Umm Kulthum

Egyptian world music singer

• Born: December 31, 1898
• Birthplace: Tamy al-Zahayrah, Egypt
• Died: February 3, 1975
• Place of death: Cairo, Egypt

Kulthum rose from poverty in the dusty peasant village in Egypt where she was born to dazzle audiences as far away as Paris with her songs, encompassing Western popular and art music, Arab folk music, and religious music and exhibiting strong Arab and Muslim roots.

The Life

The father of Umm Kulthum (ewm KUHL-thuhm), al-Shaykh Ibrahim al-Sayyid al-Baltiji, was the devout leader of his village mosque, and her mother was a homemaker. She had a sister, Sayidda, ten years older, and a brother, Khalid, one year older. The family home was in the village of Tamy al-Zahayra near the city of al-Sinbillawayn in the delta province of Daqahliyya. At the age of five, Umm Kulthum was sent to the local Qur՚ān school, where she learned to recite Qur՚ānic Arabic with proper enunciation and to sing some of the standard religious songs based on the Prophet Muhammad’s life. Although these songs were usually sung by men, women sometimes performed them, and so when her brother was ill, Kulthum would sing in his place. Her skill soon identified her as min al-mashayikh (reared among the sheikhs).

After her debut between the ages of five and eight at the home of the village leader, Kulthum started performing at events in neighboring villages, earning the equivalent of fifty cents or more. Traveling around as a public performer meant contact with the disreputable elements of society, and it led to her attentive father’s often dressing her as a boy. By 1920 Kulthum’s fee had jumped to fifty dollars. With the encouragement of the noted singer Zakariyya Ahmad and with the patronage of one of Cairo’s prominent families, Kulthum and her family moved to Cairo sometime in the early 1920’s. She began singing in theaters at intermissions, eventually moving up from working-class neighborhoods to the music halls of the main theater district. Between 1924 and 1926 Kulthum released fourteen recordings on Odeon Records, but in 1926 she left Odeon Records to sign a contract with Gramophone Records, which paid her five hundred dollars per disc with a yearly retainer of ten thousand dollars.

Various physical ailments plagued Kulthum after 1937, and in 1946, beset with personal problems, she suffered a serious depression. Treatment at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland in 1949 was followed by marriage to Dr. Hasan al-Hafnawi in 1954 and by a close friendship with Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian prime minister. In the 1960’s, she became interested in politics, contributing more than two million dollars to the Egyptian government and earning the resentment of those who saw her as too conservative. Further health problems culminated in the kidney disease that led to her death in 1975. A crowd of mourners carried her body through the streets of Cairo for three hours before taking it to its burial place.

The Music

Umm Kulthum’s songs represent a mixture of styles, although her musical idiom has Arab and Muslim roots. It is commonly thought of as asil, or authentic, and it is seen as a contribution to Egyptian cultural life. Her exceptional vocal power and its uniform quality enabled Kulthum to give performances of great length. Her originality inspired the development of both a neoclassical mode of expression and a populist one, and much of this inspiration derived from her close involvement with the composition of the works she sang and her control over the circumstances under which she composed.

Early Works. Kulthum explained that she began singing by imitating her father, who sang religious songs at weddings in their village. When she started singing in Cairo, she performed traditional religious pieces unaccompanied by instruments. Audiences often requested popular songs of the day, and thus she learned many lighthearted love songs in colloquial Arabic. Sophisticated listeners complained of the vapidity of these simple songs, known as taqatiq, but she complemented these with qasaid, which were often long, rhyming poems honoring the Prophet, and also some new qasaid on romantic themes. One of the most popular of these early love songs was “Ma li futint.” Other favorites included the taqatiq “Anaՙal՚a keefak” and “il-Khalaa՚ah,” a composition judged in bad taste. Kulthum’s career continued to prosper; in the 1940’s, she reached the peak of her success, singing ughniyyat, love songs combining vocal instrumental sections, and the neoclassical qasaid.

“In kuntu assamih.” Kulthum adopted a new genre in the late 1920’s, a series of monologues composed for her by al-Qasabji and Ahmad Rami, described as virtuosic, dramatic, romantic, and innovative in genre and style. In classical practice, a composer basically works up from the lower range of the chosen melodic mode and eventually returns to the original mode. However, in “In kuntu assamih” al-Qasabji introduced triadic passages into the instrumental introduction that listeners knowledgeable about European classical musical found modern and operatic. The recording of “In kuntu assamih” sold in great numbers, and the monologue came to be identified with Kulthum. The texts of these monologues featured themes on love lost and individual struggle.

Widad.Widad was the first of six films that Kulthum made, starting in 1935. She invented a story about a singing slave girl in thirteenth century Egypt, and Rami wrote the script. The leading male roles were played by well-known stars, and the production was so successful that it became the first Egyptian entry in an international film festival in London. Kulthum’s motion pictures featured exotic locales with exciting characters involved in romantic plots that developed themes of good triumphing over evil. The style of her films was strictly Hollywood. Of her other five films, only a version of the opera Aida (1871) made in 1942 failed; her last was Fatma (1947), a popular and blatantly didactic production dramatizing the misbehavior of the wealthy, the virtues of closeness with friends and family, and the honor of the woman who resists temptation.

“Al-Atlal.” “Al-Atlal” was Kulthum’s signature song. It was produced by the famous songwriter Riyad al-Sunbati, a talented composer who enjoyed innovation and who featured a piano in “Arak asey al-damii,” the only one of Kulthum’s songs to include that instrument. Kulthum showed great respect for al-Sunbati, and she considered him superior to other writers in treating difficult Arabic poems and in expressing their meanings in his melodic adaptations. He understood Kulthum’s voice, and he composed with her abilities in mind. She sang “al-Atlal” in Paris in 1967 and in just about every concert she gave before Arab audiences. The words of “al-Atlal” came from two qasaid by the Egyptian poet Ibrahim Naji, mainly from “al-Atlal” (traces) and less so from “al-Wida” (the farewell). “Al-Atlal” was a neoclassical qasaid relying on the old theme of a wanderer in the desert looking for a lost lover or for some other source of loneliness and bereavement, subject matter for which Naji was well known.

Kulthum appropriated “al-Atlal” for her own purposes, streamlining Naji’s quatrains by taking the third line out of each. She rearranged the order of Naji’s stanzas, replaced a few words, and inserted lines from Naji’s “al-Wida” into the middle of the poem. Not all critics appreciated the freedom that Kulthum took with Naji’s text. One argued that the original qasaid was not just a lyric, but it was a narrative that recorded events in a specific order. Kulthum’s answer to this criticism was that the number and order of lines in the qasaid was less important than the singer’s expression of the poet’s meaning, a sentiment apparently justified by the work’s popularity.

Musical Legacy

Kulthum’s reputation lives on in the stories of her life written for children and in the many recordings of her work sold worldwide. Her solid business sense enabled her to demand large fees, and in advancing her own career commercially she achieved an authority that raised the level of respect for singers and that smoothed the way for other women in her profession. Her broad contributions to Egyptian culture made her a historic figure, and her voice resonated with her country’s indigenous values. Her songs are now turath, part of Egyptian heritage.

Principal Recordings

albums:Anta dumri, 1994; El soulasia el mokodassa, 1994; Keset el ams, 1994.

singles: “Anaՙal՚a keefak,” 1924; “Il-Khalaa՚ah,” 1924; “Ma li futint,” 1924; “Ya karawan,” 1925; “In kuntu assamih,” 1928; “Zekrayat,” 1930 (“Memories”); “Ouzkourini,” 1939; “Raq el habib,” 1941 (“The Servitude of Love”); “Hasibak lel-zaman,” 1957; “Dalili ehtar,” 1958; “Hagartak,” 1959 (“I Abandoned You”); “Howwa sahih el-hawa ghallab,” 1960; “Kull laylah wi-kull yum (betfakkar fi min?),” 1962; “Arak asey al-damii,” 1964; “Siret el-hobb,” 1964 (“Tale of Love”); “Amal hayati,” 1965 (“Hope of My Life”); “Beeid annak,” 1965 (“Away from You”); “Enta el-hobb,” 1965 (“You Are My Love”); “Al-Atlal,” 1966 (“The Ruins”); “Fakkarooni,” 1966 (“They Reminded Me”); “Hadith al-rouh,” 1967 (“The Talk of the Soul”); “Toof we shoof,” 1967; “Alf leila we leila,” 1969 (“One Thousand and One Nights”); “Aqbal al-layl,” 1969; “Tareeq wahed,” 1969; “Aghadan alqak,” 1971; “Ya msaharni,” 1972; “Hakam aleina el-hawa,” 1973; “Leilet Hobb,” 1973 (“Night of Love”).

Bibliography

Danielson, Virginia. “Artists and Entrepreneurs: Female Singers in Cairo During the 1920’s.” In Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender, edited by Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991. An early version of a subject Danielson would explore in her biography of Kulthum.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. A comprehensive, prize-winning study of Kulthum and the society in which she flourished. Includes illustrations, bibliography, and glossary.

Fernea, Elizabeth Warock, and Basima Qattan Bezirgan, eds. Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977. One of the autobiographical statements in this volume is by Kulthum.

Nassib, Sélim. I Loved You for Your Voice. Translated by Alison Anderson. New York: Europa Editions, 2006. A novel based on the life of Kulthum, told in the first person by Rami, the poet-librettist who wrote many of the songs she performed.