Umm Kulthum and Fairuz

An essay on my introduction to Arab music in the context of current events

I started listening to Arab music when I read the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz a few years ago. The series is about the family of a wealthy patriarch Ahmed Abd-al-Jawad and begins during the Egyptian revolution against the British after World War One. It ends three generations later close to the end of World War Two and each book in the trilogy is named after a street in Cairo with the focus of the story shifting with al-Jawad’s children as they get married and move out to create new homes. I now feel like I have a long-distance relationship with Cairo, a city I long to visit to relive the book’s neighbourhoods and coffee shops. I want to visit the Al-Gamaliya neighbourhood and Al-Husayn Mosque, the two nerve centres of the story. At the pyramids, I will remember Kamal, Aisha, Huseyn, Budur and their conversations. I will visit the houseboats along the Nile where the patriarch, known to his friends as Al-Sayyid, visited his favourite courtesans to drink and listen to their music.

I wanted to get a sense of this music which is an important theme in the story. Searching for contemporary Egyptian music was not very helpful since it led to Amr-Diab, who, while being an outstanding musician, is not who Al-Sayyid was listening to in the early part of the last century. The trilogy mentions few historical characters but one of them who makes an appearance in the second half is Umm Kulthum (pronounced Kulsoom), who Mahfouz mentions as a new singer people were listening to at the time. She is the only musician he names. While Mahfouz doesn’t dwell on her, I got the sense that he had to mention her, as though he was almost forced into giving her a nod and watch her pass as his characters developed in the Egypt of that time. So I looked her up and that’s how I began listening to Arab music because Umm Kulthum - with titles like ‘Egypt’s Fourth Pyramid’ and ‘Star of the Orient’ – is also ‘The Voice of Egypt’.

Umm Kulthum in the 1950s

Listening to black and white videos of her most popular songs like Enta Omri (You are my life) on YouTube that were recorded when she was in her late sixties, I found a deep and powerful voice, the kind that wouldn’t belong to a commercially successful female singer in India. I discovered high-quality versions of her most popular songs by the National Arab Orchestra which were performed by Mai Farouk, another Egyptian singer with a deep voice. I loved the festive spirit of the Arab Orchestra, different from the respectful silences maintained in European ones. Since they were Umm Kulthum’s songs, the audience knew the lyrics and they were encouraged to clap, shout (yalla!) and sing along. On these videos, I depended on the YouTube comments section to learn and found that for many across the Arab world, her songs are linked to memories of their parents and grandparents, people like the characters in the Cairo Trilogy. Mahfouz had to take her name. Her funeral is considered the largest gathering of Egyptians ever.

By the time she died in the 70s, a young singer - who grew up listening to Umm Kulthum - had established herself as a star. According to the Arab folk I read on YouTube’s comment sections, if Umm Kulthum is one pole of Arab music, then Nouhad Wadie Haddad, known to the world as Fairuz, is the other. For decades now, music lovers across the Arab world have begun their mornings with coffee and Fairuz’s voice on the radio. Fairuz in the morning and Umm Kulthum in the evening is a day well spent, they say. Fairuz’s music had more western influences and her songs were shorter than Kulthum’s sometimes thirty minute long epics. If Umm Kulthum was the ‘Voice of Egypt’, then Fairuz is the ‘Voice of Lebanon’; to Kulthum’s ‘Star of the Orient’, Fairuz could raise ‘The Nightingale of the East’. Both women refused to share personal details and made few public appearances outside their concerts. But while Kulthum was more open about her proximity to Egyptian leaders like Nasser, Fairuz could not afford to be seen as political. Given her diverse country and its fractured politics, Fairuz has never expressed a political opinion or performed for any leader.

Fairuz in the 1970s

But unlike Kulthum who sang about love and desire, Fairuz’s music was influenced by political events. In 1982, Israel had invaded Lebanon for the second time to attack the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) that had operated from there since Palestinians were displaced from their homes during the Nakba in 1948 and the six-day-war in 1967. They were refused the right to return to their homeland and this demographic change is one of the reasons that led to the Lebanese Civil War. Israelis had taken sides in the Civil War and supported the Christian militia. As a Christian herself, Fairuz was expected to side with her faction but she stayed neutral in the context of her country and sang for the Palestinian cause. When Israel laid siege to her city and bombed it, many Lebanese people fled the country, but Fairuz stayed on. Instead, in her haunting voice, she sang her most famous song. Like many people who listen to Fairuz for the first time, I was recommended ‘Li Beirut’ (To Beirut). It was a song set to a Spanish tune and was released in 1984. In it, Fairuz and Beirut are women who comfort each other with hugs and kisses in the face of the masculine war and bombing. For many Lebanese people, the song is also a lament for what the city was and could have been.

Forty years later, the 89-year-old Fairuz must have a sense of déjà vu as she hears blasts and screams in her city again. History must be that bad poem which rhymes too much. In 1982, during Israel’s second invasion, she was able to create her own song in response to history’s bad poem. In 2024, she may be beyond it, adding to her helplessness.

But helplessness that grows over the years can become radical. A few years after another Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006, Fairuz’s son Ziad - one of the writers of Li Beirut - revealed in an interview that his mother admired ‘the master of resistance’, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, whose party was founded in response to Israel’s attack when Li Beirut was released. In a country where the soul of Lebanon is meant to be above factions, all hell broke loose with the foremost leaders and commentators weighing in, some of them asking Ziad not to drag his revered mother into the political landscape. Fairuz stayed silent.

In the ongoing series of bombings on Lebanon and Beirut, Nasrallah has joined thousands of other Lebanese in death and I wonder what this bout of helplessness will do to the politics of Fairuz. How much more has been added to what she will leave unsaid?

PS: I recently discovered another Lebanese-Christian singer Abeer Nehme and wanted to share her incredible voice and range with you. Here she sings a 700 year old song with the National Arab Orchestra.