With three books and tens of articles broaching hot social and cultural issues under her belt, it’s hard to believe that Soheir Helmi, 43, began her career as a professional journalist just under five years ago. Her latest book Farouk: Thaliman wa Mathlouman (Farouk: Culprit and Victim), released in January by Al Ahram’s Nisf El-Donia, was so well-received by critics and readers alike that the second edition was sold out in bookstores. Helmi crowned her commercial success by taking home the prestigious Mostafa and Ali Amin Journalism Award in April.

“It’s a source of great pride for me to be recognized with an award commemorating the founders of Egyptian journalism,” says Helmi, who graduated from Cairo University’s Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication in 1984. “I didn’t work in my field for many years, but never regretted it. I was married with children, so it would have been very difficult for me to pursue a career that involved mental and intellectual effort. My professional life had to move at a pace that didn’t compromise my obligations to my family. Otherwise, the lack of balance would have been detrimental on both fronts.”

Helmi joined the staff of Nisf El-Donia, a weekly general interest magazine, in 2000. Her first story “El-Rawshana Yasnaaha Al-Kibar Aydan” (Older People Can Be Cool, Too), was about teenage lingo. The interesting twist was that she interviewed Naguib Mahfouz for it and he admitted that in his day, they also came up with some strange words.

Helmi’s passion for history and heritage is evident in every corner of her Heliopolis apartment. An organized chaos of paintings, tapestries, old French furniture and silver collectables grace her walls and coffee tables. A perfect replica of Gauguin’s painting of two Tahitian women, Nafea Faa Ipcipo, catches my attention. “My love for everything old is something I inherited from my mother. I like to read old books and magazines,” she says. Her extensive collection of the weekly Al-Mussawer magazine is a family heirloom.

Helmi’s interest in history was the fruit of a deeper interest in writing biographies, which explains why the subject of her first book, released in 2002, was the life and works of Egyptian author and intellectual Abbas El-Aqqad. Its success paved the way for her next project, a biography of Egypt’s last monarch, King Farouk.

“The catch is,” recalls Helmi, “my initial intention was to write a book about Farouk. I wanted to examine his character in depth, but when I began researching, I kept going back and back in history to delve deeper into his roots. First, I read up on his father, King Fouad, then went further back until I reached Mohammed Ali. Even when I reached Mohammed Ali, I felt it wasn’t enough. I had to make a comparison between what Egypt was like before Mohammed Ali and what it had become after him in order to be able to assess the role of this family within a historical context. I had to put both realities side by side. This way, my assessment would be methodical and objective.”

Helmi believes that the writing of history should never be subjective.

“I’m entitled to my own opinion and to keep [it] to myself. But when it comes to writing history, I must tell the truth by seeking it objectively,” she continues. Writing about historical figures, she explains, is problematic. The first picture painted of any figure casts him in a certain mold, and so writing from a different perspective is akin to swimming against the tide.

“It’s a daunting task,” she says, “and won’t change the direction of the tide. It’s very easy to spread a lie, but difficult to make people believe that it was a lie.”

Her approach to the book sprang from a desire to tell the truth and satisfy her conscience. “As a child, I liked to spend time with older people who discussed big issues. When I listened to their political conversations, I used to hear stories I didn’t understand. I would watch a TV show about the 1952 revolution, for example, and one chronicler or politician, for instance, would say: ‘When Abdel Nasser and Abdel Hakim Amer were in Korba on the eve of the revolution and met Youssef Siddiq.’ I didn’t use to understand and would ask myself: Where is Korba? What did they do there? I longed to know the story. This idea of knowing the story was crucial for me because it carried a special magic. Even when we want to teach a child a certain value, a story makes it more appealing and convincing.”

For Helmi, the only way to complete a picture is by tackling it from its essence and recounting it in one breath. When it came to her book, she needed to trace the plot from the very beginning: What was Egypt like before Mohammed Ali, and how did it change throughout the 140 years or so until Farouk took the throne? Her desire to compile this whole background in one work by default led to her second book, El-Khedewy (The Khedive, 2003). Since King Farouk’s era was packed with major events which eventually led to the revolution, Helmi felt that it had to stand independently in a comprehensive work of its own.

“I decided to divide my project into two parts only after I stared researching,” says Helmi. “This was when the story began to take shape in my mind; my intention was to write about the royal family from its roots till the end of the monarchy in a work that is comprehensive.”

The success of El Khedewy, which was reprinted by Maktabet El-Osra (The Family Library, a project of first lady Suzanne Mubarak) under the title Osret Mohammed Ali (The Family of Mohammed Ali) was the driving force behind Helmi’s growing enthusiasm about the Farouk biography. Through extensive research, she discovered that Farouk had written memoirs. Parts of it were published in a London paper called Empire News, which has long since closed down. Save for some marginal excerpts, there was no trace of these memoirs as a whole in any local publications about Farouk. It took Helmi three months to get in touch with people in London who would help her locate them.

“I was finally told that they were available, but in bad condition, and so if I needed to look at them, I had to make the trip to London myself, so I did,” says Helmi. “For the first time a complete portion of Farouk’s memoirs was published in Egypt. This was pivotal to the success of the book because we finally managed to present the perspective of a king who was forced to abdicate through memoirs published while he was still alive, which adds to their authenticity.”

Memoir’s aside, Farouk: Culprit and Victim is a must-read for many reasons. The 486-page tome is divided into 26 chapters tackling the king’s private and public life, his family, an in-depth look into the roles of the main players in the political arena during his reign, including Wafdists Mostafa El-Nahhas and Makram Ebeid, and major events like the king’s ill-fated decision to enter the 1948 Palestine war, the Cairo Fire and the 1952 revolution. Helmi’s work is comprehensive, transporting the reader back to the spirit of the age. Through her engaging, descriptive story-telling, heightened by literary allusions, the reader gets the feeling that Helmi herself had lived in the 1940s and was unfolding the life stories of people she knew. Court intrigues, family feuds and political turmoil are further fleshed out by an extraordinary number of well-captioned, often rare photographs which Helmi borrowed from private collections and the archives.

But what was Helmi’s own assessment of Egypt’s last monarch?

“I had a lot of compassion for King Farouk on the humanitarian, not the political level. From a mother’s perspective, I felt that he was a victimized child. The winds blew him to a wrong place, like a little boy in a little boat caught in the middle of a huge storm at sea,” says Helmi.

She recounts how he was merely 16 when he was summoned from London in 1936 to take his father’s place as King of Egypt. His complex relationship with his mother Nazli, whose rumored affair with one of his idols, Oxford-graduate and ambassador Ahmed Hassanein, was also a source of great distress for the young king. When Hassanein was later killed in a mysterious car accident and Nazli immigrated to the United States with Farouk’s sister Fatheya, who married a Christian convert against the monarch’s wishes, Farouk was forced to strip them both of their titles and disinherit them.

“The injustices to which Farouk was subjected were many. The blows were much worse because they were dealt by the people closest to him.”

Helmi stresses, however, that in the final analysis there was a historical necessity to end the monarchy.

“Farouk was simply not fit to rule and the entire regime had become obsolete, decadent and had reached the point of self-immolation,” says Helmi. “If you recall the events that preceded the revolution until they reached the climax with the Cairo Fire, you can see how they set the stage for the Free Officers. The revolution didn’t take place from a vacuum. A Chinese proverb says that a picture is worth a thousand words. Documentaries of the event showing hundreds of thousands of people cheering Mohammed Naguib and Nasser after the coup prove it. The masses were exalted when Farouk was deposed.”

Categorically opposed to the character assassination to which the royal family was subjected, Helmi makes it very clear that she did not believe that Farouk was a villain. In a chapter titled “Farouk Never Drank Alcohol”, she dismantles claims that Farouk was a heavy drinker and a notorious womanizer through the testimony of one his closest friends, Karim Thabet, who said that Farouk never drank and that his rumored escapades never went beyond wild laughter.

“Farouk loved Egypt,” she concludes. “He was also the first to address his people in Arabic and mastered the colloquial dialect. He even prohibited anyone from speaking Turkish in Abdeen Palace. Churchill’s famous statement ‘This boy is not loyal to Britain.’ is the best proof of his loyalty to his country. The reason behind Farouk’s downfall was that he wanted to live his life like young people his own age, and so he rebelled against his destiny to become king. He paid a heavy price.” et