Legends: Umm Kulthum’s Legacy Lives in the Emotion of Younger Generations

“Every first Thursday of the month, our relatives came over for a festive lunch to listen to Umm Kulthum’s concert on the radio. All linens had to be washed because they would stay at least a month or two. We didn’t have to invite them, they’d just announce that they are coming,” Saadiya El Rafie tells OkayAfrica. She pauses, chuckles, and says, “I don’t know why we only hosted relatives as if they didn’t know anyone else back then. We would sit in our really nice dining room in clothes made especially for the occasion by the sewing lady.”

Umm Kulthum, Kawkab al-Sharq(The Star of the East), was born sometime between 1898 and 1904 in a small village in the countryside of Egypt’s Nile Delta. Her story is one of upward social mobility. She sang her way from humble religious festivals, where she performed alongside her Imam father to praise the prophet, into the salons of Egypt’s Upper echelons and on to world stages.

At that time, singers did not receive formal music education; instead, they learned through oral training with mentors, which was often based on Qur’an recitation. In the Arab world, music is organized in maqamat, microtonal scales that follow a melodic, tonal-spatial system.

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By 1926, she began superseding all competition and became the best-paid musician in Egypt. Many attribute this to her unparalleled talent, while others argue that her image of a humble, pious peasant girl fits perfectly into the nationalist rhetoric. Umm Kulthum embraced this role and lent her voice to political causes, such as supporting Egyptian soldiers and raising funds during wars against Israel or helping further President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Pan-Arab nationalism after the 1952 revolution toppled the monarchy.

Whether you are walking past any cafe in Cairo or sitting by the Mediterranean in Tunis, Umm Kulthum’s voice remains the soundtrack to life in the Arab World. Despite the decline of Pan-Arabism and the shrinkage of our modern-day attention span to the size of a blurry TikTok video, her long songs about love and patriotism continue to rack up millions of streams.

“My most prominent memory of Umm Kulthum is going to the kitchen as a child and hearing my grandmother singing along to her songs in her bedroom,” says Hana “Kilma” Seif El Nasr, an Egyptian multi-disciplinary artist and musician. As a vocalist, Seif El Nasr is inspired by Umm Kulthum’s range and stamina. Beyond that, the singer’s music is a container of complex memories.

“Listening to Umm Kulthum has helped me grieve and feel connected to my grandmother in a way few other musical artists can offer me,” says Seif El Nasr. “When she was dying, she was bedridden. Even at her absolute worst, if you put on Umm Kulthum, you could see her hand tapping along to the music. It brought something to life in her; I am grateful for that.”

“She’s a soundscape. Like a landscape we know of and will continue to know of,” says Sudanese painter and multi-disciplinary artist Tibian Bahari. “I admire how [her] voice cracked open through Quran recitation. The influence of the book of Allah and the ruh (spirit) of Allah in a woman’s body.”

Heba Attia Moussa remembers growing up hearing Umm Kulthum as the soundtrack to her life in Egypt and not paying much attention to her until she reached her twenties. “Many people don’t like her until they experience their first serious heartbreak,” she laughs. She is making an important point that is echoed by several other interviewees: the experience of appreciating and really hearing Umm Kulthum seems to be related to the experience of falling in love.

Anecdotally, if a young person realizes that they suddenly appreciate Umm Kulthum’s music when they never before understood the hype, elders will know they have fallen for someone. El Rafie’s favorite Umm Kulthum song, “Gholobt Asaleh Fe Rohy,” was released in 1948, the year she got married.

“Listening to a song that goes on for an hour, with its ups and downs of the same theme, gives you the opportunity to feel it all,” explains Moussa. “It’s not like modern songs where you have four minutes and then move on to another song with another feeling.”

Moussa compares Umm Kulthum’s songs to reading a novel or having a good conversation. She will choose a Cairene coffee shop that plays Umm Kulthum over other coffee shops, knowing that everyone is relating to the same feelings of agony or love as they hear people shout her name in the old recordings from the 1950s.

“She gives me strength. She’s very stable on that stage and carries hurt with stoicism,” says Moussa. “She was there across different generations, eras and turbulence. She keeps coming back, and everyone looks to her for strength.”