Şehzade Mahmud Namık

Şehzade Mahmud Namık ( ota, شهزاده محمود نامك ;23 December 1913 – 13 November 1963) was an Ottoman prince, the only son of Şehzade Ömer Hilmi, and his second wife Gülnev Hanım. He was the grandson of Sultan Mehmed V Reşad and Mihrengiz Kadın.

Mahmud Namık was an active member of the "Zohriya Set", a group of exiled members of the Ottoman dynasty who lived in the Cairo suburb of Maadi along with members of the Egyptian Royal family and their entourage. Mahmud Namık was implicated in the "Restoration Plot" to overthrow Gamal Abdel Nasser and replace him on the restored throne with Prince Muhammad Abdel Moneim. His trial and subsequent imprisonment made headlines around the world.

Birth and early childhood

Şehzade Mahmud Namık was born on 23 December 1913 in Dolmabahçe Palace. His father was Şehzade Ömer Hilmi, son of Sultan Mehmed V and Mihrengiz Kadın and his mother was Gülnev Hanım.

He lived there until the death of his grandfather, Sultan Mehmed V, just before the end of World War I on 4 July 1918. He then moved with his family to a Konak (residence) at Nişantaşı for the winter months and to one in Bağlarbaşı, above Beylerbeyi, for the summer.

Exile

In March 1924, at the age of 10, Prince Mahmud Namık was sent into exile along with the entire Imperial Ottoman family, following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey and the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate and the Ottoman Caliphate. Prince Mahmud Namık never returned to Turkey, since he died before the decree of exile was lifted in 1974. He was initially sent to boarding school in Lebanon, but then soon came to live with his family in Nice, France once they had settled there to be close to the former Ottoman Sultan Mehmed VI, who had rented a villa in San Remo, and to their cousin, the last Caliph of Islam Abdülmecid II, who lived in Nice. In 1934 he moved to Alexandria, Egypt with his father Ömer Hilmi and grandmother, and was later joined in January by his sister, Emine Mükbile, and his brother-in-law, Ali Vâsib.

Personal life

Namık's only wife was Şehrazad Hanım. She was the daughter of Ismail Ratib Bey, and his wife Princess Emine Bihruz, daughter of Prince Ibrahim Rashid Fazil Pasha, of Egypt. She was born in 1922. They married in 1939. On 4 June 1941, she gave birth to Şehzade Ömer Abdülmecid in Alexandria. By the early 1940s, he kept an apartment with his wife in Maadi, a suburb of Cairo. They divorced in 1947. She died in 1993.

Career

Prince Mahmud Namik worked until the end of World War II for the Alexandria tramline company. In the late 1940s he established himself as a businessman and settled in Geneva, Switzerland where he developed his business interests in places as far apart as Pakistan and the USA.

Arrest, trial and imprisonment

Namık was accused of involvement in a plot to bring down the military regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser in favour of the one time Regent Muhammad Abdel Moneim or his son. The Plot to topple Nasser had been ongoing since before the Suez Crisis of 1956 and was supported at various times by the British M16 and the French.

Tried in absentia on charges of plotting to place a Mohammed-Ali/Osmanoglou descendant on Egypt's throne, Prince Namik was sentenced to 15 years in jail on 29 April 1958. Luckily for him he was in Europe at the time.

In 1958 he was asked to help negotiate the marriage of his cousin Princess Sabiha Fazila Hanimsultan, the only daughter of Prince Muhammad Ali Ibrahim of Egypt and Princess Zehra Hanzade Sultan, to King Faisal II of Iraq. The engagement was ended by the murder of King Faisal II, following a military coup on 14 July 1958.

For his utter misfortune Prince Namik was in Iraq on 14 July 1958 when a bloody revolution broke out in that country. Mending fences with its republican neighbors, the new military junta offered the captured prince to a pitiless Nasser in exchange for improved relations with Egypt. Namik was thus flown to Cairo on 31 August 1958 to face retrial receiving a 15-year jail sentence in Tora Prison.

Death

Mahmud died at the age of fourty-nine from a stroke, at Cairo, Egypt on 13 November 1963. The funeral took place in the garden of the prison, and was attended by relatives and few Turkish citizens living in Cairo. He was buried in the private tomb of his former wife, Şehrazad Hanım. In 1977, he was reburied in the mausoleum of Sultan Mahmud II in Istanbul.

Ancestry

References

Bibliography

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External links

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Family Tree
descendants of Sultan Mahmud II. Retrieved 2011-02-28.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mahmud Namik Osmanoglu
1913 births
People from Istanbul
Ottoman princes
1963 deaths