CAIRO — Naglaa Ali Mahmoud wears an Islamic head covering that drapes down to her knees, did not attend college and never took her husband’s last name, because that is a Western convention that few Egyptians follow. She also refuses the title of first lady, in favor of simply Um Ahmed, a traditional nickname that identifies her as the mother of Ahmed, her eldest son.
Egypt has a new leader, Mohammed Morsi, the first president to hail from the Muslim Brotherhood, not the military. And it also has Mahmoud, 50, whose profile is so ordinary by contemporary Egyptian standards as to make her elevation extraordinary.
Mahmoud could hardly be more different from her predecessors, Suzanne Mubarak and Jihan el-Sadat: aloof, British-Egyptian fashion plates with well-coiffed hair and advanced degrees. With her image as a traditionalist everywoman, Mahmoud has come to symbolize the dividing line in the culture war that has made unity an elusive goal since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. For some, she represents the democratic change that the revolution promised. She is a woman in the presidential palace who looks and lives like their sisters and mothers.
But to some in the westernized elite, she stands for a backwardness and provincialism that they fear.
“I can’t call her a first lady under any circumstances,” complained Ahmed Salah, 29, a banker having coffee with his friends on the Nile island of Zamalek. “She can’t be an image for the ‘ladies’ of Egypt.”
Many others, though, said it was her critics who were out of step. “People like Suzanne Mubarak are the odd ones out — you don’t see them walking down the street,” said Mariam Morad, 20, a psychology student. “This is exactly what we need: change.”
Mahmoud, for her part, said she knew it would not be easy to be the wife of the first Islamist head of state, as she told the newspaper of the Muslim Brotherhood, the 84-year-old Islamist movement. If she tries to play an active role, she risks comparisons with Suzanne Mubarak, who was widely despised for her supposed influence behind the scenes. But if Mahmoud disappears, she said, “They will say that Mohammed Morsi is hiding his wife because this is how Islamists think.”
Mahmoud’s unexpected path to the presidential palace illustrates just how foreign her experience is to the culture of the old Egyptian elite — or perhaps how foreign that elite is to Egypt. Hers was a very typical beginning: She grew up in the poor Cairo neighborhood of Ain Shams, and was 17 and still in high school when she married her cousin, Morsi, who was 11 years older. He also had grown up poor, in the small village of El Adwa in the Nile Delta province of Sharqiya, but excelled in the engineering program at Cairo University. They have five children.
In Egypt’s patriarchal culture, and especially among Islamists, men seldom talk publicly of their wives, and mentioning them by name is almost a taboo. But Morsi is unusually appreciative of Mahmoud, even in public, sometimes saying in television interviews that marrying her was “the biggest personal achievement of my life.”
He sometimes helped her with chores, she told the magazine Nesf el Donia, and even cooked for her. “I like everything about him,” she said.
She often appeared with her husband during the campaign, though she seldom spoke publicly. When a magazine journalist asked for a photograph, her answer was conditional. “Only if your photos make me look younger and a little thinner,” she said.
