The legacy of Oum Kalthoum remains one of the most spellbinding musical phenomena of the twentieth century. By many accounts, her performances achieved something far more transcendent than mere listening pleasure. Across the Arab world—echoing from rooftops in Cairo, lilting through the hush of late-night coffeehouses in Beirut, looping on YouTube playlists in Dubai—her voice endures, commanding reverence with an almost sacred immediacy. The source of this veneration is no simple matter of celebrity. Rather, Oum Kalthoum was the supreme master of the Arabic musical state of tarab—a condition so culturally embedded that Western ears and tongues struggle to approximate it, typically settling on phrases like “ecstatic emotionalism” or “heightened affect.” But tarab is more than an emotional crest or a melodic swirl: it is an experiential metamorphosis, a shared, hypnotic fervor between artist and audience.
A typical evening with Oum Kalthoum’s takht—her small acoustic ensemble—began with a leisurely, maqam-based instrumental prelude. Delicate motifs emerged in unhurried unison, guiding the listeners to relax into the rolling sonic canvas. The music then lightly settled, each phrase coaxing the traditional Arab reserve toward a place of vulnerability. By the time the prelude resolved into a slower cadence, the audience had collectively softened, primed to submit their senses to whatever emotional journey the singer undertook.
Whether her imagined lover stood far or near, cruel or benevolent, her performance swayed between lamentation and rapture.
In that anticipatory hush—like a tavern maiden gracefully entering to pour wine for her expectant guests—Oum Kalthoum began her ascent, weaving her voice into the melodic line and binding it to the ensemble’s steady pulse. In tones laden with shagan, a soulful melancholy, she gave utterance to unquenchable longing, invoked the torment of separation or the sweetness of elusive desire. Whether her imagined lover stood far or near, cruel or benevolent, her performance swayed between lamentation and rapture. She draws melodic lines, and repeats each of them with new ephemeral ornamentations, spun directly from her own voice, and conjures emotional swells. She cries out against forgetfulness, curses the fate that made oblivion so unattainable, and her listeners, enraptured, find themselves intoxicated by that fusion of pain and pleasure—an ecstatic tension that was tarab’s hallmark.
Even as this emotional tension mounts, the audience feels a curious elation—something akin to the sense of watching a distant horizon erupt into brilliant color. Grief and desire become inseparable threads, while Oum Kalthoum’s lyrical improvisations soar above the ensemble’s cyclical motifs. Here, the “dichotomy” of sensuous yearning and near-spiritual elevation finds perfect embodiment, immersing the crowd in a swirl of musical intoxication.
Yet the listeners themselves were far from mere spectators. Once the flames of ecstasy had soared to dizzying heights, the musicians abruptly cease their playing—as though to honor the sacred moment and allow its aftershocks to ripple through the hysterically applauding crowd. In that charged moment, usually, a few figures stand—eyes brimming with tears or fervent longing—and beg Oum Kalthoum to repeat the entire passage. Through plaintive cries, somehow still audible today in the recordings through the crowds’ applauds and sights, of “By Allah! By the Prophet! Again!” the supplicants enact a ritual of masochistic devotion, each word a plea for an intermittent encore.
Unmoved in outward appearance but fully aware of her audience’s trembling anticipation, Oum Kalthoum often turned her face to her ensemble with an almost regal poise. No words were spoken; a simple nod said everything, after which the takht obediently returns to the opening bars. For a moment, disbelief spread among the audience, and it surges into a short-lived rapture, only for them to collapse back into their seats, eager and impatient for the next wave of intoxication. Over the course of 60, 90, and sometimes 120 minutes, her tarab ran its course in repeated cycles of tension and release, a mystical drama of music, emotion, and collective aesthetic submission and enchatenment.
Oum Kalthoum was not by any means the first modern singer to evoke tarab in Arabic music—this state of ecstatic rhapsody had existed in Arab musicology long before and even influenced the flamenco notion of duende. Yet her genius lay in orchestrating a new kind of performative tarab that hinges on a collaborative feat, in which singer, musicians, poet, and audience collectively molded each performance into a singular, unrepeatable event. In her quest for excellence, Oum Kalthoum handpicked the most celebrated, iconoclastic poets, composers, and instrumentalists from across the Arab world, assembling them into a troupe capable of blending spiritual dimension and raw passion together.
Her genius lay in orchestrating a new kind of performative tarab that hinges on a collaborative feat, in which singer, musicians, poet, and audience collectively molded each performance into a singular, unrepeatable event.
In this new form, she grasped that tarab transcended mere performance; its essence was the reception. Thus, the faithful audiences were not called simple “listeners” but sami’a, an Arabic term denoting “those who deeply listen,” to distinguish them from mere music consumers. This audience, now practically incorporated into the performance and subject to active social engineering, participated actively in the music, challenging the ensemble for encores, dissolving into audible sighs and exclamations of bliss, and prompting Oum Kalthoum to channel that energy back into each improvisation and ornamentation. This interaction made the concert arena less a stage than a communal altar—where audience, singer, and ensemble all co-authored the sacramental moment. In Egypt, and indeed the broader Arab world, the brilliance and authority she exuded earned her a more exalted epithet than any mere name: she became known simply as El Set—“The Woman.”
Such experiences of tarab transcend mere musical aesthetics and fuse melody with emotional reality. They did more than arouse a potent feeling in the listener—they invited a surrender of the traditionally reserved bourgeois Arab ego, prompting a full identification with a sensuous superego conjured by the performance. While ordinary singing generally articulates trivial personal emotions, tarab ventures into the spiritual domain, demanding from its performers as much discipline and self-restraint as raw virtuosity. Indeed, the singer and musicians themselves must become vessels of the emotion if they are to transmit it authentically. What makes tarab so compelling is its mimetic essence: it orchestrates a ritual in which audience members are permitted—even urged—to absorb and reflect the same emotional condition unfolding onstage, all without conflict, actively dissolving all conflicts into blissful acceptance.
To label the 1950–1970 era—when Oum Kalthoum soared to prominence—as historically fitting would be a gross understatement. The annihilation of the self that tarab requires, and the eager willingness to partake in this self-negation mirrored the very ethos of mid-century undergirding pan-Arab totalitarian movements like Nasserism and Ba’athism. Just as tarab calls on individuals to subsume their egos into a collective emotional state, so did Nasser’s patrimonial state and Ba’athism’s patriarchal order demand the erasure of personal identity beneath an all-encompassing Arab superego. In essence, and seen politically, tarab served as a mimetic boot camp, training listeners to forfeit their individual wills in favor of whatever the public mind valued or loathed at the moment.
Unsurprisingly, once Nasserism emerged victorious in Egypt, Oum Kalthoum was elevated to the status of official state symbol, displacing Egypt’s first female superstar, the Jewish Layla Murad. In a move both brilliant and diabolical, the Egyptian regime recognized that identifying itself with Oum Kalthoum’s persona would coax the masses into a voluntary surrender: devotion to her music seamlessly bled into devotion to the state, while the state, in turn, provided solace through the warmth of her voice. Oum Kalthoum was a phenomenon that both actively made and was made by the state. Nasser incarnated the archetypal masculine figure, and Oum Kalthoum was the supreme feminine archetype. Hence, Nasserism not only wielded absolute power but also offered itself as the empathic protagonist of a national romanticist drama. In the concert halls, the audience sat to listen to her under large panels declaring faith in the trinity of Arab Nationalism: Unity, Freedom, and Socialism, and on the Arab radio waves of the 1960s, her concerts frequently preceded Nasser’s speeches, ensuring listeners were already wrapped in a communal rapture by the time the leader began to speak, effectively merging Nasser with the mysterious lover for whom the audience longed.
Unsurprisingly, once Nasserism emerged victorious in Egypt, Oum Kalthoum was elevated to the status of official state symbol, displacing Egypt’s first female superstar, the Jewish Layla Murad.
That particular psychic matrix still resonates through the Arab consciousness—especially the Egyptian mindscape—to this day. One cannot listen to Oum Kalthoum’s recordings without feeling a faint stir of nostalgia for the era’s charismatic socialism and the illusions of unity it represented. Those echoes—both emotional and political—are a testament to the enduring mystique of the totalitarian experience: a phenomenon in which music, state power, and collective yearning converge to produce a singular emotional and existential collective condition.
Yet, by the late 1960s, as the luster of Nasserism and Ba’athism began to tarnish under the weight of military defeats and internal repression, many of the restless youth stirring across the Arab world found in Oum Kalthoum a prime target for their cultural rebellion. The same iconic voice that had once emboldened a collective vision of the unity of Arab culture now struck this new generation as maternalism synonymous with state-orchestrated power and the stifling paternalism it enshrined. In the Levant, students flocking to radical political circles openly resisted the staid theatricality of her performances, seeing in them the shadow of a discredited, now reactionary, past. Most famously, Edward Said openly derided Oum Kalthoum’s music. He could barely endure what he considered the “endless wailing”—its languorous repeats, its syrupy emotionalism, and its music’s atonality. (The charge of atonality reflects Said’s personal bias against Arab music, producing a profound misunderstanding of both the modal basis of Arabic maqam and the nature of Western tonality. In the Western classical tradition, tonality typically hinges on major and minor scales, chord progressions, and the resolution of harmonic tension to a tonal center; atonality in that context implies the deliberate absence of any such center, as in the works of Schoenberg or Alban Berg. By contrast, Arab music operates within a richly modal framework, where each maqam possesses its own home note, intervallic identity, and emotional ethos. Microtonal intervals—neither strictly diatonic nor random—help define these modes, enabling subtle melodic nuances. Thus, contrary to Said’s biased assertion, Arab music is not atonal in the Western sense; its modal logic creates a coherent, albeit non-harmonic, center around which the performance orbits. The irony is that while Said’s Western ears, pretending to be Arab, may perceive these quarter tones as unresolved or out of key, the maqam system is internally consistent, guiding melodic development and ornamentation every bit as systematically as any Western tonal center. As for Oum Kalthoum’s “wailings” and “repetition,” an imperfect Western analogy might be the extended bel canto technique in 19th-century Italian opera, where the soprano draws out melodic lines, repeats them with new ornamentations, and conjures emotional heights— however, it was typically driven by the singer’s spontaneous artistry rather than explicit audience feedback, yet achieving an immersive, rapturous intensity akin to tarab.)
Said’s distaste was an echo of that of the generational revolt of the Arab New Left, mostly Beirut-based, who felt that tarab catered to a collective trance, dampening individual critical thought and glorifying a doomed ideology of mass conformity. In these avant-garde circles, Oum Kalthoum was openly reviled and was accused of attaining an artificially designed monopoly over Arab musical high culture solely due to the orchestration of faux-progressive states. In this light, things like her new form of audience-centered performance become merely a psychopolitical tool of social engineering. The sense of belonging and deep harmonization of all conflict becomes merely a tactic for suppressing internal contradictions. What was El Set, the woman, but the subtle shadow of the one supreme individual?
Most famously, Edward Said openly derided Oum Kalthoum’s music. He could barely endure what he considered the “endless wailing”—its languorous repeats, its syrupy emotionalism, and its music’s atonality.
Within this cultural revolt, the Levant saw the rise of Fayrouz and the Rahbani Brothers as a fresher alternative—a music that combined some melodic structures of Arab tradition with the breezy, ephemeral textures of American rock or jazz. This lighter, more versatile form of expression seemed perfectly suited to the era’s anti-authoritarian ethos, ironically represented by the likes of Arafat. Promoted by an expanding network of theaters, festivals, and radio stations eager for something modern, Fayrouz’s songs captured the hearts of a generation disenchanted with the solemnity of state-sponsored anthems. In the eyes of these young revolutionaries, Oum Kalthoum’s stately persona of the older generation felt calcified and remote; Fayrouz projected a looser, more intimate vibe that promised liberation from old-guard aesthetics and a more appropriate soundtrack for the new Palestinian guerilla romanticism of terror than that of the grandeur of statist projects.
Some public intellectuals, such as Hazem Saghiyyeh in Lebanon, even launched frontal assaults on Oum Kalthoum’s legacy, painting her as the operatic expression of the totalitarian machine of the rule of one individual. In Saghiyyeh’s scathing book, her tarab was dismissed as an almost hypnotic device to lull listeners into subservience, fostering an emotional dependency on the charismatic voice of the singer who is really a tyrannical autocrat—a synergy culminating in what is practically soulless communal mass. Whereas the earlier generation had reveled in such communal rapture, the new activists longed for more individualized, even fragmented, self-expression—qualities they discovered in the ephemeral lilt of Fayrouz.
Yet despite this attempt to dislodge Oum Kalthoum from her pedestal, neither side fully triumphed. The culture war was, in effect, totally eclipsed by the post-1973 increasing market liberalization and culture Americanization, primarily of Sadat’s Egypt, that opened the cultural sphere, to the scorn and dismay of the old-guard intellectual elites who once border-patroled the public sphere so militantly, to commercial popular music produced independently from state intellectuals and officials, a process which exploded thanks to newly invented cassette technology. Thus, Fayrouz never became the undisputed champion of a new revolution; her music, too, would eventually be drawn into commercial circuits and apolitical contexts. In the end, both Oum Kalthoum and Fayrouz were assimilated into the broader canon of contemporary Arab culture, each representing a different facet of a shared heritage. Oum Kalthoum’s monumental pathos and Fayrouz’s airy modernism came to be seen not so much as antagonistic forces but as complementary components in a multigenerational musical narrative—one that blended together the ache of nostalgia, the urgency of the sentimental, and the deep emotional romanticist registers that define the last century’s Arab artistic spirit.
What, then, endures of Arab Nationalism, now that its once-monolithic creed has largely crumbled under the weight of reality? Although the ideology itself has faded—undone by military defeats, ideological schisms, and the fragmentation of grand pan-Arab visions—it nevertheless bequeathed a far-reaching cultural legacy that still underpins Arab identity. Modern standard Arabic, shared literary canons, and a pervasive yearning for a collective belonging: all these continue to bear the imprint of a movement that, in its heyday, promised to unite every Arab soul.
Perhaps, then, this lingering spiritual force serves as a gentle reminder that our most profound human longings—love, belonging, transcendence—are ill-fated when placed in the clutches of politics.
Oum Kalthoum exemplifies this cultural transcendence. For even as new power centers like Abu Dhabi and Riyadh arise—representing an ethos antithetical to the socialist, pan-Arab experiments of mid-twentieth-century Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Beirut—they, too, celebrate and revere her memory. Far from being relegated to the museum of Egyptian nationalism, Oum Kalthoum’s music resonates in glittering Gulf capitals and beyond, a testament to the fact that she transcended the very political ideology that once catapulted her to iconic status. Thus, in a twist laden with cultural irony, Oum Kalthoum’s music—once the rousing anthem of a world-shaping revolution—now resonates chiefly as a conservative elegy to vanished eras and a central element in a particular modern Arab conservative sensibility. Where once her majestic timbre heralded the promise of new pan-Arab glory, her voice has transmuted into a touchstone for deeply conservative personal memories and nostalgic melancholy. That same music that fueled lofty dreams of solidarity now lingers as an echo of lost innocence, hinting at the owl of Minerva’s bittersweet realization that visions of Arab unity, while stirring, have largely been eclipsed. More than any political ideology, her voice stands as a living thread connecting disparate Arab geographies and social systems through its sheer emotional gravity—a living echo of the dream of oneness, layered with a nostalgia that transcends borders and time.
Perhaps, then, this lingering spiritual force serves as a gentle reminder that our most profound human longings—love, belonging, transcendence—are ill-fated when placed in the clutches of politics. In the experience of Oum Kalthoum’s tarab, we witness a spark of something purer, something higher, urging us to seek fulfillment not in power struggles or ideological dictates but in art and beauty, the signposts of the divine that surpass any agenda.
