Samira Khashoggi is a name that rings famous and mysterious and glamorous in the cloisters of the high politique of the world. This woman’s real-life story can be described as a TV series or a movie since her biography is really rather interesting and shocking.
Today, we discuss the biography of this mysterious woman from her childhood to her marriage with Mohamed Al-Fayed, the future owner of Harrod.
Early Life
Samira Khashoggi is a Saudi Arabian Interior Designer that was born in 1935 in Mecca, Saudi Arabia where she was raised in a family that was part of one of the Middle East’s most powerful families. Her father’s Muhammad Khashoggi was a physician of King Abdul Aziz Al Saud the founder of the contemporary Saudi Arabia.
This relationship put the Khashoggi family in the mainstream of Saudi Arabian society and politics as early as the time of Samira. Her upbringing was also progressive for women in Saudi Arabia of this time, a testament to her family’s liberal attitude towards women’s education.
Samira grew up in KSA but she was exposed to both traditional Saudi Arabian culture and an international experience due to the family. Samira being young and a woman was beautiful, intelligent and charming from her youthful age with average height.
These qualities accompanied by her family background set her in the right course of meeting influential personalities of the international society. She was an avid traveling and very soon she became trilingual and she got an excellent outlook on the world that helped her moreover in the future.
Career
The career, which Samira Khashoggi does not possess a typical conventional one in the conventional way, is filled with diplomacy, connection making and persuasion. Instead, she was a business and political operative whose true “job” was to arrange such meetings and forge these links.
These attributes of Samira; intelligence and courteous behavior secure her a place in an international relation. It was also recognized that she was often playing the role of an unofficial diplomatic envoy by clearing the way for commercial and political business.
As such, she was able to appreciate the differences between the Western and the Middle Eastern culture hence effectively bring the two or more parties together and hold a common ground. She has also leveraging on her position and influence to sponsor projects in education and health mainly women and children’s in Middle East.
Spouse: Mohamed Al-Fayed
Samira Khashoggi’s story is perhaps most famous for her marriage to Mohamed Al-Fayed. Egyptian-born Mohamed Al-Fayed is widely known for owning one of the biggest departments stores in the world, Harrods, in London and having a relationship with the British royal family through his son Dodi with whom Princess Diana was involved at the time of the fatal accident.
Certainly, Samira and Mohamed’s wedding occurred in 1954 when Samira was still 19 years old. They are that the union joined two giant families and formed a great combination. But it proved to be a fairly short marriage and the couple was divorced in 1956.
