Singers: Nightingale of the Nile

To Westerners, her voice sounds like the siren call of a lovesick cat at midnight. When Egypt’s Um Kalthoum sings on Cairo radio, however, the entire Arab world falls into ecstasy.

It happens, like some grand exercise in mass therapy, at 10 p.m. on the first Thursday of the month, nine months of the year. As the hour nears, the streets from Mecca to Marrakech grow strangely quiet. Groups of spade-bearded sheiks repair conspiratorially to their salons; workers jam the coffeehouses, and nomads huddle like crapshooters in their tents. As they listen to Um Kalthoum’s tremulous voice, old men weep, women writhe on the floor, and the hashish smokers—whose purchases soar to monthly peaks just before the broadcasts—drift into glaze-eyed reverie.

Um Kalthoum sings of love, of the bittersweet pangs of passions lost or longed for, unfurling verse upon verse of ballads that last for over an hour. Like a sorceress weaving a spell, she sings on and on, spinning variations on the same simple phrases, until 3 a.m. Then her millions of listeners, feeling spent, exhilarated and somehow cleansed by this solemn ceremony of joy, return to normalcy—until the next time.

7¢ for Ten Hours. The ritual has been going on for 32 years, making squat, swarthy Um Kalthoum, now a matron of 64, the most famous personality in the Arab world, better known than Nasser, especially among desert folk. When she appeared for the first time at Lebanon’s Baalbek Festival last month, her followers came by the busload from points as distant as the Persian Gulf. Her two concerts in the 4,000-seat tent theater amid the Roman ruins were sold out months in advance, and scalpers got up to $250 for tickets. While she conducted the 20-piece orchestra with flicks of a long linen hanky, her smoky voice quavered like a struck gong, snaked nasally through soaring loop-the-loops, dipped to guttural growls, sobs and moans. Her subtle phrasing and delicate changes of pitch evoked revival-like cries from the whistling, shouting, foot-stamping audience: “Ya qalbi [Oh, my heart!]” and “Ya habibi [Oh, my love!].” The first song, Amal Hayati (Hope of My Life), lasted 70 minutes. After a 45-minute rubdown backstage by her two personal masseurs, she returned to sing again. Another break, another rubdown, and she wailed on until 2 a.m.

A poor fellah’s daughter who started out posing as a boy—because proper Arab girls did not then perform in public—Um Kalthoum as a child often sang Koranic songs for five or ten hours at a stretch. Her pay: 1$ per performance. At 15, she bought her first dress, later switched from religious to romantic songs, and instantly became a Pan-Arabic institution. King Farouk awarded her Egypt’s highest civilian decoration, and she reciprocated by singing political songs, first, Farouk, May You Live Forever and later, for Nasser, Gamal and the Nile Are Creators of the Dam. When, in 1953, a black-bordered box in Egyptian newspapers reported that a hyperthyroid condition endangered her voice, no doctor in the Middle East dared to treat her for fear of damaging “Allah’s treasure.” At the invitation of the U.S. Government, she was treated successfully with isotopes at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center.

Eternal Shrine. Today, with an annual income of $130,000, Um Kalthoum is the wealthiest woman in the Middle East. For her two performances at Baalbek, she pocketed $28,000, or four times the yearly salary of Nasser. She lives in a villa on Cairo’s Zamalik Island with her doctor husband, a prosperous venereal disease specialist. There are no signs that the “Star of the East” is fading. The Arabs think that with age her voice has become mellower, richer, more touching. As her followers in Egypt like to say: In the Middle East only two things never change. The other one is the Pyramids.