Umm Kulthum

Umm Kulthum (Arabic: أم كلثوم; 31 December 1898 – 3 February 1975) was an Egyptian singer, songwriter, and film actress active from the 1920s to the 1970s. She was given the honorific title Kawkab el-Sharq (Arabic: كوكب الشرق, lit. 'Planet of the East'). Immensely popular throughout the Middle East and beyond, Kulthum is a national icon in her native Egypt; she has been dubbed "The Voice of Egypt" and "Egypt's Fourth Pyramid". In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Kulthum at number 61 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.
Her funeral in 1975 drew a crowd of over 4 million people, the largest human gathering in Egypt's history, even surpassing that of president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Umm Kulthum was born in the village of Tamay El Zahayra within the markaz of Senbellawein, Dakahlia Governorate, to a family of a religious background. Her father, Ibrahim El-Sayyid El-Beltagi, was a rural imam, while her mother, Fatmah El-Maleegi, was a housewife. She learned how to sing by listening to her father teach her older brother, Khalid. From a young age, she showed exceptional singing talent. Through her father, she learned to recite the Qur'an, and she reportedly memorized the entire book.
Her grandfather was also a well-known reader of the Qur'an and she remembered how the villagers used to listen to him when he recited the Qur'an. When she was 12 years old, having noticed her strength in singing, her father asked her to join the family ensemble. She subsequently joined as a supporting voice, initially just repeating what the others sang. On stage, she wore a boy's cloak and bedouin head covering in order to alleviate her father's anxiety about her reputation and public performance. At the age of 16, she was noticed by Mohamed Abo Al-Ela, a modestly famous singer, who taught her the old classical Arabic repertoire. A few years later, she met the famous composer and oudist Zakariyya Ahmad, who took her to Cairo. Although she made several visits to Cairo in the early 1920s, she waited until 1923 before permanently moving there. She was invited on several occasions to the home of Amin Beh Al Mahdy, who taught her to play the oud, a type of lute. She developed a close relationship with Rawheya Al-Mahdi, Amin's daughter, and became her closest friend. Umm Kulthum even attended Rawheya's daughter's wedding, although she usually preferred not to appear in public, outside of her performances.
During the early years of her career, she faced staunch competition from two prominent singers: Mounira El Mahdeya and Fatheya Ahmed, who had voices similar to hers. El Mahdeya's friend, who worked as an editor at Al-Masra, suggested several times that Umm Kulthum had married one of the guests who frequently visited her household; this affected her conservative father so much that he decided that the whole family should return to their village. He would only change his mind after being persuaded by the arguments of Amin Al Mahdi. Following this incident, Umm Kulthum made a public statement regarding visits in her household in which she announced she would no longer receive visitors. In 1923 she struck a contract with Odeon Records which by 1926 would pay her more than any other Egyptian musical artist per record.
Amin El Mahdi invited her into the cultural circles in Cairo. In 1924, she was introduced to the poet Ahmed Rami, who would later on write 137 songs for her, and would also introduce her to French literature and become her head mentor in Arabic literature and literary analysis.
In 1926, she left Odeon Records for His Master's Voice who would pay her about double per record and even an additional $10,000 salary. She also maintained a tightly managed public image, which undoubtedly added to her allure. Furthermore, she was introduced to the renowned oud virtuoso and composer Mohamed El Qasabgi, who introduced her to the Arabic Theatre Palace, where she would experience her first real public success. Other musicians who influenced her musical performances at the time were Dawwod Hosni and Abu al-Ila Muhammad [fr]. Al-Ila Muhammad instructed her in voice control, and variants of the Arabic Muwashshah.
By 1930, she was so well known to the public that she had become a role model for several young female singers. In 1932, she embarked upon a major tour of the Middle East and North Africa, performing in prominent Arab capital cities such as Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut, Rabat, Tunis, and finally Tripoli.
In 1934, Umm Kulthum sang for the inaugural broadcast of Radio Cairo, the state station. From then on onwards, she performed in a concert on the first Thursday of every month for forty years. Her influence kept growing and expanding beyond the artistic scene: the reigning royal family would request private concerts and even attend her public performances.
In 1944, King Farouk I of Egypt decorated her with the Supreme Class of the (nishan el kamal), a decoration reserved exclusively for female royalty and politicians. Despite this recognition, the royal family rigidly opposed her potential marriage to the King's uncle, a rejection that deeply wounded her pride. It led her to distance herself from the royal family and embrace grassroots causes, exemplified by her acceptance of the request of the Egyptian legion trapped in the Faluja Pocket during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, who had asked her to sing a particular song. Among the army men trapped were the figures who would lead the 1952 Egyptian revolution, prominently Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Following the revolution, the Egyptian Musicians' Union of which she became a member (and eventually president), rejected her because she had sung for the then-deposed King Farouk of Egypt. When Nasser discovered that her songs were banned from being aired on the radio, he reportedly said something to the effect of "What are they, crazy? Do you want Egypt to turn against us?" Later, Nasser would schedule his speeches so they would not interfere with the radio performances of Umm Kulthum.
Some claim that Umm Kulthum's popularity helped Nasser's political agenda. For example, Nasser's speeches and other government messages were frequently broadcast immediately after Umm Kulthum's monthly radio concerts. She sang many songs in support of Nasser, with whom she developed a close friendship. One of her songs associated with Nasser—"Wallāhi Zamān, Yā Silāḥī" ("It's Been a Long Time, O Weapon of Mine")—was adopted as the Egyptian national anthem from 1960 to 1979, when President Sadat replaced it by the less militant "Bilady, Bilady, Bilady" following peace negotiations with Israel; it remains the Egyptian anthem to this day.
Umm Kulthum was also known for her continuous contributions to works supporting the Egyptian military efforts. Until 1972, for about half a century she gave at least one monthly concert. Umm Kulthum's monthly concerts were renowned for their ability to clear the streets of some of the world's most populous cities as people rushed home to tune in.
Her songs deal mostly with the universal themes of love, longing and loss. A typical Umm Kulthum concert consisted of the performance of two or three songs over a period of three to four hours. These performances are in some ways reminiscent of the structure of Western opera, consisting of long vocal passages linked by shorter orchestral interludes. However, Umm Kulthum was not stylistically influenced by opera, and she sang solo for most of her career.
During the 1930s her repertoire took the first of several specific stylistic directions. Her songs were virtuosic, as befitted her newly trained and very capable voice, and romantic and modern in musical style, feeding the prevailing currents in Egyptian popular culture of the time. She worked extensively with texts by romance poet Ahmad Rami and composer Mohammad El-Qasabgi, whose songs incorporated European instruments such as the violoncello and double bass, as well as harmony. In 1936 she made her debut as an actress in the movie Weddad by Fritz Kramp. During her career, she would act in five more movies, of which four would be directed by Ahmad Badrakhan while Sallama and Fatma would be the most acclaimed.
Umm Kulthum's musical directions in the 1940s and early 1950s and her mature performing style led this period to become popularly known as the singer's "golden age". Keeping up with changing popular taste as well as her own artistic inclinations, in the early 1940s, she requested songs from composer Zakariya Ahmad and colloquial poet Mahmud Bayram el-Tunsi cast in styles considered to be indigenously Egyptian. This represented a dramatic departure from the modernist romantic songs of the 1930s, mainly led by Mohammad El-Qasabgi. Umm Kulthum had abstained from singing Qasabgi's music since the early 1940s. Their last stage song collaboration in 1941 was "Raq el Habib" ("The lover's heart softens"), one of her most popular, intricate, and high-calibre songs.
The reason for the separation is not clear. It is speculated that this was due in part to the popular failure of the movie Aida, in which Umm Kulthum sings mostly Qasabgi's compositions. Qasabgi was experimenting with Arabic music, influenced by classical European music, and had been composing a lot for Asmahan, a singer who immigrated to Egypt from Syria. She was Umm Kulthum's only serious competitor before her death in a car accident in 1944.
Simultaneously, Umm Kulthum started to rely heavily on a younger composer who joined her artistic team a few years earlier: Riad Al-Sunbati. While Sonbati was evidently influenced by Qasabgi in those early years, the melodic lines he composed were more lyrical and more acceptable to Umm Kulthum's audience. The result of collaborations with Rami/Sonbati and al-Tunisi/Ahmad was a populist and popular repertoire that had lasting appeal for the Egyptian audience.
In 1946, Umm Kulthum defied all odds by presenting a religious poem in classical Arabic: Salou Qalbi ["Ask My Heart"], written by Ahmad Shawqi and composed by Ryad Al Sunbati. The success was immediate and it reconnected Umm Kulthum with her early singing years. Similar poems written by Shawqi were subsequently composed by Sonbati and sung by Umm Kulthum, including Woulida el Houda ["The Prophet is Born"] 1949), in which she surprised royalists by singing a verse that describes Muhammad as "the Imam of Socialists".
At the peak of her career, in 1950, Umm Kulthum sang Sonbati's composition of excerpts of what Ahmad Rami considered the accomplishment of his career: the translation from Persian into classical Arabic of Omar Khayyám's quatrains (Rubayyiat el Khayyam). The song included quatrains that deal with both epicurianism and redemption. Ibrahim Nagi's poem "Al-Atlal" ["The Ruins"], sung by Umm Kalthum in 1966 in a personal version and with a melody composed by Sonbati, is considered one of her signature songs. As Umm Kulthum's vocal abilities had regressed considerably by then, the song can be viewed as the last example of genuine Arabic music at a time when even Umm Kulthum had started to compromise by singing Western-influenced pieces composed by her old rival Mohammed Abdel Wahab.
When Umm Kulthum sang live, the duration of each song was not fixed as she would repeat at length verses requested by the audience. Her performances usually lasted for up to five hours, during which three songs were sung. For example, the available live performances (about thirty in number) of Ya Zalemni, one of her most popular songs, varied in length from 45 to 90 minutes. Besides requests, it also depended on her creative mood for improvisations, illustrating the dynamic relationship between the singer and the audience as they fed off each other's emotional energy. One of her improvisatory techniques was to repeat a single line or stance over and over, subtly altering the emotive emphasis and intensity and exploring one or various musical modal scales (maqām) each time to bring her audiences into a euphoric and ecstatic state known in Arabic as "tarab" طرب. This was typical of old classical Arabic singing, and she executed the technique for as long as she could have; both her regressing vocal abilities with age and the increased Westernization of Arabic music became an impediment to this art. Her concerts used to broadcast from 9:30 PM on Thursday until the early morning hours on Friday. The spontaneous creativity of Umm Kulthum as a singer is most impressive when, upon listening to these many different renditions of the same song over a period of five years (1954–1959), the listener is offered a completely unique and different experience. This intense, highly personalized relationship was undoubtedly one of the reasons for Umm Kulthum's tremendous success as an artist. It is worth noting, though, that the length of a performance did not necessarily reflect either its quality or the improvisatory creativity of Umm Kulthum.
Around 1965, Umm Kulthum started collaborating with composer Mohammed Abdel Wahab. Her first song composed by Abdel Wahab was "Enta Omri" ["You Are My Life"], and later became one of her iconic songs. In 1969 it was followed by another, Asbaha al-Ana 'indi Bunduqiyyah ["I now have a rifle"]. Her songs took on a more soul-searching quality in 1967 following the defeat of Egypt during the Six-Day War. Hadeeth el Rouh ["sermon of the soul"], which is a translation of the poet Mohammad Iqbal's "Shikwa", set a very reflective tone. Generals in the audience are said to have been left in tears. Following the formation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1971, she staged several concerts upon the invitation of its first president Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan to celebrate the event. Umm Kulthum also sang for composers Mohammad El Mougi, Sayed Mekawy, and Baligh Hamdi.
Umm Kulthum died on 3 February 1975 aged 76, from kidney failure. Her funeral procession was held at the Omar Makram mosque and became a national event, with around 4 million Egyptians lining the streets to catch a glimpse as her cortège passed. Her funeral's attendance drew a greater audience than the one of the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the area where the funeral procession took place, traffic was cut off two hours ahead of the procession. The mourners would also wrest the casket from the shoulders of its bearers, force the procession to change its direction and brought her coffin to the prominent Al Azhar mosque. She was buried in a Mausoleum close to the Mausoleum of Imam al-Shafi'i in the City of the Dead in Cairo. Her death was a great tragedy for the country and also drew international media attention, as news of her death was reported by the American Times magazine and the German Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine.
Umm Kulthum is regarded as one of the greatest singers in the history of Egyptian and Arabic music, with significant influence on a number of musicians, both in the MENA and beyond. Jah Wobble has cited her as a significant influence on his work, and Bob Dylan has been quoted praising her as well. Maria Callas, Marie Laforêt, Bono, and Robert Plant, among many other artists, are also known admirers of Kulthum's music. Youssou N'Dour, a fan of hers since childhood, recorded his 2004 album Egypt with an Egyptian orchestra in homage to her legacy. One of her best-known songs, "Enta Omri", has been covered and reinterpreted numerous times. "Alf Leila wa Leila" was translated into jazz on French-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf's 2015 album Kalthoum.
In Egypt, Umm Kulthum is nicknamed "Elset" (Egyptian Arabic: الست) meaning "The Lady" in Egyptian dialect, the word "Elset" is derived from the Ancient Egyptian name Aset or Eset, the ancient name of the goddess Isis, one of the most important goddesses of ancient Egypt. The nickname is often heard in her live records when ecstatic audience shout "الله عليكي يا ست" (English: may God bless you, Lady 'Aset') or "عظمة علي عظمة يا ست" (English: "this is greatness upon greatness, Lady 'Aset') and that often happen after she ends a song or hit a high note.
She was referred to as "the Lady" by Charles de Gaulle as well and is regarded as the "Incomparable Voice" by Maria Callas. It is difficult to accurately measure her vocal range at its peak, as most of her songs were recorded live. Even today, she has retained a near-mythical status among young Egyptians and the whole of the Arabic World. In 2001, the Egyptian government opened the Kawkab al-Sharq ("Star of the East") Museum in the singer's memory. Housed in a pavilion on the grounds of Cairo's Manesterly Palace, the collection includes a range of Umm Kulthum's personal possessions, including her trademark sunglasses and scarves, along with photographs, recordings, and other archival material.
Her performances combined raw emotion and political rhetoric; she was greatly influential and spoke about politics through her music. An example of this is seen in her music performed after World War II. The theme at the surface was love, yet a deeper interpretation of the lyrics – for example in the song "Salue Qalbi" – reveals questioning of political motives in times of political tension. Umm Kulthum's political rhetoric in her music is still influential today, not only in Egypt, but in many other Middle Eastern countries and even globally. Her entire catalogue was acquired by Mazzika Group in the early 2000s.
Umm Kulthum is also notable in Baghdad due to her two visits to Iraq, the first occurring in November 1932 and the second in 1946 upon the invitation of regent Abd al-Ilah. During those two visits, the Iraqi artistic, social and political circles took an interest in Umm Kulthum, and as a result, a large number of her fans and her voice lovers opened dozens of Baghdadi coffeehouses that bore her name in different places. Today, one of those coffeehouses, named "Star of the East" is preserved on al-Rashid Street and is still associated with her.
Umm Kulthum was a contralto. Contralto singers are uncommon and sing in the lowest register of the female voice. According to some, she had the ability to sing as low as the second octave and as high as the eighth octave at her vocal peak.
Her incredible vocal strength, with the ability to produce 14,000 vibrations per second with her vocal cords, required her to stand three feet away from the microphone. She was known to be able to improvise and it was said that she would not sing a line the same way twice. She was a student of Abu al-Ila Muhammad, starting from her arrival in Cairo up until his death in 1927. He taught her to adapt her voice to the meaning and melody of a traditional Arabic aesthetic.
She is referenced at length in the lyrics of the central ballad "Omar Sharif" in the musical The Band's Visit. A pearl necklace with 1,888 pearls, which she received from Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, is exhibited at the Louvre in Abu Dhabi. Even 40 years after her death, at 10 PM on the first Thursday of each month, Egyptian radio stations broadcast only her music in her memory.
In January 2019, at the Winter in Tantora festival in Al-'Ula, a live concert was performed for the first time with her "appearing as a hologram with accompaniment by an orchestra and bedecked in flowing, full-length gowns as she had when debuting in the 1920s." Hologram concerts featuring her have been organized also by the Egyptian Minister of Culture Inas Abde-Dayem in the Cairo Opera and the Dubai Opera. A private museum was established for her in 1998.