The Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum may be one of the world’s most documented and obsessed-about musical figures, especially in the Arab world, but the star who was at the height of her fame and influence in the 1950s and 1960s still has the power to surprise us, with lesser-known facts about her life as well as her rich artistic legacy.      

With her repertoire of deeply romantic songs mixed in with stirring Nasserite anthems, the story of Umm Kulthum’s life and career is often narrated against the backdrop of the Nasser era. But even before the 1952 “Free Officers” revolution, which eventually led to Col Gamal Abdel Nasser becoming Egypt’s second president in 1954, Umm Kulthum enjoyed great fame and popularity during the reign of King Farouk. She would often give private concerts at the royal family’s request and was even decorated with the Order of the Virtues (Nishan el-Kamal) which was usually only reserved for female royal family members. In contrast to the image of Umm Kulthoum as a cultural icon of the revolutionary New Egypt, she was initially barred from joining the Egyptian musicians’ syndicate because of her previous allegiance to the monarchy. Seen as a traitor to the nationalist cause, her songs were banned from being broadcast on the radio entirely.

This did not last for long, of course, given what we know today. Nasser quickly came to realize that Umm Kulthum’s immense national and international popularity could be of great aid to his nationalist and pan-Arabist project and as such, he befriended her and they developed a close friendship. From 1952 to 1960, about half her songs were nationalist in sentiment, as encouraged by the Ministry of Information and National Guidance which set the policies for state-run radio stations (in other words, all radio stations).    

One critical piece of information, which is often left out of biographies of Umm Kulthum, further explains how she came to be so closely linked to the Nasser era. It pertains to her record label.

Misrphon (sometimes spelled Misrphone) was an Egyptian record company started in the mid-1950s and privately owned by the Egyptian composer, singer, and actor Mohamed Fawzi. It was one of only two Egyptian-owned labels at the time, the other being Cairophon. Fawzi managed to convince an impressive number of musicians to join his record label, including a number of other era-defining singers like Shadia, Faiza Ahmed, Layla Mourad, and Nagat el Saghira. But naturally, Umm Kulthum was the biggest and brightest star of the Misrophon firmament, and Fawzi owned and managed distribution of her entire discography. In 1959, half of the company’s shares were bought by Philips Orient, a subsidiary of the Dutch conglomorate Philips, which marked the beginning of the end for Misrphon.

A year later, nationalization, one of the hallmarks of Nasser’s regime, kicked in and by 1962, the government assumed control over Misrphon, first buying out Mohamed Fawzi and then, Philips Orient. Shortly after, the record label’s name was changed to SonoCairo and, whether they agreed to it or not, the ownership of every artist’s discography signed onto Misrphon was immediately transferred to the government. This meant that Umm Kulthum became contractually obligated to comply with government-sanctioned guidelines and her songs were the state’s to deploy as it pleased. Without wishing to sound too cynical, one could say this detail ever so slightly pivoted the position of Umm Kulthum from a singer in allegiance to the state to one who was, materially, owned by it. 

That being said, Umm Kulthum was certainly not the exclusive property of Egypt or the Egyptian audiences. After all, she was known as Kawkab al Sharq or “the Star of the East” signifying her international fame that garnered dedicated listeners from across the Arab world and beyond. Her immense popularity transcended borders and Arabic dialects largely due to radio stations like Sawt al-‘Arab which broadcast Umm Kulthum’s concerts (often immediately followed by the speeches of President Nasser) to listeners across the Arab world. Airwaves were a fundamental instrument in propagating Nasser’s agenda of Arab nationalism alongside a sense of closeness with and ownership over Umm Kulthum, adding to the complexity of her legacy. 

Upon her death in February 1975, four million mourners took to the streets of Cairo to attend her funeral. But it was not Egypt alone that grieved. Tunisia hosted a national singing competition in honor of her passing and countries like Jordan, Pakistan, and Kuwait, which had awarded her state awards during her career, also mourned her loss. However, soon enough, there were other singers in Egypt being propelled forward by political leaders to either eclipse Umm Kulthum or to reframe her legacy. 

During the presidency of Anwar Sadat, Yasmine el Khayyam was groomed as a candidate to dislodge Umm Kulthum’s long-established cultural foothold, as a means of also marking a distinct shift in political leadership. Later when Hosni Mubarak succeeded the assassinated Sadat, he faced his own legitimacy crisis due to corruption scandals and failed economic reforms. Unlike Sadat, who wanted to set himself apart from Nasser, the Mubarak regime sought to create continuity between the revolutionary events of 1952 and Mubarak’s presidency as a means of reinstituting legitimacy, and so he recruited the help of singer Amal Mahir to revive the legacy of Umm Kulthum by performing her repertoire to new generations. 

Although Umm Kulthum’s songs have been historically employed to vouch for state-aligned politics, more and more musicians have used her songs to do the exact opposite. Inta ‘Umri, perhaps her most popular and immediately recognizable song, provides a potent example of how that is the case. In 2003, the Israeli Arab heavy metal band Khalas used the song to protest the impotence of Arab leaders, implying Umm Kulthum sedated her listeners to the realities of war and defeat. Opting for an instrumental metal cover version of the song, the band replaced Umm Kulthum’s singing with anti-regime chants and protest songs to drive their point further. 

In another example, Iron Sheik, a Palestinian-American hip-hop artist used a string arrangement of Inta ‘Umri to attack US President George W. Bush’s foreign policy as hypocritical and his presidency as illegitimate. Short snippets of Bush’s speech are interpolated with the strings and nay, a reed flute common in Arabic cultures, with Iron Sheik’s verses stacked atop one another to create a song that sonically communicates pan-Arabism and lyrically, a stringent anti-Americanism.

One of the most extensive re-interpretations of Umm Kulthum’s discography and cultural significance is that promoted by Jewish musicians with Sephardic or Mizrahi origins. The terms Sephardic or Mizrahi, meaning "Spanish" and "Eastern" respectively are often used interchangeably to denote Jewish people from Middle Eastern or North African origins. This is contrasted with Ashkenazi Jews who hail from Europe. Singers like Zehava Ben from Israel and Danielle Ebguy, who goes by the stage name Sapho, from Morocco essentially appropriated Umm Kulthum’s music to promote Sephardic-Mizrahi cultural heritage against a backdrop of Jewish media that generally favoured Ashkenazi culture. What is perhaps most problematic about this endeavour is that it apoliticized and decontextualized much of Umm Kulthum’s music, erasing the original sentiments behind it.

In response to the marginalization of Eastern Jews in Jewish media, Ben and Sapho turned to the music of Umm Kulthum as a means of rallying support and appreciation for their culture. However in order to do so, Umm Kulthum’s discography and public image were modified in questionable ways. For example, the cover of Ben’s 1995 album Zehava Ben Sings Arabic, which features several of Umm Kulthum’s songs, shows Umm Kulthum's face in profile but with a stylized portrait of Ben in place of the Egyptian diva's hair. It's quite a weird rendition that seems to boast a remarkable intimacy between the two singers, even suggesting Ben as Umm Kulthum's inspiration, not the other way around. Far from inhabiting the diva's thoughts, Ben stripped her songs of their original patriotic, political, or religious intentions. She reduced the colossal figure of Umm Kulthum to a beautiful voice singing beautiful love songs.

Sapho also engaged in a similar “de-fanging” of Umm Kulthum’s discography. In 1994, she performed Umm Kulthum’s song Al-Atlal (“The Ruins”)—which initially served to sustain Egyptian morale after the defeat of 1967—to an audience of Israelis in occupied Jerusalem, just as Israel celebrated the achievements of the peace agreement with Jordan and the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians.

In a 2010 article entitled Preservation and Politicization: Umm Kulthum's National and International Legacy which discusses in detail the different utilizations of her discography over the years, the US music researcher Laura Lohman described Umm Kulthum as an “evolving cultural heritage”. This is exactly what the aforementioned examples collectively demonstrate. Just as much, they illustrate her enduring significance and the malleability of her music and its messages across time and space. Even in Egypt, where there exists a dominant discourse around Umm Kulthum that narrates her life and career as linear and consistently single-minded, we see how her national legacy has in fact remained contentious, how it has been air-brushed and co-opted in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons.

It may seem a daunting task to revisit and revise the history of a figure as towering and prolific as Umm Kulthum, but it can often lead to discoveries that alter how we see the artist and understand the events that punctuate their lives. When I listen to Umm Kulthum's recordings I find myself transported to a time past, the image of her on stage almost palpable. At the same time, I cannot help but imagine the ranks of singers who took up her repertoire of songs after her death. To me they remain a brooding reminder of the competing visions that found their remedy in the same set of songs.