Sheikh Imam the Singer
Authors: Booth Marilyn 
Published: October 2007

‘My mass media are the masses,’ says Egypt's most famous political singer, whose critical songs landed him in jail.

It was almost the end of the eleven-month tour which had taken Sheikh Imam Issa outside Egypt for the first time. The venerable folk singer and lutist, widely known in the Arab world and to Arab communities elsewhere as the composer and performer of critical political songs, was on a weekend visit to London before returning to Egypt in February.

The concert was a blend of old and new, the familiar tunes composed for the lyrics of Ahmad Fu'ad Najm interspersed with compositions with lyrics by other songwriters, Egyptian and North African. Najm, until recently the other half of a partnership which since 1962 has produced a wealth of songs attacking the Egyptian government and its allies, had participated in most of the tour. Muhammad Ali, the Sheikh's longtime companion who has been receiving considerable renown recently as a representational artist, was still on stage. Never before had the authorities in Cairo permitted these artists to leave al-watan, the homeland, to which the performer and the painter would shortly be returning after their travels in North Africa, Syria, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, and Europe.

Since 1967, the Imam-Najm duo had been a beacon of oppositional culture in the Arab world. While they espoused the political orientation of Nasserism, their songs exposed the contradictions between the aims and practices of the ruling group and the needs of the populace. With the advent of Sadat, the contradictions became more overt; the compositions of Imam and Najm appropriated the images, modes of expression and musical forms of the Egyptian folk heritage to pose sharp attacks on government policies, to paint vivid pictures of the growing fissures in society, and to celebrate the channels through which popular resistance to the ruling apparatus had emerged and broadened. Over the past two decades, Sheikh Imam's voice has almost come to embody the persistent vitality of the political song in Arab societies, while the attempts to silence and control that voice - and to erase the lyrics which it utters - illustrate the continuing tug-of-war between the authorities and would-be independent voices in Egypt's political arena.

Colloquial poetry, whether declaimed or sung, has long been a vehicle for political comment and opposition in Egypt. First propagated orally, then through the emergent satirical press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century nationalist movement, such poetry now benefits from the ‘cassette culture’ which avoids the official channels of cultural communication and reaches out directly, without censorship, to a large audience of Egyptians and non-Egyptian Arabs. [For ‘Unofficial cassette culture in the Middle East’, see Index 5/82. For Najm, spelt ‘Ahmed Fouad Negm’, see Index 2/1979p 50, 2/1980, 5/1981 p11]

For Sheikh Imam and the poets whose works he sets to music, the political outlook and the mode of communication are inseparable: they have rejected both the ‘elite’ literary tradition (and its linguistic mode, classical Arabic) and all media linked to ‘official’ culture.

The Sheikh's feeling for his audience and his political vision stem from his own experience of life among the poor people, rural and urban. Born in the village of Abu Numrus, near Cairo, in 1918, he lost his sight at the age of five months. Like other boys in the village, he began to attend the local kuttab, or Qur'an-school, when he was five, where he memorised the Qur'an. Moving to Cairo at the age of 13, he began to study the exacting art of Qur'an recitation. But already as a child, the secular as well as the sacred had caught his ear.