Kenize Mourad: The Ottoman princess boycotted in France for supporting Palestine

In 1945, an Indian prince sent two women to a convent in France to find his young daughter and bring her to him.

The Second World War had just ended and Syed Sajid Hussain Ali, the raja of the northern Indian princely state of Kotwara, was busy campaigning with the Congress Party for Indian independence.

But now the Nazi German occupation of France had ended, he was intent on having his daughter, whom he had never met, brought to India. 

Kenize Mourad was born in France on 11 November 1939 to an Ottoman princess, the exiled granddaughter of Sultan Murad V. 

Less than two years later, her mother died and Mourad was left in the care of a convent.

She would not make it to India in 1945. The nuns who raised her were horrified at the thought of the girl being brought up by a Muslim prince and hid her.

The child, who might have been raised in an Indian princely court, was instead brought up French.

“And so my life was predetermined by racism,” Kenize Mourad tells me 80 years later in Paris.

“The nuns hid me because in no way were they willing to give this nice little girl to a Muslim father. It was just that. 

“Muslim for them meant devil.”

Legion d'Honneur

Now 85, Mourad, a princess by birth, is a distinguished writer with several books to her name and was once a glamorous novelist prominent in France's literary circles.

This week she received the most prestigious award in the country, the Legion d’Honneur, in recognition of her writing.

It is quite the achievement, but during our conversation Mourad reveals that she is deeply unhappy with France.

In fact, she explains, she is only in Paris temporarily, and now calls Turkey home.

For years, she has effectively been persona non grata in the French media. While in the past, her bestselling novels won her regular newspaper coverage and television appearances, her most recent book was almost completely boycotted by the press.

The reason? Speaking openly about Palestine.

“I’m an idealist,” Mourad tells me. “I’m fighting for the Palestinians, and I’ve paid for it dearly in France.”

The royal has written extensively on the Palestinian struggle against dispossession and occupation, and she describes her own life experiences as having influenced and informed her interest in the issue.

“I experienced injustice, loneliness and poverty when I was young,” she reflects.

“I think my whole life has been to fight by writing for the dispossessed and for minorities.

"The other important aspect has been to explain my native countries, Turkey and India, to my adopted country.”

The Ottomans and India

Mourad’s first novel, Regards from the Dead Princess, was published in 1987 and instantly became a smash hit in France.

An intensely personal work, it was based on four years of research and told the tragic story of her mother, Princess Selma, the granddaughter of Sultan Murad.

The princess was exiled from Istanbul with the rest of the Ottoman imperial family after the empire fell and the caliphate was abolished by the fledgling Republic of Turkey in 1924.

Mourad’s family history fascinated me because of its connection to a topic I spent over a year investigating and writing about: the alliance between the deposed last Ottoman caliph, Abdulmecid II, and the seventh nizam of Hyderabad, a billionaire Indian prince. 

One of the richest men in the world, the nizam governed a princely state the size of Italy in India and after the caliphate’s abolition, he financially supported Abdulmecid.

Helped by that patronage, the former caliph moved with his family to a seafront villa on the French Riviera.

In 1931, Abdulmecid's daughter Princess Durrushehvar married the nizam's heir apparent, Prince Azam Jah.

She went to live in Hyderabad with her cousin Princess Niloufer, who had married the nizam's younger son, Prince Moazzam Jah.

These marriages were brokered by Maulana Shaukat Ali, a legend of India’s early independence campaign and former leader of its Caliphate Movement, which had campaigned on behalf of the Ottomans after the First World War.

This extraordinary alliance between the Ottoman and Asaf Jahi dynasties in 1931 represented the union of two great Islamic dynasties, of the west and east of the Islamic world.

Princess Durrushehvar gave birth to a son, Prince Mukarram Jah, in 1933.

When the British left India in 1947, the nizam wanted Hyderabad to be an independent state, and if that had happened, then Mukarram Jah would have been perfectly placed to claim the caliphal title when he became nizam.

After all, few Muslims could claim to be grandson to both the Ottoman caliph and the world's richest man.

In my research, I have come across secret British documents which reveal that authorities discovered and concealed Abdulmecid’s intentions for the future of his lineage before he died in Paris in 1944.

But after the British left the subcontinent three years later, the newly established Indian Union annexed Hyderabad in 1948, putting a decisive end to the prospect.

The princess and the raja

I was fascinated to read in Mourad’s book that Maulana Shaukat Ali, the mastermind behind the union, also arranged the marriage of her own parents several years later, while a politician in the Muslim League.

“My mother was in Beirut with her family,” Mourad tells me. “They had little money and my grandmother was looking for my mother to marry a Muslim, a prince and somebody with money.

“There were two reservoirs of these sorts of people: the Egyptian monarchy and the Indian princes. She contacted Maulana Shaukat Ali, and he had my father in mind.”

Syed Sajid Hussain Ali, the raja of Kotwara, was a cosmopolitan figure with a love for sports cars and had a British education.

He went to university in Edinburgh, Mourad laughs, having decided against Oxford because “students in their first year there could not have a car”.

The raja - despite his royal position - was a communist and campaigned for Indian independence.

“For the maulana, it was very good for somebody in Indian politics to have a connection with the Ottoman family,” Mourad tells me. 

Princess Selma travelled to Lucknow in north India in 1937 to be married. “My father was not religious, he was very progressive.

“But being in India, his wife had to obey all the customs - and my mother could not stand it.”

When she was pregnant in 1939, Selma travelled to Paris accompanied only by a eunuch to have her baby.

She was stranded there when the war began, and Mourad was born on 11 November that year.

Two years later, Selma died in Paris of sepsis, just three years before the head of the Ottoman family, Caliph Abdulmecid, would also die in the French capital.

'An interesting life'

And so Mourad was raised in a convent as a Christian. As a young woman, she discovered Islam and finally visited India when she was 21, meeting her father for the first time.

She found Lucknow delightfully cosmopolitan: “It was full of interesting people. The best friends of my father were Hindus. Muslims and Hindus went to each other’s ceremonies, and mixing was no problem.”

I ask how she looks back on her upbringing.

“I’m not bitter. I’ve had an interesting life,” she reflects.

“But it has been very difficult to overcome all of this. I spent many years in depression trying to find my identity. Thankfully, I was forced to work - just to eat.”

When did she first meet another member of the Ottoman imperial family?

“I was a student at the Sorbonne,” Mourad reminisces. “Aunt Niloufer called me to have tea".

Princess Niloufer had married the nizam’s second son, Prince Moazzam Jah, but she divorced him after Hyderabad fell and lived in Paris.

Niloufer introduced Mourad to one of her distant cousins, “a young, plump Indian man,” she recalls fondly.

He was Prince Muffakham Jah, Princess Durrushehvar’s second son and a grandson of both the nizam and the last caliph. Family members called him Keramet.

“He was very nice and we talked. He asked me to have lunch the day after, so we did. We talked about what I wanted to do - at the time I wished to be a medical doctor.”

A few days later, Niloufer called her. “She tells me, ‘Keramet is asking if he can hope’,” Mourad laughs. 

“I say, ‘hope for what?’ She says, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, for your hand!’”

Mourad was shocked: “I didn’t understand the culture. I had never been to the east. How could this man ask someone else if he could marry me and not ask me?”

She turned down the proposal, which she says annoyed Princess Durrushehvar.

“She was so cross that this little girl dared to refuse her son that when we would meet, which was normally at funerals, she did not even look at me,” Mourad says, adding that “Keramet was a nice person.”

An encounter with the CIA

Mourad ultimately became a journalist and reported for the left-wing Nouvel Observateur, a Parisian outlet commonly known as Le Nouvel Obs.

This led to one of the most interesting episodes of her life: an attempt by the CIA to turn her into a spy.

In the past month, a flurry of articles in the Turkish press have inaccurately claimed that Mourad worked as a CIA agent in the 1970s.

They stemmed from a misrepresentation of revelations in a recent Sunday Times investigation.

Uncovered secret CIA memos recorded an attempt to recruit her as an asset in Paris in autumn 1973 in order to spy on Chinese diplomats "and near east targets". 

The memos reveal that Mourad initially accepted the offer but soon went back on her decision.

"The idea seemed exciting,” she wrote to her case officer. "But I finally realised it was going deeply against my feelings… It would be a constant struggle in my mind."

What really happened?

Mourad says she was an "ultra-leftist" journalist when the CIA approached her.

"We were very anti-American because of Vietnam, because of Cuba. Che Guevara was our hero."

She was struggling to have her articles published, partly because editors complained that she didn't present the American viewpoint.

And her boyfriend at the time wasn't all he seemed.

"My English boyfriend, who I thought was a journalist, told me he could put me in touch with someone in the American embassy," Mourad tells me.

She agreed and they had lunch with a "gentleman, who was like an old uncle and was very nice".

The diplomat invited her to have coffee the next week, and they spoke some more.

But it was when he asked her to meet up a third time that Mourad became suspicious.

"I asked my boyfriend if he could be secret service. He smiled and said 'no'; that I should talk to him. I went to meet him for coffee again. This time I was on my guard, but I could not believe that the CIA was trying to recruit a left-wing journalist."

'I was imagining a fantastic article on how the CIA tried to recruit a left-wing journalist'

As she would soon realise, that was exactly what was happening. The diplomat revealed he secretly worked for the CIA and asked her to join the agency.

"While he was talking," Mourad remembers, "I was imagining a fantastic article on how the CIA tried to recruit a left-wing journalist."

She pretended to accept the offer, planning to go along with the process and then write a sensational story about it.

"I thought this would impress my editors - I was ambitious, maybe reckless."

She pauses and reconsiders: "I was certainly reckless."

The idea didn’t last for long. A journalist friend warned Mourad that the plan was risky and that the CIA could take revenge.

"I became frightened," she recalls. "I worried they would think I tried to cheat them, so a week later I wrote to them saying I had reconsidered. That was maybe a mistake because it left a trace, but I had no courage to confront the man."

And that was that: Mourad insists she never heard from the agency again. 

She is hurt by claims that she worked for the CIA, describing them as a stain on her integrity.

The fake stories are particularly frustrating, she adds, because she has always been an idealist - and has suffered for sticking by her political principles.

Boycotted over Palestine

After rebuffing the CIA, Mourad went on to cover the Iranian revolution and the Lebanese civil war. But her real success came when she moved away from journalism.

Her debut novel on her mother’s life in 1987 helped her to become one of the most successful writers in France.

Also a bestseller was her second novel, A Garden in Badalpur, which was based on her own life and struggle to find her identity. 

But everything changed with Mourad's third book, published in 2005. 

'In France, when you talk about Palestinians, you are told you are a terrorist'

Our Sacred Land: Voices of the Palestine-Israeli Conflict marked her return to journalism and was based on a journey she took through Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

It was a collection of testimonies from Palestinians and Israelis alike, and documented the crimes and injustices of Israel's occupation.

"The book was balanced,” she tells me. “I depicted Jews who were heroes and helped the Palestinians, standing against their government. I showed settlers who were very nasty.”

After its publication, Mourad was subject to a press boycott. 

"Before that book, I was always on television and my books were in all the papers. But afterwards it all stopped, and even my next novels were boycotted."

She says that her 2010 novel, In the City of Gold and Silver, was largely ignored by the press.

The book tells the story of Begum Hazrat Mahal - the queen of Awadh in India, who helped incite a major anti-colonial uprising in 1857.

It still sold well, she says, because was such a well-known writer.

But her most recent novel, a geopolitical thriller about Pakistan released last year called In the Land of the Pure, has received barely any attention.

“I wanted to do justice to Pakistan. There is a vibrant modern society there.” The book was widely reviewed in Pakistan, but it was far from well-received in France - in fact, it was barely received at all.

Mourad puts it bluntly: “Nobody knows about it. Even many of my friends don’t know I wrote it.

“My life has been really wounded by my position on Palestine.”

'Now there is no free speech'

Even though she is being given the Legion d'Honneur, she says the press boycott remains. A search for her name online proves this correct.

Mourad describes a censorious atmosphere in France, pointing to the extraordinary blanket ban on all pro-Palestinian demonstrations introduced after the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

Anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim sentiment is much worse than it was decades ago, she argues - and journalism is in the gutter.

“My whole life as a writer, I have aimed to serve as a voice of the voiceless. Now, most journalists are repeating the words of the powerful instead."

The environment in France has becoming so suffocating for Mourad that she has made Turkey - the country from which her mother was exiled over a century ago - her home.

"In France, when you talk about Palestinians, you are told you are a terrorist. You are an antisemite. This is why I live in Turkey now," she says.

"There are many problems in Turkey but it's not anti-Palestinian, it's not anti-Muslim."

Is she sad, I ask, that she no longer feels comfortable in the country of her birth? 

Mourad mourns what France has become. “It’s a country of free speech. It brought free thinking to the world,” she says.

“Now there is no free speech.”

She has continued to write and speak extensively about the Palestinian struggle, especially in the last two years. 

The writer doesn’t mince her words when talking about Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza: “The genocide happening now is horrendous.”

Some might say that Mourad underwent a dramatic rise and fall in her writing career. She has gone from being a darling of the French literary establishment to an almost complete outcast.

But she still has a devoted readership, much of it in South Asia, where her father was from and where she has regularly travelled. At 85, she remains an active and respected commentator in Turkey, particularly on the Palestinian cause.

And Mourad is ultimately firm in her convictions - and at ease with their consequences for her books in France.

"I know that if I write something excusing Israel, I would be in the newspapers again,” she reflects.

“But I will never do it.”