 1921 by General Mustafa Kemal, hero of the war of independence against Greece (1919–21), definitively abolished the sultanate of Istanbul, and the last sovereign of the Ottoman dynasty, Mehmet VI, went into exile. Yet, as early as the 19th century, members of the centuries-old Ottoman dynasty had already reached other shores, anticipating the implosion of the empire.

This was the case of Selma Hanimsultan, daughter of Hatice Sultan and niece of Sultan Murad V, who remained on the throne practically only during the month of August 1876. She fled with her mother to Lebanon at the time of the dissolution of the Ottoman dynasty. In Lebanon, due to poverty, she was forced into an arranged marriage with an Indian prince. Moving to Paris to give birth to her daughter Kenizé, she died tragically of septicemia following peritonitis, having kept the child's birth secret from everyone, leaving her in the care of a loyal servant. The baby would find refuge at the Swiss consulate and be raised by a Swiss diplomat, who arranged for her to be educated in a convent of Catholic nuns. Only as an adult did she learn the truth about her princely origins and her mother’s story. The latter's life would become the subject of her first novel, On Behalf of the Dead Princess, published in France in 1987, which became a worldwide bestseller translated into more than twenty languages, including Turkish (published in Italy by Rizzoli in 1988). In Turkey, narrating for the first time the end of the empire through the eyes of a member of the sultan’s family, the book enjoyed resounding success. However, the parts of the novel portraying Kemal Atatürk in an unflattering light were censored. The journalist turned writer (reporter for the prestigious Nouvel Observateur, for which she covered, among other things, the Iranian Revolution and the Lebanese Civil War), now 85 years old, has just received the Legion of Honour as recognition of her literary career. It is, in a way, a surprising tribute with the flavor of compensation, given that Kenizé Mourad faced heavy ostracism in France following the release of her essay Our Sacred Land: Voices of the Palestine-Israeli Conflict in 2005. Mourad has always insisted that she tried to let both Palestinians and Israelis speak, in order to overcome the fatal polarization and the total “dehumanization of the enemy” which increases, for both sides, the tolerability of their death—a dehumanization that, even today, makes the same war crimes morally bearable. Since then, however, the fortunes of the princess-writer have significantly declined, as has part of her hope that journalism could be a means of giving a voice to those who have none, rather than simply being a megaphone for the powerful.

The prestigious award conferred by the Presidency of the French Republic has paradoxically arrived just as Kenizé Mourad had finalized the long-pondered decision to return to her mother’s homeland. From her home on the shores of the Bosphorus, in Istanbul, she has never stopped supporting the Palestinian cause, explaining how her life as an exile and quasi-stateless person—tossed between India, her father’s country, Switzerland and France, which raised and educated her, and Turkey, the land of her roots—has shaped and nourished her interest in the claims of peoples searching for a land in which to put down roots. Tragically prophetic, in Our Sacred Land, is the account of Gaza’s desperate cry: the urgent appeal for increased aid to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. Twenty years have passed—and that catastrophe has never ended!

Claudio Monge
NP May 2025