For most of the English-speaking world, the name surfaces only in footnotes to a famous tragedy. She is introduced as the mother of Dodi Fayed, the man who died alongside Diana, Princess of Wales, in a Paris underpass in the summer of 1997. She is mentioned in the same breath as her brother, the arms broker Adnan Khashoggi, once described as the richest man in the world. She is linked, more soberly, to her nephew Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist whose killing in 2018 became a matter of international consequence. Around all of these men, she tends to be a sentence, a parenthesis, a name in a family tree.
This is a disservice to one of the most quietly remarkable women the Arabian Peninsula produced in the twentieth century. Samira Khashoggi was a novelist before Saudi Arabia had a tradition of women novelists. She was a publisher before the kingdom had a single female publisher. She built a magazine that still circulates across the Arab world today, founded a charitable society that has since addressed the United Nations, and put her name to the first novel ever written by a Saudi woman. The men in her life were extraordinary. So, by any honest measure, was she.
To understand Samira Khashoggi properly is to step back from the gossip columns and the Netflix dramatisations and to look instead at a life lived across Mecca, Alexandria, Riyadh, Beirut and London. It is the story of a woman who used a pen name to slip past the expectations of her era, and who, by the time she died of a heart attack in 1986 at the age of fifty-one, had reshaped what a woman from the Gulf was permitted to imagine for herself.
A Daughter of the Royal Court
She was born in 1935 in Mecca, into a family close to the centre of the new Saudi state. Her father was Dr Muhammad Khashoggi, and his position could hardly have been more intimate or more influential. He served as the personal physician to King Abdulaziz Al Saud, also known as Ibn Saud, the founder of the kingdom that had been declared only three years before her birth. To be the daughter of the king’s doctor was to grow up close to power, in a household accustomed to discretion, education and a degree of cosmopolitan ease unusual for the time and place.
The Khashoggi name itself carries a clue to the family’s origins. It derives from the Turkish word for spoonmaker, a trace of Ottoman ancestry that the family never disguised. Samira Khashoggi’s father was of Turkish descent, and her mother, Samiha Ahmed, came from a Saudi family of Syrian heritage. That blend of Turkish, Syrian and Arabian influences gave the household a worldliness uncommon in the Saudi Arabia of the 1930s and 1940s, a kingdom then less than a decade old as a unified state. The same mixture of languages and references would later run through her fiction and her magazine.
She did not grow up alone. Dr Khashoggi and his wife had a large family, and the siblings who surrounded the young Samira would go on to extraordinary, in some cases notorious, lives. Among them was Adnan Khashoggi, who would become a billionaire financier and arms intermediary whose deals shadowed Cold War politics for decades. Another sister, Soheir Khashoggi, would herself become a published novelist of international reach, writing in English from a base in the United States. The family produced financiers, fixers and storytellers, and Samira Khashoggi belonged firmly to the storytelling line.
After the Second World War, Dr Khashoggi made a decision that would prove formative for all of his children. He sent them to be educated in Egypt, then the cultural and intellectual capital of the Arab world. Alexandria, the cosmopolitan Mediterranean city of poets, merchants and exiles, became the place where Samira Khashoggi came of age. She was educated there, reportedly at an English-language school for girls, and later associated with university study in the city. Cairo and Alexandria in the mid-twentieth century were alive with cinema, journalism, theatre and a flourishing literary scene. For a curious girl from Mecca, it was an education in far more than the classroom subjects.
Alexandria, Mohamed Al-Fayed and the Birth of Dodi
It was in Alexandria, on the beach, that the most famous chapter of her early life began. Through her brother Adnan, Samira Khashoggi was introduced to a young, ambitious Egyptian named Mohamed Al-Fayed. He was then a man of modest origins, the son of a schoolteacher, who was working in the orbit of the wealthy Khashoggi family. The attraction was real, and in 1954, the two married.
The union was brief. By most accounts, it lasted around two years and produced a single child. On 15 April 1955, in Alexandria, Samira Khashoggi gave birth to a son, registered as Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Mena’em Fayed, the boy the world would come to know as Dodi Fayed. The marriage dissolved not long after his birth. Mohamed Al-Fayed retained custody of the child and went on to build the business empire that would eventually include Harrods, the Hôtel Ritz Paris and Fulham Football Club. He later added the “Al” to his surname, married the Finnish model Heini Wathén, and raised a larger second family.
Yet the bond between mother and son was never severed by the divorce. Friends of Dodi would later describe a devotion that bordered on the unconditional. He telephoned his mother almost every day, wherever in the world he happened to be, often speaking with her for an hour at a stretch. One acquaintance recalled that no matter how glamorous the company he was keeping, Dodi would set everything aside the moment his mother called. The same friend suggested that it was thanks to Samira Khashoggi that her son grew into a man unusually attuned to women, sensitive and attentive in a way that defined his later relationships. It is a touching detail, and one that quietly reframes a man more often remembered for his Playboy reputation than for his interior life.
After the separation, Samira Khashoggi returned to Saudi Arabia, and in time she married again. Her second husband was Anas Yassin, a former Saudi ambassador, and with him she moved for a period to Beirut, then the publishing and cultural capital of the Arab Middle East and a natural home for a writer with her ambitions. The marriage gave her a second child, a daughter named Jumana Yassin. That detail matters more than it might first appear, because Jumana would grow up to inherit and lead the most enduring institution her mother created. The family’s literary and editorial life passed, mother to daughter, across the generations.
The Writer Who Hid Behind a Pen Name
The romance and the famous surnames are the easy parts of the story. The harder, more interesting truth is that Samira Khashoggi was a serious writer at a time when the very idea of a Saudi woman publishing fiction was close to unthinkable. The kingdom in the 1950s offered women almost no public platform. Formal state education for girls had barely begun. A woman who wished to speak to the world through literature did so against a powerful current of social expectation.
Her answer was a pseudonym. Samira Khashoggi wrote under the name “Samirah, Daughter of the Arabian Peninsula,” a phrase that managed to be both a veil and a declaration. The pen name shielded her from the scrutiny that a prominent family’s daughter would otherwise have attracted, while at the same time announcing exactly where she came from and on whose behalf she presumed to speak. There is something defiant in that choice. She did not pretend to be European, or male, or anonymous. She claimed the whole peninsula as her vantage point.
In 1958, she published her debut, Wadda’t Amali, usually translated as Farewell to My Dreams or Farewell to My Hopes. It is widely regarded as the first novel ever written by a Saudi woman, appearing more than a decade before other Saudi women would follow her into print. Saudi fiction as a whole was then in its infancy, dominated almost entirely by male voices, and no woman in the kingdom had published a novel narrating female longing, disappointment and inner life. Samira Khashoggi did it first.
The novels that followed deepened the project. Thekrayat Dam’ah, or Tearful Memories, appeared in 1963. Wara’ al-Dabab, Beyond the Clouds, came around the turn of the 1970s. Qatrat min ad-Dumu’, translated as Teardrops, was published in 1979. And there was Bariq Aynaik, The Sparkle of Your Eyes, perhaps the best known of all. Across these books, a consistent preoccupation emerges. Samira Khashoggi wrote about the emotional interiors of women, about dreams that collided with social constraint, about love and memory and the quiet negotiations that women conducted within conservative structures. The titles alone, drenched in tears, clouds and fading light, signal a romantic and introspective sensibility, but beneath the melodrama ran a steadier current of social observation.
These were not obscure literary curiosities read by a handful of intellectuals. They reached a wide Arab readership, and one of them crossed into another medium entirely. Bariq Aynaik was adapted into a feature film in 1982, with the celebrated Egyptian actor Nour El Sherif among the cast. Saudi women’s novels did not generally become Egyptian films in the early 1980s; hers did. The girl who had read European novels on the beaches of Alexandria had become an author whose own characters walked onto the screen.
What is easy to miss, from the comfortable distance of the present, is the sheer scarcity of what Samira Khashoggi was attempting. The Arabic literary canon of the mid-twentieth century was overwhelmingly the work of men, and the Gulf in particular had produced little prose fiction of any kind, let alone by women. A female author who wrote candidly about romantic disappointment, about the gap between a woman’s hopes and the life arranged for her, was venturing into territory that carried real social risk. The romantic register of her novels, all those teardrops and clouds and shining eyes, has sometimes led casual readers to dismiss the work as sentimental. That reading misses the point. Sentiment was the permissible language of the time, and Samira Khashoggi used it as a vessel for something more pointed, smuggling observations about women’s confinement and longing inside stories that could pass as love stories. The melodrama was, in part, a strategy, much as the pen name was.
Her fiction also belonged to a particular moment of Arab cultural confidence, the decades when Cairo’s printing presses, Beirut’s publishing houses and the region’s burgeoning cinema created a shared cultural marketplace stretching from Morocco to the Gulf. Samira Khashoggi was perfectly placed to move within that world. Her education in Egypt had given her the literary Arabic and the cosmopolitan reference points to write for readers far beyond Saudi Arabia, and her family’s standing gave her the means and the confidence to publish. She was not a provincial voice that happened to travel. She wrote, from the beginning, for the entire Arabic-reading world, and that ambition is stamped on everything from her chosen pen name to the pan-Arab reach of the magazine she would later found.
Al Sharkiah and the First Female Publisher
If the novels established Samira Khashoggi as a writer, it was a magazine that established her as an institution. In 1972, she founded Al Sharkiah, a publication whose name is often rendered in English as a reference to the oriental, or Eastern, woman. It was conceived as a monthly magazine for women, addressing fashion, culture and the questions that mattered to Arab women, written largely from their own perspective. In doing so, Samira Khashoggi became the first Saudi female publisher and columnist, a distinction that no amount of family wealth could have manufactured. She had to build it.
Al Sharkiah was, in its way, a radical proposition. A magazine by and for women, edited by a woman, published in an era when women’s public voices were heavily circumscribed, was an act of cultural engineering as much as commerce. Its pages mixed fashion, beauty and social life with reporting and commentary on the questions facing Arab women, presented from their own point of view rather than an imported one. The magazine grew into one of the leading pan-Arab women’s titles, circulating well beyond the borders of Saudi Arabia and shaping conversations about womanhood, taste and modern life across the region. It gave Arab women a mirror that reflected them, and it gave Samira Khashoggi a permanent platform from which to influence the culture she had spent her life observing.
Al Sharkiah outlasted its founder. After Samira Khashoggi died, the title passed to her daughter, Jumana Yassin, who took up the role of editor-in-chief and has carried the publication forward to the present day. More than half a century after its launch, Al Sharkiah remains a living concern, still speaking to Arab women, still bearing the imprint of the woman who imagined it. Few publishers of either sex can claim a legacy that outlasts them by generations and passes, intact, to their own children.
When Samira Khashoggi launched Al Sharkiah, there was no Saudi publishing industry that employed women for her to join. She was the first to prove a Saudi woman could own, edit and sustain a serious commercial publication. Every Saudi woman who has since launched a magazine or written a column under her own name followed a path she cut first.
Al Nahda and the Cause of Saudi Women
Her ambitions were not confined to the printed page. In the early 1960s, Samira Khashoggi turned her energy toward the practical advancement of Saudi women, lending herself to one of the most important social initiatives in the kingdom’s modern history.
In 1962, in Riyadh, a group of pioneering women established what would become the Al Nahda Philanthropic Society for Women. The name Al Nahda means “the awakening,” and the choice of word was deliberate. The society was founded under the patronage of Queen Effat al-Thunayan, the influential wife of the future King Faisal and a quiet force behind the expansion of girls’ education in Saudi Arabia. It was spearheaded by Princess Sara Al-Faisal, with a small circle of founding women around her, and Samira Khashoggi was among that pioneering group. Al Nahda holds the distinction of being one of the very first organisations in Saudi Arabia dedicated to women, created to empower them socially and economically at a moment when such an idea was novel and, in some quarters, controversial.
Samira Khashoggi was, by every account, a committed supporter of the education of girls, a cause that in the Saudi Arabia of the early 1960s was far from settled. The first state schools for girls opened only in 1960, under royal decree, and in some towns the move met open protest, with families and clerics resisting the idea that girls should be formally schooled at all. To stand publicly for the proposition that girls should be educated, and to put one’s name and effort behind an institution built to advance women, carried weight for a woman of her standing. She did it alongside her literary work, not instead of it, treating the page and the public sphere as two fronts of the same effort.
The society she helped found has had a remarkable afterlife. Al Nahda continued to expand its development projects across the decades, and in 2019, it was formally accredited by the United Nations Economic and Social Council. In 2020, it was chosen to chair the Women 20 engagement group ahead of the G20 summit hosted by Saudi Arabia, an extraordinary international role for an organisation born from the volunteer efforts of a handful of women in 1962. When that society addresses the world today, it carries forward an awakening that Samira Khashoggi was present at the beginning of.
A Family of Legends and Notoriety
No account of Samira Khashoggi is complete without the relatives whose fame, fortune and fate have so often eclipsed her own. Muhammad Khashoggi and his wife, Samiha Ahmed, raised six children together, among them Adnan, Samira, Soheir and the brothers Essam, Ahmad and Adil. The Khashoggi family became one of the most written-about in the modern Arab world, and Samira sat near its centre.
Her brother Adnan Khashoggi became, for a period, a byword for excess and intrigue. As an arms intermediary and financier, he brokered deals between Western manufacturers and Middle Eastern governments, accumulated a fortune once estimated in the billions, and lived a life of yachts, private jets and properties that made headlines for decades. He was entangled in some of the era’s most significant financial and political affairs, his name surfacing in the Lockheed bribery investigations of the 1970s and later in the Iran-Contra scandal that shook the Reagan administration. He is the brother most people picture at the sound of the surname, and his fame has tended to crowd out hers.
Her sister Soheir Khashoggi took the family’s literary gene in a different direction, writing novels in English, among them Mosaic, Mirage and Nadia’s Song, that explored the lives and resilience of women in Saudi society for an international audience. The two sisters represent, in a sense, two routes for the Arab woman writer of the twentieth century. One wrote in Arabic for the Arab world and built an institution at home. The other wrote in English for readers abroad. Both insisted that women’s inner lives were worthy of serious fiction.
The generation that followed produced figures of equal renown. Samira Khashoggi was the aunt of Nabila Khashoggi, the actress and film producer, and the aunt of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist and commentator whose killing in 2018 became one of the most consequential international incidents of the decade. Through her, the bloodlines connect in unexpected ways. Her son Dodi Fayed and her nephew Jamal Khashoggi were first cousins, two men from the same family whose deaths, two decades apart and in entirely different circumstances, each became the subject of global headlines and lingering questions.
The Devoted Son and the Princess
The thread of Samira Khashoggi’s life that the wider public knows best runs, inevitably, through her son. Dodi Fayed grew into a charming, restless figure who moved between the worlds of film and high society. He was educated partly in Europe, attended the Sandhurst military academy in England, and eventually established himself as a film producer. His credits included the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire, along with films such as Breaking Glass, the F/X pictures and a later adaptation of The Scarlet Letter. He lived lavishly, supported by a substantial allowance from his father, and his name was linked over the years to a long roster of glamorous companions.
Through all of it, his mother remained his anchor. The daily telephone calls continued, and the sensitivity that friends attributed to her influence shaped the man he became. She did not live to see the relationship that turned him into a fixture of twentieth-century history.
Samira Khashoggi died in March 1986. The cause was a heart attack, and she was just fifty-one years old. She did not witness what came eleven years later. In the summer of 1997, her son began a romance with Diana, Princess of Wales, that consumed the world’s tabloids. The couple were photographed across the Mediterranean, pursued relentlessly by paparazzi. On 31 August 1997, Dodi Fayed and Diana died together in a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. He was forty-two.
The grief that followed belonged to the world, and to Dodi’s father, who spent the rest of his life convinced of conspiracies surrounding the crash. Samira Khashoggi was not among the mourners. She had raised the boy at the heart of that tragedy, had spoken to him almost every day of his adult life, and had shaped the temperament that drew him to a grieving, embattled princess. The most famous chapter of her son’s life unfolded eleven years after her own death.
The Name in the Modern Imagination
There is an irony in the way the Khashoggi name now circulates in popular culture. For much of the world, it arrived through entertainment rather than literature. When the fifth season of The Crown dramatised the life of Mohamed Al-Fayed and his fascination with the British establishment, Samira Khashoggi appeared on screen as a supporting character, portrayed by the actress Chayma Abdelkarimi, a brief presence in a story centred on the men around her. Millions of viewers met her name for the first time in that context, framed once again as the wealthy first wife and the mother of the man who would one day meet a princess.
Around the same time, the surname carried a far graver weight in the news. The killing of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 thrust the family into headlines of a wholly different order, and obituaries and investigations alike reached back into the family tree to explain who he was and where he came from. In those genealogies, Samira Khashoggi surfaces as the aunt, the novelist sister of the famous arms dealer, the mother of Dodi. The family name had become, by turns, a symbol of Cold War excess, of celebrity tragedy, and of the dangers faced by journalists who challenge power.
It is a strange inheritance for a woman who spent her life with words. The Khashoggi name became globally famous for arms deals, for a fatal car crash and for a political killing, three stories of men and money and violence. And yet the quiet, durable achievement attached to that surname, the one that has improved more lives and lasted longer than any arms contract, belongs to Samira Khashoggi. She turned the family name into a byline, a masthead and a charitable banner. While her relatives made the name notorious, she made it generative. The magazine still on the shelves and the society still doing its work are her answer to a legacy otherwise dominated by spectacle.
Death and Legacy
When Samira Khashoggi died in 1986, the obituaries in the English-speaking press tended to define her by her connections. She was the sister of Adnan, the former wife of Mohamed Al-Fayed, and the mother of Dodi. The framing missed the substance of a career that had rewritten the possibilities for women in her part of the world.
She wrote the first novel by a Saudi woman. She became the first Saudi woman to own and edit a magazine, one that has outlived her by more than four decades and now runs under her daughter. She was among the founders of the first organisation for Saudi women, a body since accredited by the United Nations and chosen to chair a G20 engagement group. She backed the education of girls while that was still contested. She did it from inside a society that gave women almost no public platform, using a pen name where discretion served her and her own name where it counted.
Her life reads differently after a decade of rapid change in Saudi Arabia, where women have gained new rights and new public roles. Officials describe that change with the language of awakening, al nahda, the same word that named the society Samira Khashoggi helped establish more than sixty years earlier. She had argued for the education and empowerment of Saudi women when it took real nerve and brought none of the institutional backing later generations would have.
The literary world has started to give her the credit. Scholarship on the Saudi woman’s novel now treats Wadda’t Amali as a foundational text, the first point in a tradition that critics trace forward from there. That standing rests on the work, not on a famous son or a billionaire brother.
The institution closest to her stayed in the family. Al Sharkiah still publishes under Jumana Yassin, the daughter that Samira Khashoggi raised, carrying her mother’s editorial line into a Saudi Arabia her mother would barely recognise. One determined woman, working in conditions that offered her little, built something that has lasted.
It is easy to keep a woman like this in the supporting cast of the men around her, and most accounts have. Her brother brokered weapons. Her first husband bought Harrods. Her son loved a princess. Samira Khashoggi wrote the first Saudi woman’s novel, ran the first magazine a Saudi woman ever owned, and helped open the first door for women’s organising in the kingdom. Set the careers side by side, and hers is the one whose results are still in print and still doing work.
What to know about Samira Khashoggi
Who was Samira Khashoggi?
Samira Khashoggi was a Saudi Arabian novelist, publisher and philanthropist, born in Mecca in 1935. She is widely credited as the author of the first novel written by a Saudi woman, and she founded Al Sharkiah, becoming the first Saudi female magazine publisher. She was also the mother of Dodi Fayed and the sister of the financier Adnan Khashoggi.
What was Samira Khashoggi’s first novel?
Her debut novel, Wadda’t Amali, translated as Farewell to My Dreams or Farewell to My Hopes, was published in 1958. It is regarded by scholars as the first novel ever written by a Saudi woman, predating other female-authored Saudi fiction by more than a decade.
Why did Samira Khashoggi use a pen name?
She wrote under the pseudonym “Samirah, Daughter of the Arabian Peninsula.” The pen name allowed her to publish fiction at a time when it was unusual and socially fraught for a Saudi woman, and especially one from a prominent family, to appear publicly as an author. The chosen name also asserted her identity as a voice of the whole region.
How was Samira Khashoggi related to Dodi Fayed?
Samira Khashoggi was Dodi Fayed’s mother. She married the Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed in 1954, and their son Dodi was born in 1955. The marriage lasted around two years. Dodi remained devoted to his mother throughout his life and reportedly spoke with her almost every day.
What is Samira Khashoggi’s connection to Jamal Khashoggi?
Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist killed in 2018, was Samira Khashoggi’s nephew. This also made Jamal a first cousin of her son, Dodi Fayed. Samira had died in 1986, long before her nephew’s death.
What magazine did Samira Khashoggi found?
In 1972, she founded Al Sharkiah, a monthly magazine for Arab women covering fashion, culture and women’s issues. It grew into one of the leading pan-Arab women’s titles and continues to publish today under the editorship of her daughter, Jumana Yassin.
When and how did Samira Khashoggi die?
Samira Khashoggi died in March 1986 of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one. She did not live to see her son Dodi’s relationship with Diana, Princess of Wales, or their deaths in Paris in 1997.
