On the afternoon of July 6, 1943, millions of Egyptian families gathered around the radio, which was preparing to announce the names of the first students in the “general secondary” orientation stage, before the announcer informed that the first-place student was studying at the boarding secondary school in Helwan. Astonishment prevails in the ears of those waiting. All those studying in that school were girls. Did a girl win first place? Could that happen? The broadcaster did not leave his listeners in confusion for long, as he quickly announced the name of the first student in the republic: Niamat Ahmed Fouad. At the same moment, he whistled a glorious journey of challenge and majestic feminist creativity. Nemat Ahmed Fouad.. is an Egyptian writer who was born in the city of Maghagha in the southern Minya Governorate. She memorized the Holy Qur’an in her childhood, then moved from Maghagha to the Helwan suburb of Cairo to join the girls’ boarding secondary school. She graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, and obtained a master’s degree in Mazani literature. Her doctoral thesis was on “The Nile in Arabic Literature.” In the mid-fifties, she married her companion in life, Professor Muhammad Taher, who owned a pharmaceutical factory and a book publishing house. He was the best companion in Nemat’s journey, as she describes him, and he loved to surprise her from time to time with precious and rare books as evidence of his love for her. The name of Dr. Neamat Ahmed Fouad has been associated with issues during which many battles were raised in defense of Egypt, its civilization and its people, the most important of which is the issue of the Pyramids Plateau, the issue of burying nuclear waste, the issue of defending the Dome of Hussein, the issue of defending Islamic antiquities, the issue of the Sphinx, and the issue of the Egyptian antiquities that Israel seized during its occupation of Sinai. Dr. Neamat has written several books about Ibrahim Abdel Qader Al-Mazni, Umm Kulthum and the Nile, as well as about Al-Aqqad. And the poet Ahmed Rami. UNESCO also translated her book “To My Daughter” into English.
Rich writings
Dr. Niamat Ahmed Fouad poured her soul onto paper, adding her experiences supported by multiple readings in the books of her predecessors. One of her first works was her master’s thesis on the literature of Al-Mazni, which was later turned into a book that was printed and sold in the markets. This book is the first scientific thesis in Egyptian universities dealing with a character from modern literature, as everyone relied on researching ancient Arabic literature or Western and comparative literature. Among Dr. Neamat’s works is also the book “Letters to My Daughter,” which she began writing around the year 1955. The story of the book, as she tells it, began from the moment she knew that she was on the verge of motherhood, so she began writing whatever phrases that came to her mind that expressed her feelings toward her fetus. After the chapters of feelings, she moves on from the Egyptian peasant woman to the Arab woman, then takes you to talk about the value of money, the value of friendship, the meaning of religion and culture, and the art of choosing a husband. One of Nemat Ahmed’s masterpieces is the book “Beauty, Freedom, and the Human Personality in the Literature of Al-Aqqad,” in which she talked about the personality of this creator, whose books fill the streets and rooms of his house, in which he lives alone without a husband to keep him company. This is what she expressed by saying: “It was as if he had been dedicated to the temple….He devoted himself to writing and she gave herself to him.” Neamat Ahmed Fouad has many books, approaching forty books, including “The Crisis of Youth,” “Literature and Civilization,” and “Umm Kulthum and an Era of Art,” which is the book about which she says: “When I finished writing this book, which I wrote not only as an autobiography but as a history of a comprehensive era, I went to Umm Kulthum to present it to her before it was printed. She read it and she liked it, but she had reservations about some of the points mentioned in it, including some. I wrote it about her position at the time when Munira al-Mahdi was the Sultana of Music. We appealed to the youth poet Ahmed Rami, and he came to my side.” Another book by Nemat Ahmed Fouad is “From the Genius of Islam,” in which she says in its introduction: “How much I read to write this book about Islam, how much I contemplated, how much I hoped, how much I became aware and how much I was inspired, and after all of this came just a glimpse of its light and a whiff of its guidance.” She says in another place about the character of society in Islam: “If we add the verses of consultation in the Qur’an to the verses of good debate, we see the Qur’an’s exhortation of the necessity of public opinion’s role, and that public opinion has psychological control, meaning that if it is sound, it will correct individuals and groups, and if it is corrupt and inactive, society will be corrupted. The means for society to create a virtuous society is modesty and concealment. Modesty is a social restriction, and concealment is a limitation of evil.”
Cultural battles
Neamat Fouad held several important positions, the most important of which were Director General of the Supreme Council of Culture in Cairo, Professor of Postgraduate Studies at Helwan University for the Philosophy of Civilization, and Professor at the International Institute of Economics and Islamic Banking affiliated with the International Union of Islamic Banks. She has taught at the universities of Istanbul, New York, Georgetown, Washington, Tripoli, Libya, Al-Azhar Al-Sharif, and the Academy of Arts in Cairo. She fought many intellectual and judicial battles to protect heritage and antiquities, including preventing the burial of Austria’s nuclear waste in Egypt, preventing harm to the water of the Nile and giving a drop of it to Israel, demolishing the Dome of Hassan, traveling antiquities and desecrating antiquities by looting and gifting, defending Islamic antiquities, internal encroachments on the Nile, and prepared a list of antiquities that Israel took from Sinai and presented it to the Permanent Antiquities Committee of the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs before negotiating the retrieval of antiquities. I also worked as a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs. (Committee of Science and Civilization), member of the Permanent Committee for Islamic and Coptic Antiquities, and President of the Scientific Society for the Preservation of Heritage and Historical Monuments. During the era of President Mubarak, Nemat Ahmed Fouad waged fierce cultural battles against the Minister of Culture at the time, Farouk Hosni, objecting to the exhibitions he held of Egyptian antiquities outside Egypt, stressing that traveling antiquities had many dangers to them, and that anyone who wanted to see our antiquities had to come to them. Nemat Ahmed Fouad wrote a lot, and although she lost the battle because no one responded to her, she gained everyone’s respect.
Her private life
As for her home, it was a piece of her: spacious rooms that opened her arms to greet you, furniture with Arabic features that caught your eye from the first moment, books that cramped her library and were scattered between a table and a chair, and a small desk suitable for a writer praised by giants. Next to it was a table unlike any other. It was designed to contain an archaeological map printed by the Encyclopedia Britannica dating back to the beginning of the last century, with comparisons to the civilizations of the ancient world, and next to all of this are rare antique books that are a gift. Her husband is hers. On October 1, 2016, Nemat passed away quietly from our world after a period of illness, devoid of crowds except those closest to her, after she transferred her printed possessions, which exceeded – as her daughter Hanan says – forty thousand books, to a huge library in the Arabic style on a plot of land owned by her husband, Professor Muhammad Taher, on the Haram Road. The Aga Khan Cultural Foundation registered it as one of the rare libraries founded by an individual. Nimat Ahmed Fouad says: “It is a great thing for a person to have a pen, but it is a valuable thing for a person to have a position, and one of God’s blessings upon me is that he gave me the word and the decision, I mean the ability to make difficult choices. So I knew the positions, and for the sake of my positions I endured a lot and rose above temptations, offers, positions, and glamour, so I am dearer than all of them to the soil of this country… every atom of this soil.”
