When Sudanese journalist Sadig Eltigani moved back to Egypt for university in 2014, a taxi driver asked him what music he liked. “Pop, RnB, hip-hop, anything,” he said. “Hip-hop?” the driver said. “Listen to this.”
“It was just so noisy, and there was a lot going on in the song,” Eltigani remembers. “There's snares and whistle sounds, and this guy's vocal effects. In Sudan, we have the term jota [chaos]. It was a lot of that. The more I listened to it, the more I liked it.”
When Egyptian American DJ Noor Adel visited her cousins in Alexandria years before she’d move to Cairo, they introduced her to the same genre: mahragan (Arabic for festival). “A lot of other genres are imported, but mahragan is quintessentially Egyptian,” she says. “It’s loud, colorful, fun and taboo, because of this demonization of anything that hints at something inappropriate. When I listened to it abroad, it would remind me so much of home.”
Meanwhile, Alia Wasfi and Bassel Medhaat were bumping the latest mahraganat after school in Asyut and Cairo respectively, feeling rebellious and excited about the songs’ lyrics. “Mahraganat artists imposed themselves and made people accept them. It was literally everywhere so people had to listen to it,” says London-based Egyptian feminist writer Mariam Diefallah.
A neighborhood you didn’t know
A typical mahragan song back in the early 2000s was a mix of Egyptian folklore and fast-paced electronic beats, badly produced in somebody’s home. This home would be in a working class neighborhood somewhere in the outskirts of Cairo, which the singer would shout out at the beginning of the track. It would then be distributed around similar neighborhoods on USB sticks or uploaded to YouTube, spreading rapidly without any formal distribution company.
“I love that mahraganat lyrics reclaim these neighborhoods that people don’t know about, because I’m also from such a neighborhood,” says Diefallah. “It says: I’m from that part that you don’t care about, but you will listen to me because I’m loud and annoying.”
It’s the combination of these things that makes mahragan quintessentially Egyptian: an infectious, overwhelming sound, witty and funny lyrics, and a reliance on community (rather than official institutions) to keep making and distributing the music.
“Mahragan differs from rap or trap in that it addresses most of Egyptian society. People with real struggles, not ‘my girlfriend left’ me but ‘this dude and I were in prison and he had my back,’” says Medhaat. “You’re listening to someone telling you that life is shit, but at the same time, you're dancing. This is Egypt. We turn anything into a joke.”
The genre rose to further prominence after the 2011 revolution. “It gave you a transparent lens on what was happening at the time,” says Eltigani. “People were suffering from inflation and political injustice.”
“I remember the early songs being very angry, which drew me to it,” says Diefallah. “A lot of angst and stress that I could relate to, but also a lot of joy about reclaiming life.”
An acceptable representative?
Similar to the story of Algerian raï, mahragan challenges class dynamics. On YouTube, songs can have hundreds of millions of views. Still, the genre was (temporarily, unsuccessfully) banned in Egypt in 2020, prompted by Hassan Shakoush and Omar Kamal’s song “Bent El Giran” (The neighbors’ daughter) going viral, singing “If you leave me, I will hate my life and all my years, I will be lost, I will drink alcohol and smoke hash.” These lyrics apparently violated the rather vague concept of “Egyptian family values.”
While the Musicians’ Syndicate decided that mahragnat were not appropriate for people to listen to, let alone represent Egypt the way it has by being played in bars and clubs all over the region, the distribution continued, because it had never relied on any official systems anyway. In Eltigani’s opinion, this was what got mahragan artists in trouble in the first place. “These people were making a lot of money, but the government wasn’t getting any revenue from that,” he says.
Mahraganat have long become an inescapable feature of Egypt’s street, but you’re unlikely to hear them in wealthier neighborhoods unless the occasion is a wedding. “At my university [the American University in Cairo], people would say ‘You call that music? You call that art?,’” remembers Eltigani. “Sadly classism in Egypt is very real and I think with mahraganat it’s very telling of how real it is.”
In her upper-class neighborhood of Maadi, Adel experiences similar reactions to the genre. “Sometimes when I put it on in the car and say ‘it’s good,’ people will say ‘No, it's cute for a gag, but nobody listens to this seriously,’” she says. This attitude is in stark contrast to the neighborhood Diefallah grew up in where mahraganat is the sound of everyday life on the bus or in the supermarket.
Adel DJs global bass, a description she intentionally keeps vague so that she can experiment. When she incorporates mahraganat into her sets in Egypt, she gets mixed reactions. “There was one gig I played, and the person came up to my partner and was like, ‘Why the fuck is she playing mahragan? This is not the music policy here,’” she remembers. “But the people were enjoying it.”
The numbers speak for themselves: people definitely enjoy it. “It’s nice when someone you wouldn’t expect to listen to mahraganat turns out to be a hardcore fan,” says Wasfi, a London-based culture worker. “It happens a lot in my family in Asyut.”
“My mother would tell me ‘don’t put this music in your headphones, it will make your thoughts go bad,’” says Medhaat, a Nuremberg-based engineer. “But at the wedding, she’d tell us to go dance to it.”
When it comes to the upper classes, there seems to be a time and place for it. “Don’t you think it's ironic that they’re listening to this misery at their weddings, but not in their cars?” asks Medhaat. “They don't want to focus on the reality of the lyrics; they just want to dance.”
A representative of Egyptian masculinity?
Similar to street culture being hailed as “real culture,” working class men are often considered “real men.” Mahragan isn’t only music, but also a specific knife dance that has become mainstream and given the genre more acceptance as people all over Egypt imitate the moves (usually replacing the knives with cigarettes).
“My brother is a dentist. Him and his friends don’t want to be known as doctors and engineers, but as strong men, so they relate a lot to mahraganat telling them ‘I’m taking this life and dancing with it,’” says Medhaat. “They will dance and imitate.”
Patriarchy goes hand in hand with this stereotyped expression of masculinity, which is why some people criticize mahragan’s misogynistic lyrics. “Saying this in Egypt is funny. It’s only them who are sexist? Not every other singer across classes, neighborhoods and regions?” says Diefallah. “I don’t think it’s fair to judge mahraganat based on that, because it’s just a reflection of the bigger context.”
Diefallah has been uncomfortable walking in a street where a mahragan song was playing sexist lyrics, which can be used to harass women or create a tense atmosphere. But she’d find herself dancing to the same song later with her female friends in private. “Sometimes I feel bad that I laugh at something that’s not okay, but it’s packaged in a hilarious and smart way,” she continues with a grin. “You experience it in a hostile way, but then you go indoors and experience it in a freeing way.”
While many wouldn’t deem mahragnat an acceptable representative of modern Egyptian culture, its power has always been the fact that it represents without needing anyone’s permission, whether that be Egypt’s reality of class struggle or its unchecked patriarchy.
Has mahragan peaked?
In August, Egyptians were excited about Icelandic artist Björk featuring Double Zuksh and Sho Madjozi’s “Zamaleky” in one of her DJ sets. Was mahragan finally ready to go global? Adel believes so. “The world is more open nowadays to what I would describe as global tuk-tuk music, which is music that you’d find in any tuk-tuk or taxi in any country,” she says. “More and more people are starting to uncover those, and I think mahragan is soon going to have its moment on the global stage."
Some long-time listeners are not too happy about the genre’s recent mainstream appeal and fusions with other sounds. “It’s becoming gentrified and transforming into something that is different from its original,” says Eltigani. “It’s not relatable anymore and starting to eclipse a little bit.”
“Mahraganat is not as strong as it was five years ago,” agrees Medhaat. “It’s becoming more diluted and the music is about numbers, not lyrics. The songs sound the same now.”
“It’s how a lot of dissent music starts and then loses touch when it becomes commercialized. But part of the watering down is that it’s easier to become more sexist,” says Diefallah. “Before, they’d sing about a woman leaving them for a richer man and the important subtext would be economic: she’s leaving him for someone who can give her a ring. Without this social advocacy aspect, it just becomes about hating women.”
In the foreseeable future, Mahraganat will continue to ring through Egyptian streets. But becoming more mainstream has also led to the depoliticizing of the genre.
