Beginning in the mid-1940s, superstar Layla Murad (1918–95) mobilized her contacts with the press and used her social capital as a respected artist to formulate and publicize her account of how her father and the entire family decided she would become a professional singer. Her accounts contradicted one another, as these three statements in 1946, 1948, and 1954, respectively, show:
My father was a famous singer, but my mother’s family condemned me for becoming a singer! My father traveled to America for four years, then returned to us penniless. I had to sing in concerts, weddings, and radio until I appeared in Yahya al-Hubb. Footnote 1
Because of my inclination, it was natural to become a singer, but my father initially fought my desire. Like many fathers. . . . Despite his rejection, I progressed in my singing career, which led to my cinema career.Footnote 2
I did not wish to become a singer or actress; I wished to be a teacher or a housewife. I could not become a teacher because bad luck plagued my father despite an earlier time of affluence. My father used me as his last gamble to make a living for himself and my siblings. Earning a living was difficult for everyone; only singers and artists could gain plenty of money and live well-off.Footnote 3
In one account, Layla Murad claimed that her maternal family condemned her, a statement that cannot have been true, because her maternal grandfather organized her first concert. The second account highlighted her agency in choosing her career against her father’s wish, which also cannot be truthful, because her father was her first music teacher and business manager. In the third statement, she highlighted her victimization as a child whose father had no other choice but to use her talent to support the family. Layla adjusted her narratives to place her personal story in harmony with mainstream social norms regarding respectability and to maintain the public’s empathy with her life and career choice. Many women entertainers in 20th-century Egypt have given similar narratives of their career choice to become artists. After attaining respectable social status through successful careers, female stars have used the media to confirm their gender respectability as normative and conforming to social values and moral order despite their high visibility. Their accounts aim at eliminating the tension between desired social respectability and the traditional lowly status of women entertainers.
In this essay I interrogate the intersection of social and moral order with entertainment technology. I argue that technical tools used in entertainment, namely music recordings, microphones, and national radio broadcasts in Egypt after World War I, played key roles in transforming entertainers into national icons and contributed to debates about female entertainers’ social respectability. My goal is to show how technical innovations in entertainment played a crucial role in providing women performers with practical means to preserve their satr (gender respectability), elevating the status of some of them to national sociocultural icons. Satr literally means “cover” or “protection” in Arabic, and is used as a term to signify socioeconomic respect. Crossing class lines, the concept excludes those outside the boundaries of social respectability regardless of any wealth or economic means they might or might not have had.Footnote 4
Here I incorporate satr by examining the role of technology in the careers of the legendary singer Umm Kulthum (c. 1898–1975), the pioneer filmmaker and music composer Bahiga Hafiz (1908–83), and Layla Murad, the most celebrated singer–movie star. I do not attempt to tell a comprehensive or new story of these superstars. I focus only on how their use of technology contributed to maintaining their satr or gender respectability.
In the interwar period, semi-independent Egypt witnessed the first generation of women who evolved to become national stars recognized and respected across the country and the surrounding Arab world: Munira al-Mahdiyya (1885–1965), Umm Kulthum, Fathiyya Ahmad (1898–1975), and Nadra Amin (1906–90), to mention just a few. Scholarship on songs in the early 20th century has focused on the rise of new musical genres, changes in the gendered content, the depiction of women in songs, and their contribution to Egyptian nationalism. Those who have researched the life and careers of a few women stars of this period have attributed the exceptional respectability those women enjoyed compared with previous generations of women entertainers to two arguments. The first relies on the individual characters of those stars, including their exceptional talents, hard work, and intellectual capacity, allowing them to engage meaningfully with increasingly educated audiences. The second consideration incorporates the grand sociopolitical changes following the 1919 nationalist revolution, which allowed an unprecedented increase in the participation of women in public life.Footnote 5 With full acknowledgment of the importance of these reasons, I want to highlight how these talented women used technical innovations to solve the contradictions inherent between their high visibility, even hypervisibility, and social norms regarding gender respectability. Hypervisibility of ordinary individuals has been associated with deviancy and disrespectability.Footnote 6 Visibility and violation of privacy, of women particularly, can potentially erode the social respectability and privacy of them and their families.
The culture of satr incorporates universal, personal, religious, and socioeconomic dimensions that protect male and female individuals and groups against negative visibility, preserving their social honor and respectability.Footnote 7 Satr is so valuable in Egyptian social culture that people consider it a gift from God; al-Sattār, the provider of satr, is one of God’s names.Footnote 8 Despite the increased sensitivity of material cover and the female body, the hijab, body cover, home privacy, and sanctuary protection are all symbols associated with satr. More importantly, satr goes beyond material and body cover and is associated with honor and protection from scandalous exposure, faḍīḥa. A poor person who does not ask people for any financial help and covers their needs enjoys satr, meaning they are mastūr (pl. mastūrūn or mastūrīn), whereas a wealthy person whose greed, moral weakness, and dependency are exposed lacks satr, that is, they are mafdūḥ. Footnote 9
Gender and class are arguably the most important signifiers of social status in Egyptian society. However, social stratifications and hierarchies based on class fall short of capturing the social divide based on social respectability. Satr, faḍīḥa (scandalous visibility and exposure), and ʿār (shame) are important components of the Egyptian concept and praxis of respectability. I contend that class is insufficient for studying social respectability and hierarchy among individuals and groups. Historians of modern Egypt have used class as a primary category of analysis.Footnote 10 However, they have become less concerned about it in recent decades because of the decline of Marxist-inspired theories and the rise of the field of cultural studies, which have facilitated a stronger focus on the concept of social hierarchy. The social hierarchy framework allows focus on symbolic, cultural, social, and other kinds of capital, rather than just economic status, as a way to understand the different ways of life, interactions, and power relations among different groups. It highlights social status as an everyday performance.Footnote 11 In Egypt, I argue that satr is a key sociocultural performance, symbolizing social respectability and status in the broad social hierarchy.
In the recent field of cultural studies, with attention to studying the social culture of the bourgeois middle class in the Global South, scholars have struggled to define the middle class in modern Egypt and to distinguish its morality from that of other social classes. A near consensus has emerged among scholars that the “middle class” stretches to incorporate social groups with limited income but with levels of education and nationalist aspiration, which allow their engagement in formulating social norms and normalizing social values.Footnote 12 In sum, they are the mainstream of a dynamic society, individuals and groups who are constantly and deliberately striving to live up to the ideals of what used to be known as al-aḥrār in premodern society. Literally, al-aḥrār means free people, and, until the 19th century, it was the term used to describe ordinary people who were honorable, enjoyed respect, and were in opposition to those whose moral failing was exposed or uncovered, who were pushed to the social margins. Organic concepts such as satr better capture the broad social divide between mainstream society (mastūrīn) and morally marginalized individuals and groups (mafḍūḥīn).
Arguably elusive, the organically Egyptian concept of satr is more precise in capturing the struggles for gender respectability faced by women performers coming from drastically different socioeconomic, geographical, and religious origins. Satr was the common ideal of rural and Muslim conservative Umm Kulthum, the Jewish-born Cairene Layla Murad, and the elite, European-educated Bahiga Hafiz. Moral and material satr was the crucial social capital for gender respectability among their families and communities before they pursued entertainment careers. These talented women transformed the positions of female performers from morally questionable to respectable national stars by utilizing technical innovations to embrace their social ideals of satr. The technical innovation of microphones, music recordings, and radio broadcasts provided them with the means to eliminate the tension between high visibility and social satr—to combine the social capital of satr with high visibility. This combination of the sociopolitical and cultural reconfiguration witnessed in Egypt after World War I elevated them into nationally respected cultural figures.
Although Umm Kulthum, Bahiga Hafiz, and Layla Murad were still among the new generations who adventured with these technical innovations, they were not the first to use them. Therefore they did not experience the ambivalence that earlier performers had toward those technical tools. For example, the first records for women singers did not improve their social status, and using microphones accelerated the eclipse of some previously successful singers, as I discuss below.
Recording the Female Voice
Recording technology, which arrived in Egypt in 1890, opened new possibilities for young female singers to continue being draped in satr while their work was highly visible to mass listeners. Recording technology and radio broadcasts enabled audiences to hear women’s voices without physical presence, allowing women singers to keep their image chaste.Footnote 13 When Umm Kulthum came from her Delta village to Cairo in the early 1920s, the recording business was expanding and flourishing. Concert halls and recording companies mushroomed, twelve different magazines reported on music and music theater, and many periodicals and newspapers devoted sections to celebrity news and criticism.Footnote 14 Umm Kulthum benefited greatly from recording, and she had the courage to experiment with new genres and different types of lyrics. While she was dressed like a boy during her live concerts and chanted traditional religious and turāth, or traditional, songs, her sense of satr, of being invisible while recording, encouraged her to integrate light and sensual songs, as in her recording of “al -Khala ‘a wa- l- Dala‘a Madhhabi, Min Zaman Ahwa Safaha wa- l- Nabi” (Debauchery and indulgence are my way; by God, I have loved them my whole life), released in 1924. The Odeon Recording Company sold the records of this song inexpensively, and despite poor reviews it sold well, encouraging the company to offer Umm Kulthum more recording contracts for higher payment.Footnote 15 Between 1924 and 1926, Odeon issued fourteen records for her, none of which included religious songs. They were huge successes, and Umm Kulthum received the highest payment among singers, exceeding Muhammad ’Abd al-Wahhab (1902–91). She even increased her payment from an exuberant fifty pounds a record to eighty when she moved to the Gramophone label in 1926.
Before coming to Cairo, young Umm Kulthum first performed in public concerts in the Nile Delta countryside. Her reputation as a child able to perform religious chants that only adult men performed attracted audiences. However, attending concerts to listen to music for paid tickets was new to Egypt, and most of the audience was made up of men. It was not unusual for listeners to pay little attention to, or abandon altogether, social decency, and even consume alcohol. Umm Kulthum’s first concerts witnessed chaos, noise, and arguments among audiences to the extent that she performed for only thirty minutes during a four-hour concert.Footnote 16 Her father asked that alcohol not be served during her performances, alarmed that the family’s reputation could be stained. He subsequently dressed her in bedouin boy clothing, wearing male headgear (ʿuqāl) and a loose robe topped with a coat (Fig. 1). The feminine visibility of her body was minimized, and she was restricted to performing religious chants, even when she moved as a young woman to Cairo.
On the left, Shaykh Ibrahim al-Baltagi with his baby daughter Umm Kulthum, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_Kulthum). On the right, Umm Kulthum with her brother Khalid after her father dressed her as a bedouin boy, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_Kulthum).
Commercial recording allowed female performers to expand their public presence while avoiding the need to appear in live performances during which they were physically exposed to and mingled with men. Male and female household members and guests had a chance to listen to and enjoy music without leaving their homes. Although owning phonographs was limited to the wealthy in cities and countryside homes, records made listening to music available to wide and diverse audiences. Record players and gramophones tended to appear in shared spaces, such as coffeehouses and clubs. More importantly, as record-consuming audiences grew across the country, records expanded the fame and prestige of Umm Kulthum and others beyond Cairo, where most recording companies operated and singers performed live. Records also substantially augmented women musicians’ incomes and respectability.Footnote 17
It is noteworthy that Shaykh Yusuf al-Manyalawi (1847–1911) was the first singer to record his performance in 1890, followed by other male stars such as ʿAbdu al-Hamuli (1836–1901), Muhammad ʿUthman (1855–1900), and ʿAbd al-Hayy Hilmi (1857–1912). The first women performers to record songs before World War I were the so-called ʿawālim (sing. ʿālima), entertainers associated with royal courts and elite circles, who performed at weddings and private celebrations. Although most early generations of ʿawālim received broad education that made them capable of participating in intellectual and literary exchange (adab), later generations in the late 19th century limited their skills to using their body and voice for entertainment. Therefore the social perception of ʿawālim increasingly equated them with “fallen women.”Footnote 18 In the early 1900s, women working in entertainment came from low working classes. They were socially viewed as a distinct group because they violated the gender segregation norms and publicly interacted with men. Their public consumption of alcohol and hard drugs and mingling with men intensified their visibility, bringing their morality into question.Footnote 19 They were looked upon as a marginalized group that offered entertainment to those who could afford it but were rarely integrated into mainstream society.
The National Radio
The Egyptian government launched the first public radio broadcast on May 31, 1934, two days after it enforced a comprehensive ban on all private radio stations. The government justified the ban by citing incidents of legal violations and misuse of the medium.Footnote 20 Privately owned radio stations had begun broadcasting in the late 1920s in Cairo and Alexandria, long before the national broadcast. Each station’s broadcast covered limited geographical areas, as small as one or two neighborhoods inside the city. A few singers monopolized the broadcast and used it as an open venue to slam critics and singers. The national broadcast covered the entire country and made the radio a government tool for promoting certain social and aesthetic values.
As private stations had done before, public radio broadcasts made music and songs integral to their daily programming. However, the national radio restricted broadcasting songs and music to what conformed with bourgeoisie tastes and values. As a result, the national broadcast became an acknowledgment of and a vehicle for a singer’s social respectability. Umm Kulthum was the first singing voice Egyptians heard on the first-day launch of the national broadcast. On July 6, 1934, five weeks after the launch of the public radio broadcast, the Egyptian public across the country listened to Layla Murad’s voice through the radio for the first time. The choices of those responsible for the Arabic broadcast not only spoke of the exceptional talent of the well-established and rising women singers but also acknowledged that these women embodied the social values of the broad listening audiences across the country. Because singers had to perform live in radio station buildings, radio studios became meeting spaces where vocalists had casual chats about music, work, and their reputations. It is no surprise that Layla Murad and Umm Kulthum similarly promoted their public personas as ordinary Egyptian women living up to what were considered authentic Egyptian social values. For example, Umm Kulthum posed for photojournalists’ cameras while feeding a water buffalo, communicating to her fans that she was still an Egyptian country woman. Similarly, Layla Murad publicized private pictures with her children and welcomed the nickname Umm Zaki (Zaki’s mom), underscoring that, despite her fame, she remained an ordinary Egyptian family woman (Fig. 2).
From that early moment, radio became a vehicle for high but positive visibility for women singers. Just as recordings did on national and regional levels, radio broadcasts provided a respectable venue that positively increased and underlined the presence of women’s voices while preserving their satr physically and metaphorically. The voices of these respectable and visible women artists became inseparable from enduring Arab and Egyptian popular culture throughout the Arab world and beyond.
The Microphone: Amplifying Distance
Ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes has discussed the impact of the microphone on the career and legacy of ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz (1929–77), the most important male vocalist in the second half of the 20th century, whose career flourished with Nasser’s regime.Footnote 21 He argues that despite the exceptional status of Halim in Egypt’s soundscape from his emergence in the early 1950s until his premature death in the mid-1970s, his legacy was contested. Stokes attributes this to Halim’s sentimentalism and use of the microphone, and therefore his exit from ṭarab or experiencing intense emotional ecstasy associated with listening to Arab music and singing. The ambivalence toward the microphone goes back to its arrival in the second decade of the 20th century. Singers thought it would be a short-lived fad; some refused to use it lest the audience thought their voice was too weak and needed aid to be heard.Footnote 22 The microphone was one of the early technical innovations that impacted Egypt’s music scene. Microphones had a twofold effect on this generation. Singers with very strong voices lost their advantage and even their careers when the microphone amplified flaws in their voices.Footnote 23 More importantly for our purpose, the microphone allowed more distance between singers and audiences, which was particularly beneficial to women singers. Women singers did not have to be in reachable closeness to male audiences, which might add to her satr and the respectability of the performance locations.
Due to the natural strength and perfection of Umm Kulthum’s voice, we cannot say that the microphone added to her performance. However, some anecdotes about the presence of microphones in her concerts add to the mythical nature of the power of her voice and personality. Many recount how Umm Kulthum rejected the microphone and threw it off the stage when it was installed before her in 1932, a sign that her voice was powerful and loud enough and needed no help for amplification.Footnote 24 In many other accounts, the exceptionally powerful and excessive vibrations of her voice allegedly damaged microphones, but she carried on. Installing microphones at some distance from her protected them and preserved their ability to project her voice to the wide audience in large performance halls. Images of Umm Kulthum’s concerts until the end of her life show that distance (Fig. 3). The circulation of these accounts contributed to the making of her legendary persona.Footnote 25
Umm Kulthum pushes the damaged microphone away in a concert in the 1960s, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBThWtNluF4).
Meanwhile, Layla Murad, who had a soft voice, joined the first generation that benefited from the introduction of the microphone. Microphones crystallized the beauty of her soft voice while affording her a protective distance from audiences during live performances. Before using the microphone, Layla had to sing in the countryside without much distance from the audience, who hurt her feelings by complaining that they could not hear her (some of them also brought their food and drinks to the concerts, which was emotional for her).Footnote 26 The microphone provided Layla Murad and a later generation of women singers with the requisite distance from the audience to maintain a needed degree of respectability both socially and professionally. Layla also joined a cohort of vocalists whose career benefited immensely from sound cinema, a topic I have elaborated on in previous work.Footnote 27 Her first appearance on the silver screen was in al-Dahaya (Victims, dir. Bahiga Hafiz, 1935.) Hafiz had produced and starred in the silent version of al-Dahaya, released in December 1932, then decided to release a talkie version after adding sounds and songs in 1935 (Fig. 4). The new sound version represented the intersection between the emerging movie star–singer, Layla Murad, and the well-established artist, Bahiga Hafiz, a pioneer actress, producer, filmmaker, composer, and teacher. Hafiz hailed from an elite family, and her trajectory underlines how technology, and cinema in particular, was a mixed blessing with regard to the social notion of respectability and satr. Although an accurate biography of Bahiga still needs to be written, what we know about her demonstrates the importance of satr as a social value among upper classes, and how technology played an important, although nonlinear, role in easing the tension between the hypervisibility of women artists and respectability. Bahiga Hafiz, the daughter of a pasha and niece of a prime minister, grew up in a music-loving family that patronized musicians and singers. Her father was an amateur `oud player and embraced his child’s talents for playing piano and composing music. After a short-lived marriage, Bahiga chose to become a professional music composer and teacher and to publish her music. Her work led a popular magazine to celebrate her talent as the first Egyptian woman composer, and run her picture on the cover. Bahiga’s family considered that publicity an embarrassment and shunned her. The family boycott was so severe that her sister refused to shake her hand when they met in public, fearing her husband might divorce her.
A promotion for al-Dahaya, 1935, starring Layla Murad (left from Unknown Past: Layla Murad, The Muslim Jewish Star of Egypt). Bahiga Hafiz (right, https://gate.ahram.org.eg/News/4914602.aspx) in advanced age points to her image as a peasant woman in Zaynab.
Nevertheless, the same publicity attracted the attention of filmmaker Muhammad Karim, who recruited Bahiga to play the lead in his silent film Zaynab (1930). Zaynab was based on a story penned by Muhammad Husayn Haykal, then considered the first Arabic novel.Footnote 28 Bahiga played a peasant woman (fallāḥa) which embellished her visibility, as Mahmud Mukhtar’s statue Nahdat Misr (Egypt Awakening, 1928) and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s novel ʿAwdat al-Ruh (Return of the Spirit, 1933) depicted Egypt and its spirit as a peasant woman (Fig. 4). Bahiga’s family attended the movie in theaters and welcomed her back, an acknowledgment that her visibility as a respected movie star did not violate their values of satr.
Conclusion
Scholars have studied techno-politics and techno-aesthetics in mass-mediated popular culture and political mobilization. Recent scholarship has examined cassette technology as a vehicle for dissenting politics and cultural production of the non-elite in the last decades of the 20th century.Footnote 29 The role the microphone has played in underlining and undermining the talents of certain vocalists in the second half of the 20th century also became a field of inquiry.Footnote 30 I suggest here that we examine the impact of technology relevant to mass-mediated music since its advent in the late 19th century, and how it preserved gender respectability for women’s performance. I do not suggest that each technical innovation equally impacted female entertainers’ careers and social status in exactly the same way, but it did lessen the tension between their high visibility and their respectability. As technical innovations contributed to the transformation of women stars at national and regional levels, music divas honed the skills to frame their public personas as mastūrūn, and technology helped them attain that achievement. I do not suggest that technology was the only reason for their exceptional success, yet this conversation may provide an important examination of the links between material and moral changes in the entertainment industry, class hierarchy and gender satr, and the making of national popular culture. These connections not only are relevant to historical developments but also are intimately linked to current debates in Egypt about new musical genres, such as mahragānāt and Egyptian rap, which rely on machinery rather than the beauty of the human voice, and how those genres disseminate specifically masculine performances that circumvent many social and political restrictions and traditional notions of middle-class taste.
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