Father (Abdel Aziz) Timeline and Summary

•  Back
• More 

• Ahmed opens with memories of her father's extraordinary gardens at Ain Shams and with his admiration for European culture.
• She introduces the conflict between her father and Nasser over the Aswan High Dam.
• This conflict eventually destroys her father's career and health. Ahmed describes his decline at Ain Shams.
• She describes how he spends his "good" time writing and listening to the Quran. After his death, she learns that he had been writing his memoirs.
• When Ahmed leaves Egypt to attend grad school at Cambridge, her father is relieved but can't say goodbye. He knows he'll never see her again.
• Ahmed backs up and tells us something of Father's earlier life: his loss of his father, his education as a scientist, and his work on the Nile.
• He ran into trouble with King Farouk, too, and had to leave Egypt to find work.
• She also learns that while he was allowed to go to university, he wasn't allowed to study engineering.
• Ahmed tells the story of her mother and father's marriage and remarks on their happiness together. She remembers how he would tell the story of her birth over and over.
• But, when she was older, her father also let it slip that her mother had tried to end the pregnancy when she was pretty far along. She had wanted to kill Ahmed.
• Ahmed learns that her father proposed marriage to someone else first but rejected her when she tried to sneak a peek of him before the wedding.
• Her father has a bit of a showdown with her older brother, Karim, who challenges his father's dire predictions about the dam. The two eventually reconcile.
• After Ahmed returns to England for grad school, she gets one more call from her father—the last call she will ever get. He dies immediately after.