Egypt's iconic voice remembered - Culture - Al-Ahram Weekly
On 5 February 1975, Egypt bid farewell to its greatest singer: Um Kolthoum. The funeral of the woman whose voice and songs has mesmerised Arab listeners all over the world for decades was on a suitably grand scale and compared with that of former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser a few years before.
Today, five decades after her death, Um Kolthoum is still an uncontested voice on the Arab airwaves. Her songs, which sold in the millions on record and cassette in her lifetime, are now viewed in the millions on YouTube or downloaded from online applications. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of the nation's most legendary singer, various events are underway. Among the publications that have appeared is Um Kolthoum: Min Al-Milad ila Al-Ostoura (Um Kolthoum: A Legend is Born) by Egyptian writer Hassan Abdel-Mawgoud and published by Diwan Books in Cairo.
The first edition of the book was available at the Cairo International Book Fair that opened on 23 January and closed on 5 February, with several other publishers also offering titles, old and new and both fiction and non-fiction, to remember Um Kolthoum. Abdel-Mawgoud's book stands out for the literary style he has used to retell what by now is a familiar story.
The woman who became Um Kolthoum was born, most likely hours before the end of 1898, in a poor village to a mother who had wished to give her husband a second son to join him in singing the praise of the Prophet Mohamed and reciting Quranic verses at religious events. Instead of a son, however, she gave birth to a daughter and one whose incredible voice took her to the top of the world, becoming the Arab world's most-famous singer whose performances were requested by millions of fans and also by top Arab leaders.
Aware of the difficulty of finding new information about the life and works of Um Kolthoum, whose story and music have been visited and revisited many times by researchers and writers, including those who knew her personally, Abdel-Mawgoud has used all the literary techniques at his disposal to make the story fresh for his Egyptian and Arab audience. The book is written in 50 short parts, glimpses of the life of Um Kolthoum, with each capturing a particular moment of her life and success in something like chronological order.
Each of these parts is based on a true story and for the most part comes with quotations from interviews either with Um Kolthoum herself or with artists who knew and worked with her. Some elements may be fictional, but all of them preserve the atmosphere and special character of the first half of the 20th century in Egypt. Each can be read independently, and each is coupled with a photograph from the archives of leading Egyptian newspapers such as Akhbar Al-Youm, Al-Ahram, and Dar Al-Hilal or from the personal archives of photographer Farouk Ibrahim who took many of her pictures.
None of the pictures has a direct association with the story it is coupled with. And none of the stories has any specific date. As a result, the book makes up a series of glimpses of Um Kolthoum, a technique perhaps designed by its author and publisher to spare the volume from being perceived as research-based, unlike author Karim Gamal's Um Kolthoum Wal-Maghoud al-Harbi (Um Kolthoum Supports the Army) published by Tanmia in 2023.
This was a great success and went into many editions, being praised on the basis of its diligent and thorough archival research.
Like many of the other titles published on Um Kolthoum since she passed away on 3 February 1975 at the Military Hospital in Maadi at the age of 75, Abdel-Mawgoud draws a picture of a conservative and highly ambitious woman who managed to overcome the obstacles that she might have faced because of her female sex and to capitalise on her remarkable voice and equally remarkable hard work to become Egypt's uncontested top singer.
She worked with some of the top writers, composers, and musicians of her time, almost from the time she started singing in the mid-1920s, and Abdel-Mawgoud's book re-tells some of the most famous anecdotes that relate to her career, including the passion that her closest co-workers, poet Ahmed Rami and musician Mohamed Al-Kasabgi, had for her. It also recalls her hallmark rituals in preparing for her recitals, managing her rehearsals, and communicating with dedicated fans who would travel across the country to attend her performances.
However, unlike other volumes that perhaps idolise Um Kolthoum, Abdel-Mawgoud does not shy away from showing her as a possessive and uncompromising woman who tried to monopolise the talent of some of the musicians who worked with her and who was willing to enter into tough disputes with her co-workers over financial issues. She could be relentlessly competitive, and she was never comfortable with the idea of anyone else coming near the level she had reached, not only in terms of the quality of her art and the size of her popularity, but also in terms of the status she had with the then political regime.
Abdel-Mawgoud does not sentimentalise Um Kolthoum's cooperation with up-and-coming composers and musicians, but shows it for what it must have been: the pursuit of continuous efforts to innovate in her art. He examines some of the by-ways of the Um Kolthoum phenomenon including her admiration for actress Madiha Yousri and belly dancer Tahia Karioka, her encounter with Coco Chanel in Paris, her expensive tastes that were reflected in her wardrobe and her jewelry, and her unfulfilled wish for motherhood.
There is also the famous story of the awkward relationship that Um Kolthoum had with Mounira Al-Mahdia, who controlled the world of Egyptian music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries prior to her rise. It reminds readers of the admiring letter that Al-Mahdia sent Um Kolthoum in 1964 following the astounding success of her song Enta Omri (You are my Life), her first cooperation with top composer Mohamed Abdel-Wahab.
The book reflects on Um Kolthoum's jealousy of Nour Al-Hoda, a singer of Lebanese origin, and her anger at what she saw as attempts by young singer Nagat Al-Saghira at imitating her style. However, it is cautious about Um Kolthoum's famous anxieties about the competition represented by singer Asmahan, whose golden voice attracted many of the composers that Um Kolthoum wanted to monopolise and who died in a mysterious car accident in 1944 after having released only a few songs, most of them composed by her brother Farid Al-Atrash, who never worked with Um Kolthoum, and Mohamed Al-Kasabgi who was always under the spell of Um Kolthoum and Abdel-Wahab.
Her issues with Abdel-Halim Hafez, Egypt's top male singer in the 1950s to the 1970s, are also not included in Abdel-Mawgoud's book. It does not say much about the marriage of Um Kolthoum to Hassan Al-Hefnawi, a source of gossip at the time. Instead, it presents Al-Hefnawi, counter-intuitively, to have had the upper hand in the relationship.
Overall, Abdel-Mawgoud's book shows Um Kolthoum to have been a woman with her own fair share of insecurities, even if he does not put this in so many words. Her unmatched success failed to make her immune against a desire for ever more praise both for her work and for her looks.
She was a human being with a voice from heaven, the author says, not an angel somehow walking on earth. She was a real woman and not just the mythical Kawkab Al-Sharq (star of the east), as she was dubbed by a fan from Haifa during one of her performances in Palestine prior to the Nakba of 1948.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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