Legends: Umm Kulthum’s Legacy Lives in the Emotion of Younger Generations
The Egyptian government announced 2025 to be the “Year of Umm Kulthum.” Egyptians of different generations share what it takes to really appreciate the icon’s music.
“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.”
El Rafie was born in Tanta, a town in the Egyptian Nile Delta, in 1926 and grew up to the songs of the legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, many of which she still hums to herself in her California home today. “She was beloved by everyone,” she repeats several times. “She sang a new song every month, and my older sister would not let us talk the whole time she sang. When I was little, I’d say, ‘Eh el araf da (What’s this crap), what are you listening to?’ but as I grew older, I understood.”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.
At the request of the Cairene elites, Umm Kulthum’s family moved to Cairo in 1923, where the renowned Sheikh Aboulela Mohammed mentored her. Collaborating with the poet Ahmed Rami, she established her signature sound: romantic poetry of unrequited love and loss, sung in maqamat, and her contralto vocal range. Her songs, which could last an hour or longer, entranced the audience and people would call out to her, entering into ecstatic dialogue with the singer. “She acted like a preacher who becomes inspired by his congregation,” the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz oncesaid. “When he sees what reaches them, he gives them more of it. He works it, refines it, embellishes it.” At her vocal peak, Umm Kulthum could sing as low as the second octave and as high as the eighth octave and had to stand at least one meter from the microphone.By 1926, she began superseding allcompetition and became the best-paid musician in Egypt. Many attribute this to her unparalleled talent, whileothers 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.
Widely hailed as the “Mother of the Arabs” and their most prominent unifier in the 20th century, Umm Kulthum’s socio-political significance continues to this day. Earlier this month, Egypt’s Ministry of Culturedeclared 2025 “The Year of Umm Kulthum,” commemorating 50 years after her passing through a year-long celebration. The statement says that while Umm Kulthum inspired many Western singers, including Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Beyoncé and Shakira, “There is no true Western counterpart to her, no artist who commands the same level of respect and adoration as she does in the Arab world.”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.”