A Royal Cause

An Iraqi princess traded her royal robes for a doctor’s, and tells us why society should look to her achievements and not her titles.

- Adeline Loh

Call me Nisreen, insists Her Royal Highness Dr Nisreen El-Hashemite at the start of this interview. At one point, the 48-year-old Iraqi princess animatedly mimics a child’s voice in Arabic to show us how she speaks to her 74-year-old mother.

As she sips her coffee, she reveals her hobby of creating paintings with the coffee stains from her cup. “Each cup has my feelings,” she reflects. “If it wasn’t my own cup of coffee, I wouldn’t know how to use it to paint.”

Though she is the granddaughter of the first King of Iraq, King Faisal (I) El-Sharif Hussein, and a direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad, she has a surprising way of making you look past her titles and focus on her humanity.

“I don’t know why everyone thinks a royal princess has to wear a tiara,” she cheerily jokes to a rapt audience at the recent Crib Summit to empower female entrepreneurs.

On this occasion, the statuesque Dr Nisreen is dressed in a sleek black shirt and pants and no headscarf, the paragon of an everyday, modern woman. She adds: “One of my colleagues (at the hospital I work in) asked me, ‘Are you a real princess? You wear jeans and no makeup.’”

Dr Nisreen was born in Kuwait. After the 1958 coup in Iraq that dissolved the Hashemite monarchy, her family lived in exile, and she grew up shuttling between London and the US.