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Toward a Class-Based Reading of Egyptian Music and Song

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2025

Clara Wenz Open the ORCID record for Clara Wenz [Opens in a new window]  and
Hanan Hammad Open the ORCID record for Hanan Hammad [Opens in a new window]
Clara Wenz*
Affiliation:
Department of Ethnomusicology, Institute of Music Research, University of Würzburg , Würzburg, Germany
Hanan Hammad
Affiliation:
Department of History and Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA
*
Corresponding author: Clara Wenz; Email: clara.wenz@uni-wuerzburg.de
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Extract

Published in 2009, the edited volume Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia represents one of the most important English-language resources for the study of music’s entanglement in the workings of power and power struggles in the modern Middle East and beyond. In the introduction, the editing author and British Iranian ethnomusicologist Laudan Nooshin identifies three “axes of difference” that organize the production of social divisions and hierarchies in the region: (1) gender, (2) religion, and (3) nationhood.1 Class, although stated as intersecting with these categories, is not explicitly listed. This absence is illustrative of a tendency that can be observed across much of contemporary scholarship on musical cultures in Egypt and the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA)/Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, in which class is regularly mentioned but, in contrast to questions of gender, religion, and nationhood, has remained underexplored.

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Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , May 2025 , pp. 333 - 337
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Nooshin, Laudan, “Prelude: Power and the Play of Music,” in Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, ed. Nooshin, Laudan (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Press, 2009), 18 Google Scholar.

2 See, for example, Gordon, Joel, Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt (Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, 2002)Google Scholar; Fahmy, Ziad, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stokes, Martin, “ʿAbd al-Halim’s Microphone,” in Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, ed. Nooshin, Laudan (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Press, 2009), 55–73 Google Scholar; and Simon, Andrew, Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For a concise discussion of the historical roots of this mode of thinking about class and its relevance to popular music, see Peddie, Ian, “Introduction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class, ed. Peddie, Ian (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 1–4 Google Scholar.

4 Examples include Walter Armbrust, “Popular Culture and the Decline of the Egyptian Middle Class,” Journal of the International Institute 3, no. 3 (1993), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0003.306/--popular-culture-and-the-decline-of-the-egyptian-middle-class?rgn=main;view=fulltext;q1=African+Studies; Beinin, Joel, “Writing Class: Workers and Modern Egyptian Colloquial Poetry (Zajal),” Poetics Today 15, no. 2 (1994), 212 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shafik, Viola, Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class, and Nation (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the ongoing workshops and symposia of EGYCLASS, an international research network for the study of social class in Egypt.

5 Adam Mestyan, “The Institute of Arab Music and the Missing History of Construction Workers,” Duke University, 28 August 2021, https://sites.duke.edu/cairemoderne/2021/08/28/the-institute-of-arab-music-and-the-missing-history-of-construction-workers-%D9%85%D8%B9%D9%87%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D9%82%D9%89-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%8A-%D9%88.

6 Armbrust, Walter, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1996), 66 Google Scholar.

7 Hammad, Hanan, Unknown Past: Layla Murad, the Jewish-Muslim Star of Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022), 32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Danielson, Virginia, The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shannon, Jonathan Holt, Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 46 Google Scholar.

9 Martin Stokes, “Sentimental Gesture and the Politics of ‘Shape’ in the Performances of Abd al-Halim Hafiz,” in Investigating Musical Performance: Theoretical Models and Intersections, ed. G. Borio et al. (London: Routledge, 2020), 185–97; Derr, Jennifer L., “The Dammed Body: Thinking Historically about Water Security and Public Health,” Daedalus 150, no. 4 (2021): 143–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Andrew Simon “The Making and Mourning of Ahmad Adawiya, a Musical Legend,” New Lines Magazine, 7 February 2025, https://newlinesmag.com/essays/the-making-and-mourning-of-ahmad-adawiya-a-musical-legend.

11 Adam Mestyan, “Power and Music in Cairo: Azbakiyya,” Urban History 40, no. 4 (2013): 698. Contemporary literature on Egyptian musical and performance practices includes multiple other examples of music as labor, including the physical efforts that go into the production of musical experiences such as tarab (a term for Arab art music and the kind of musical “enchantment” or “ecstasy” that it is meant to produce); see Seeman, Sonia Tamar, “Sweaty Transcendence and Affect: The Labor of Musical Ecstasy,” in Tarab: Music, Ecstasy, Emotion, and Performance, ed. Frishkopf, M., Reynolds, D., and Marcus, S. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2025), 191-211Google Scholar. There also is the exploitation of independent Egyptian musicians by global record companies such as Universal; see Darci Sprengel, “Neoliberal Expansion and Aesthetic Innovation: The Egyptian Independent Music Scene Ten Years After,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52, no. 3 (2020): 547. As another example, consider the labor that performers of belly dance (raqs sharqī) invest into embodying a boss-like persona to counter harassment and participate in Egypt’s male-dominated night club economies; see Şahin, Christine, Core Connections: Cairo Belly Dance in the Revolution’s Aftermath (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2024), 197 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Racy, Ali Jihad, Making Music in the Arab World: The Culture and Artistry of Tarab (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 31 Google Scholar, 34.

13 Hammad, Unknown Past, 23.

14 Sophie Frankford, “Cleaning Up Shaʿbi: Music and Class-Cultural Divides in Cairo,” Ethnography (2024), https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381241302530.

15 Marley Hanson, “Bulaq: A Pulsing Survey of Cairo’s Underground Sounds,” NOWNESS, 31 December 2017, https://www.nowness.com/story/bulaq-wael-alaa.