On June 9, 1995, several stories surfaced in al-Ahram, Egypt’s leading newspaper. A conversation with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, a scientific study on the feeling of love and its chemical connections to the brain, and a meeting in Cairo between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to discuss the prospects for peace in the Middle East were among the day’s headlines. Buried at the very back of the periodical, obituaries filled an entire page. If readers managed to reach this point in the issue, the black-and-white photographs of four compatriots likely would have caught their eye, including one image of a man wearing a cap and sunglasses. Opening with a verse of poetry, this entry’s authors, the Egyptian National Forces (al-Quwwa al-Wataniyya al-Misriyya), announced the passing of Shaykh Imam ʿIsa, “the artist of the people” (fanān al-shaʿb).Footnote 1
Shaykh Imam, we are told, was born in Abu al-Numrus, a village to the south of Cairo, in 1917, and died in Khush Qadam, a working-class area in Egypt’s capital. One year off the artist’s actual birth in 1918, the text proceeds to publicize when and where one could mourn Imam. A condolences ceremony would take place near Tahrir Square, from 8:00 to 10:00p.m., at the downtown Omar Makram Mosque. The rest of the obituary assumes the shape of a list. The names of 172 signatories pour down the page. Among those to pay tribute to Imam are poets and politicians, like Zayn al-ʿAbidin Fu’ad, Sayyid Hijab, and Farid Zahran, novelists and filmmakers, such as Sonallah Ibrahim, Nabiha Lutfi, and Youssef Chahine, and activists and cultural critics, including Shahenda Maklad, `Arwa Salih, and Mahmud Amin al-ʿAlim. Despite offering little insight into Imam’s life, the lengthy column leaves little doubt about his impact. It signaled a sharp departure from the single bullet point noting the passing of “the blind singer” below an advertisement for an air conditioner unit the previous day on the same paper’s final page.Footnote 2 Far from an afterthought, “the artist of the people,” the striking obituary leads us to believe, was someone nearly everyone knew.
One of the individuals to come across this death notice was Zakariya Nil, an Egyptian journalist, who “paused for a long time” upon seeing it. Everything from “the artist of the people” banner toward the top to the staggering number of names below caught the writer off guard. In an article titled, “Min Huwwa” (Who Is He?), which appeared in al-Ahram three days later on June 12, Nil openly acknowledges his ignorance of Imam.Footnote 3 In this regard, we are told, he was not alone. The day Imam’s obituary surfaced, people reportedly asked the author after Friday prayers: “Who is this ‘artist of the people’ who we do not know?” Determined to decipher what appeared to be an “epic tale” resting just beyond the obituary’s margins, the author poses a series of questions.
Was Imam a “political regime fugitive,” a “social justice outcast,” or “an outlaw” whose death just happened to coincide with a crisis facing freedom of speech in the Egyptian press? How did he compare to Sayyid Darwish (1892–1923), “who the people [also] called ‘the people’s artist’”? And what was the artist’s relationship with past iconic performers, including Umm Kulthum (1898–1975), Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahhab (1902–91), and ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz (1929–77)? In search of answers, Nil asked two of the text’s signatories why they had not introduced Imam’s “cause” to readers. The question elicited an emphatic response. He was “persecuted by the regimes,” the prominent writers replied, “All the regimes!” From their perspective, Imam’s cause was clear. The “artist of the people” did not require an introduction. Provocatively, Nil proceeds to attribute his personal ignorance of Imam, in part, to the very people now publicly mourning the artist’s passing on the pages of al-Ahram. These figures, in his view, did all too little to support Imam while he was still alive. Nevertheless, the journalist wished the late performer well. “May God have mercy on the popular artist (al-fanān al-shaʿbī) Shaykh ‘Imam ʿIsa,’” Nil concludes, “even though I do not know who he is.”
Who Is Shaykh Imam?
Taking this tension as a starting point, I will explore Shaykh Imam and his people in this essay. With these aims in mind, I am less interested in assessing whether or not Imam was indeed “the artist of the people,” a title commentators historically have attributed to the pioneering Egyptian musician Sayyid Darwish, and a topic that Sophie Frankford has scrutinized elsewhere.Footnote 4 Instead, I wish to brainstorm with readers about Imam, the focal point of a new book project, placing the performer’s life into conversation with his legacy and Egypt into dialogue with other settings further afield. In doing so, we will contemplate what it means to be an “artist of the people” and will consider who listened to Imam during his lifetime and who continues to do so after his death. But before introducing Imam’s audiences, the performer turned political dissident at the center of this story merits a brief introduction.
Born against the backdrop of World War I, Imam Ahmad Muhammad ʿIsa contracted an eye infection as an infant and lost his sight as Egyptians endeavored to bring an end to the British occupation. Like many other local children, Imam’s education commenced in a kuttāb, a traditional site for Qur’anic instruction. There, he memorized the Qur’an, which he would later recite. Following in the footsteps of countless compatriots before him, Imam left his village for Egypt’s capital at a young age. His Islamic studies in Cairo, however, were short-lived.
Imam was expelled from his Islamic institute for listening to Shaykh Muhammad Rifaʿat (1882–1950) recite the Qur’an over the radio. At the time, the association’s administrators viewed the technology as a gateway to unbelief (al-kufr) and insubordination (al-ʿiṣyān), irrespective of what it was broadcasting.Footnote 5 Homeless, Imam made his way to al-Ghuriyya, a working-class neighborhood in Old Cairo. In the years ahead, he managed to subsist as a singer and reciter at local events, where he met a leading music teacher, Shaykh Darwish al-Hariri, who offered to serve as his instructor. Imam went on to learn how to play the oud and crossed paths with the poet Ahmed Fu’ad Nigm (1929–2013) in 1962. Together, the two formed a dynamic duo, with Imam setting Nigm’s words to music, which landed both men in prison multiple times, under first Gamal `Abd al-Nasser (r. 1955–70), and later Anwar al-Sadat (r. 1970–81).
In the absence of state-controlled Egyptian radio, which refused to relay the pair’s critical collaborations, Imam and Nigm mobilized a new medium to reach a wider audience. Recorded by individual listeners at public demonstrations and private gatherings, noncommercial cassettes carried the singer’s voice near and far.Footnote 6 Copied and circulated by Imam’s fans, these tapes crossed borders, evaded censors, and popularized his live performances. The informal nature of these practices was not lost upon Imam. As he observed during an interview in England in the mid-1980s, “My mass media are the masses.”Footnote 7 For the artist, this connection with “the masses” was a point of pride. In addition to siding with “the people” in songs, Imam lived among them in a working-class neighborhood. When reflecting on his career and the sparse room he called home a few years later in the Egyptian magazine Ruz al-Yusuf, Imam underscored how he chose “the path of revolution and poverty” rather than “pageantry and power,” and would not hesitate to do so again, because “an artist of the people must live with the people.”Footnote 8 But who are Imam’s people?
A Remix: Dissent and the Recent Past
In the aftermath of the June 1967 war and in the run-up to the January 1977 bread riots, Imam’s early compositions converged to create a meaningful mixtape for a momentous decade. Among the individuals to experience the artist up close, in Egypt, were students. At the American University in Cairo, AbdelAziz EzzelArab was asked by a college classmate to write a story on Imam.Footnote 9 As Egypt’s student movement gained ground in opposition to a state of “no war and no peace” with Israel, EzzelArab paid a visit to Khush Qadam at the start of 1972, but did not find the singer there. Imam was in prison. Nevertheless, the artist’s meager room made an immediate impression upon the young man, who realized he “didn’t know the people” as well as he thought. An article never emerged, and a period of self-reflection ensued, during which EzzelArab sought out Imam singing on multiple occasions, often at the homes of friends. In 1982, EzzelArab left Egypt to work in Bahrain. Before traveling, he amassed a collection of Imam’s cassettes, on which the artist’s voice and the sounds of audience members surface side-by-side. The tapes served as his “solace” abroad (first in the Gulf, then in Canada). These amateur cassettes enabled others to encounter Imam’s live shows at a later date. Maha Abdelfattah recalls how students used to exchange them at EzzelArab’s alma mater.Footnote 10 During her first week in college in 1984, Abdelfattah, who had never heard of Imam, received one of his tapes from a classmate in Cairo. The recording sparked no shortage of questions, motivating her to learn more about Palestine and Che Guevara.
At the same time, Imam’s listeners were by no means limited to Egyptians. His music, which offers an opening to decenter the Islamic revival in prevailing accounts of the mid-to-late 20th century, struck a chord across the Arab world and beyond.Footnote 11 A few years after Sadat’s assassination in 1981, Imam was permitted to travel abroad for the very first time. With Nigm, he embarked on an international tour that I am in the process of piecing together. The duo performed everywhere, from living rooms in Algeria to amphitheaters in England. One of the communities with whom Imam’s music resonated most closely was the Arab left, and one of the places where he sang to leftists was Lebanon.
At the start of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90), Rabih Mroué, a child at the time, was unaware of Imam.Footnote 12 Within a few years, however, the performer appeared on the future artist’s radar, joining revolutionary musicians, like Marcel Khalife (b. 1950) and Khaled al-Haber (b. 1956), whose cassettes Mroué sold to classmates in middle school as a member of the Youth Democratic Union. Proceeds from these sales went to the Lebanese Communist Party, which invited Imam to sing on the sixtieth anniversary of its founding in 1984. Imam’s acoustic presence in Lebanon assumed a variety of forms. Unlike in Egypt, one medium that disseminated his music there was the radio. The Progressive Socialist Party’s Voice of the Mountain (Sawt al-Jabal) and the Lebanese Community Party’s Voice of the People (Sawt al-Shaʿb) stations both broadcast his songs. Off the airwaves, Imam’s cassettes were available at street stands in Beirut, where one could ask for “Imam #1,” “Imam #2,” and so forth. In the absence of official studio albums, kiosk owners generated their own informal mixtapes comprised of pirated recordings that, in Mroué’s words, operated like “rumors,” passing from person to person, the original source anyone’s best guess. Last year, I came across a cassette resembling these tapes on the digital marketplace Discogs, listed for sale by a retailer in Beirut. Below Imam’s name in bright yellow letters, a (9) adorns the cassette jacket’s cover (Fig. 1). The entity behind this production enjoys little to no presence online, its history largely a mystery. But the record label’s title speaks to a central motif. Below a red star on the cassette’s plastic exterior, a single word surfaces: the People, or al-Shaʿb. Were one to focus solely on Egypt, Imam’s people elsewhere would go entirely unnoticed, with key chapters in his arc left incomplete.
A Shaykh Imam cassette. Source: Author’s archive.
In mobilizing Imam as an interlocutor and avenue of inquiry, a cultural history of dissent, beginning decades before the dawn of the Arab Spring, comes within earshot. It is a transnational story of art and activism, with a blind performer who became a political dissident at its center, that traverses both public and private spaces, from protests to house parties. The archive animating this exploration is elusive. Its “traces,” to borrow a term from the title of Iman Mersal’s recent investigation of a forgotten Egyptian author, escape institutions.Footnote 13 Here, the memories of those who encountered Imam, whether in person or through his tapes, are integral. Such recollections have the potential to expand not only our understanding of political opposition, but also the Middle East, more broadly, during a time of immense change. Imam, accordingly, presents both an opportunity to revisit the recent past and the challenge of reenvisioning “the archive.” His life and legacy invite us to engage in what Kirsten Weld calls “archival thinking,” a practice in which archives are more than fodder for footnotes, surfacing further up the page as subjects of study.Footnote 14
Imam’s Revival and Alternative Archives
The 2011 revolution in Egypt prompted not only the rise of new artists, but the return of ones who had long since departed. Alongside the songs of Sayyid Darwish, Imam’s compositions experienced a resurgence. Protestors performed them during mass demonstrations. By opposing those in positions of power and expressing a sense of national pride, the musical numbers complemented several of the revolution’s early chants, from “the people want the fall of the regime” to “raise your head high, you are Egyptian.” Following Mubarak’s fall, Mohamed Morsi’s ascent, and the dawn of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s rule, Imam’s resonance endures. A short distance from Tahrir Square, the “Lovers of Shaykh Imam Association” organizes concerts across town commemorating its namesake. These events often turn into sing-alongs, with audience members collectively rendering the late artist’s repertoire. Joining these voices are those of professional musicians. Maryam Saleh, a leading figure in Egypt’s alternative music scene, has breathed new life into Imam’s catalog, which contributed to the soundtrack of her childhood. Imam performed in Saleh’s home, at the invitation of her parents, when she was growing up, while her mother sang alongside Imam during meetings for al-Tagammuʿ, a leftist political party. In 2015, Saleh released an album with the Lebanese producer Zeid Hamdan featuring several creative covers of Imam’s recordings, introducing him to a younger generation of listeners. A few years later, she hosted a workshop in Cairo where participants learned more about the artist’s trajectory and productions.
Elsewhere in Egypt, Imam’s music has resurfaced in places where one might not expect to hear it. In August 2024, in an exclusive compound on the North Coast, the Syrian-German duo Shkoon played a synth-heavy version of “Shayyid Qusurak” (Build Your Castles), a revolutionary anthem authored by Nigm in the 1970s about class struggle. This song serves as the title of the band’s 2017 EP.Footnote 15 Accompanied by a light show, the electronic rendition catered to the very class criticized by Imam in the composition. This irony was not lost upon Egyptian observers, who mocked the concert mercilessly online. More recently, a viral video captured a children’s choir singing one of Imam’s tracks about the 1967 war.Footnote 16 Framed as a letter from a father in Upper Egypt to his son the front, the number was performed in a church in al-Minya, a governorate where many residents live below the poverty line, hundreds of kilometers south of the Mediterranean’s gated communities. After appearing recently on TikTok (June 2025), the recording garnered nearly half a million views in less than two weeks. Cutting across class divides, such scenes push us to broaden the horizons of Imam’s people further still. At the same time, Egypt constitutes but a single track on the mixtape that is Imam’s afterlife.
Alia Haju, a Brooklyn-based musician and filmmaker who grew up in South Lebanon, encountered Imam’s music at an early age.Footnote 17 Unlike Saleh, however, she experienced the artist not in person, but on tapes. During morning commutes in the car to school, her mother, a leftist, regularly popped in cassettes containing the plays of Ziad Rahbani (b. 1956) and the songs of Fairuz (b. 1934), Marcel Khalife, and Imam. It was on these daily drives that a young Haju started to memorize Imam’s lyrics, which she would eventually sing, first in Lebanon and later in New York. Imam’s unpretentious demeanor, connection with “the people,” and the joyful manner in which he performed are three of the qualities that drew Haju to him. “He was exactly fanān al-shaʿb,” she told me when sharing a story about a visit Imam paid to her aunt’s shop in Sur during his international tour in the 1980s. In the children’s clothing store, he sang “Wahabt ʿUmri li-l-Amal” (I Dedicated My Life to Hope), one of the many informal concerts that define Imam’s career. Now in the United States, Haju has introduced Imam to new listeners. In addition to organizing a backyard concert in Brooklyn in 2021, she has taken his catalog to the streets. Demonstrations for Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ rights rallies, and, most recently, student protests for Palestine all have served as spots to perform Imam’s songs. Meanwhile, back in Palestine, Imam’s music continues to enliven private gatherings and public events. Here, we need only consider the members of “The Shaykh Imam Lovers Ensemble,” a band comprised of Palestinian performers who have made it their mission to revive his work. Online, the artist’s legacy takes still other shapes.
Following Imam’s passing, Salah ʿIsa, a prominent Egyptian journalist who was among the al-Ahram obituary signatories, issued a call to preserve the performer’s legacy and to counter the “forgetfulness that threatens it and stalks our national memory.”Footnote 18 What the writer could not have imagined, at the time, was the central role social media would come to play in these efforts. A photograph of Imam surrounded by supporters in Algeria during his 1984 tour, an invitation to al-Tagammuʿ’s headquarters in Cairo to hear “the artist of the people” perform in 1987, and a recording of a second choir singing one of his protest songs during a mass in Beirut this past year are among the many items one can find on Facebook alone (Figs. 2, 3). In sharp contrast to a museum, where exhibits are carefully crafted by select curators, social media sites enable countless people to crowdsource an individual’s life. In this sense, these outlets serve as alternative archives, where private holdings become public, enabling new stories to be told and providing us with a tool to counter the attempts of ruling regimes to monopolize the past in the present. The same forums, however, are not without hurdles. Items, like the ʿIsa article that I first found on Facebook, often lack historical details, such as dates of publication, making them difficult to fully decipher. There is then the Internet’s instability. Digital content disappears. A YouTube video accessible today might not be tomorrow. Will items online now be available next month? What about in twenty years? How, in short, will we not only write histories of social media, but write history with the very same platforms? As more materials move online, such questions have become all the more pressing.
A photo of Imam in Algeria. Source: Facebook.
An invitation to an event featuring Imam in Egypt. Source: Facebook.
Artists of the People
If there is no single listener for Imam, there is also no one “artist of the people.” Over the course of her career, Umm Kulthum, who grew up in a small village in the Nile Delta and made a splash on Cairo’s commercial recording scene during the roaring 20s, enchanted listeners near and far. Unlike Imam, the star forged close relationships with political authorities, and state-controlled Egyptian radio relayed her voice to a broader audience. Here, we need only consider a cartoon published by Ruz al-Yusuf in 1965 on the day Egypt’s president ran unopposed for another term (Fig. 4). In the sketch, titled “We have come to record our voices,” artists whom readers would have readily recognized stand in a line and sing the same words: Ya Gamāl (Oh Gamal). Literally, “Oh Beauty,” the salutation, in this context, also referred to Egypt’s leader: Gamal `Abd al-Nasser. The caption, meanwhile, plays on the double meaning of the verb “to record” (sajala) in Arabic. Umm Kulthum and company have come to record their voices (ṣawtnā, lit. our voices) over the airwaves as well as their “votes” at the ballot box for Nasser. This relationship between the prominent performer and iconic politician would grow only closer in the years ahead.
“We have come to record our voices.” Source: Ruz al-Yusuf, no. 1918, 15 March 1965, 5.
In contrast to Imam, who criticized Egypt’s defeat by Israel during the 1967 war in “al-Hamdulillah” (Praise Be to God), a subversive composition based on a poem penned by Nigm that sent both men to prison shortly before Nasser’s passing in 1970, Umm Kulthum embarked on an extensive fundraising campaign to rebuild the Egyptian armed forces. In addition to performing across Egypt, the state-sanctioned star traveled to Europe on a diplomatic passport, granted by the government. It was during this unprecedented undertaking, which advanced the aims of Nasser’s regime and raised an estimated $2,000,000 for the war effort, that Umm Kulthum received a new title: “The Artist of the People in the Battle” (Fanāna al-Shaʿb fi-l-Maʿraka). If Imam challenged the government’s “official story” of 1967, Umm Kulthum strove to strengthen the state in its wake.
This past February, Egypt’s Ministry of Culture announced that 2025 will be “the year of Umm Kulthum.” As Ahmed Hannu, the minister of culture, explained, “Umm Kulthum is an Egyptian and Arab icon of whom we are proud” and “the best voice that expresses Egypt, its history, and its civilization.”Footnote 19 To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s death, state institutions have publicized several events, from concerts at the Cairo Opera House to a National Library and Archives exhibition to a nationwide talent show to discover young singers who resemble the late icon. To be certain, such initiatives are not new. Since Umm Kulthum’s passing in 1975, public figures have taken several steps to commemorate the artist. Whether bringing Umm Kulthum back as a hologram to perform, building a museum devoted entirely to her, or unveiling sculptures of the “star of the east” (kawkab al-sharq), efforts to memorialize Umm Kulthum have assumed a variety of forms that arrive at the same conclusion: Umm Kulthum is a voice to be remembered.
Amid these commemorations celebrating Umm Kulthum as “the artist of the year,” a drawing recently surfaced outside of Cairo. At a distance from both the upper-class neighborhood where Umm Kulthum once resided in Zamalek and the singer’s museum to the south on Roda Island, the image appeared on a building in Giza, down the street from where Imam was born. The individual behind this illustration, Muhammad Eissa, one of Imam’s nephews, drew the sketch on his house in Abu al-Numrus. In the colorful caricature, Imam sports a suit, strums the oud, and grins ever so slightly. Above this scene, a single line of text, echoing the artist’s obituary in al-Ahram thirty years ago, reads: “The Artist of the People Shaykh Imam `Isa.” Departing from the formal, top-down efforts on the part of the state to honor Umm Kulthum, this creative labor made its way from Imam’s hometown to one of the many Facebook pages managed by his fans, where it proceeded to reach a wider audience (Fig. 5). “Abu al-Numrus,” the caption accompanying the image online declares, “has not forgotten Shaykh Imam 
.” Although 2025 might not officially be Imam’s year, his music continues to endure in the ears and hearts of listeners.
A drawing of Shaykh Imam, “The Artist of the People.” Source: Facebook.
What makes one an “artist of the people”? Who decides? To what ends is this distinction denied, conferred, or embraced? And how might its use reveal as much, if not more, about the person employing it than the artist in question? Moreover, who are “the people” in this moniker? How might they change over the course of a performer’s lifetime or after their passing? And what materials might we utilize to shed new light on not only artists who authorities wish to showcase, like Umm Kulthum, but also those they relegate to the margins, such as Shaykh Imam? Last, what insights might the crossroads of music and class afford us when it comes to making sense of the Middle East going forward? And what might we gain by centering popular culture as an avenue of inquiry in our scholarship as well as in our teaching, as opposed to approaching it as something that is only capable of complementing what we already know? These inquiries, which I find myself contemplating as I break ground on a new book revolving around music, misinformation, and archives, merit further research. But, in Imam’s case, at least, it is clear that his “people” exist in the plural, from those who once enjoyed his music across the Middle East decades ago to others who continue to find meaning in his art now, online or off, in Egypt or abroad.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Clara Wenz for bringing all of the roundtable contributors together in Würzburg and Hanan Hammad for the highly generative feedback. I also wish to recognize Joel Gordon. In addition to guiding IJMES with care and commitment over the past six years, Joel has been a generous interlocutor and a pioneer in the study of popular culture. To everyone in Egypt who has supported my work on Shaykh Imam, a thousand thanks.
Open access
