I was overjoyed that no one in Egypt had paid any attention to the birthday anniversary of Arab singing legend, Star of the East, Um Kulthoum. It was only when my friend Dominique Baudis, president of the Paris-based L’Institut Du Monde Arab, expressed his desire to host a huge ceremony to mark the occasion next October, did I feel that we could make up for this oversight.
May 1904 is generally known to be Um Kulthoum’s date of birth but some believe that she was born before that, yet inaccuracies in recording newborns in the countryside at that time may have been the reason behind the discrepancy.
For all intents and purposes, May 1904 remains the date we all know and the one written in the red diplomatic passport she used until she died in 1975.
Naturally I’d assumed that 2004, which passed in peace four years ago, would have been the year of Um Kulthoum, when the entire Arab world would celebrate her first birth centennial the way other countries memorialize their great thinkers, writers and artists.
I would have imagined that this would have been an occasion to celebrate her on many levels. Apart from being incomparable to anyone in our history when it comes to voice quality which spanned the gamut from alto to soprano – a quality unmatched by no other international opera singer from Maria Callas to Montserrat Caballé.
At the same time, Um Kulthoum was an outstanding cultural phenomenon in her ability to develop her style while retaining her solid Eastern roots which sprang from an Egyptian tradition of religious chanting and Quran recital techniques.
In the social sphere Um Kulthoum set an example as a self-taught woman who asserted her presence in a male-dominated society. Today, at a time when we talk about gender equality, we are in dire need of remembering this great woman who achieved that with no help from the state or from the National Council for Women.
On the political front, Um Kulthoum was committed to national issues. But she wasn’t simply satisfied with singing the praises of Egypt and its leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and bolstering the principals of Pan-Arabism, she was also at the forefront of the battle against the effects of foreign aggression to achieve social justice and Arab unity.
These are merely a few reasons why we should have worked hard to commemorate the Star of the East whose life Virginia Danielson described in her famous book “Um Kulthoum: The Voice of Egypt as “the story of a girl from the countryside who rose to become a cultural symbol for an entire nation.
And so when the president of L’Institut Du Monde Arab asked me for suggestions on how to commemorate Um Kulthoum’s birthday without repeating what was done for her centennial, I told him: “Don’t worry my friend, anything you do will be new because there was no such celebration in Egypt.
“Any celebration must present Um Kulthoum as an icon of Arab cultural history, I continued, “not only as a leading singer. Her greatness doesn’t simply lie in her god-given gift which prompted the title “Voice of the Mighty Um Kulthoum for a 1960s article about her in American Life magazine. Um Kulthoum also embodied a cultural, social and political state we would do well to emulate.
Deep down inside, I was glad we left the celebrations to L’Institut Du Monde Arab. Otherwise we would have been inundated with repeated pictures of Um Kulthoum all over the papers, not to mention the same black and white recordings of her concerts we’ve been watching on TV for years, even though I’d seen better color footage taken in some Arab countries. Her two concerts in Tunisia and Morocco, the proceeds of which all went to the military, come to mind.
Mohamed Salmawy is President of the Arab Writer’s Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo. This article is syndicated in the Arabic press.
