Umm Kulthum
1898 – 1975 · Egypt
Known for: The voice of Egypt and star of the East
“The voice that gathered a whole world around a radio.”
Biography
Umm Kulthum was born Fatima Ibrahim es-Sayyid el-Beltagi in the village of Tamay al-Zahayra in the Egyptian Delta, the daughter of a village imam and a housewife. She learned to sing by listening while her father taught her older brother Khalid, and she learned from him to recite the Qur'an, reportedly committing the whole of it to memory. At twelve her father brought her into the family ensemble, where she performed in a boy's cloak and a bedouin headcloth, since public singing was thought unsuitable for a girl in the countryside. At sixteen she was heard by the singer Mohamed Abo Al-Ela, who taught her the old classical Arabic repertoire, and soon afterwards by the composer Zakariyya Ahmad, who took her to Cairo. She settled there for good in 1923.
Cairo made her, and she made Cairo listen. Amin al-Mahdi taught her the oud and opened the cultural circles of the city to her; in 1924 she met the poet Ahmed Rami, who guided her reading and in time wrote 137 songs for her, and the composer Mohamed El Qasabgi prepared her first real public success. Later Riad El Sunbati, Zakaria Ahmed, Baligh Hamdi and Mohammed Abdel Wahab wrote for her as well. She recorded for Odeon Records from 1924 and moved in 1926 to His Master's Voice, which paid her roughly twice as much. Her contralto carried long and intricately built songs, made to be extended and varied in performance, among them Inta Omri, Al Atlal, Alf Laila wa Laila and Ya Laylat al-Eid, and she sang religious hymns and classical Arabic verse with the same authority. She appeared in six films, including Weddad in 1936 and Sallama in 1945, and her radio broadcasts gathered listeners from Morocco to Iraq.
Umm Kulthum put her standing at the service of her country as well as of her art. After the defeat of 1967 she toured Arab and European cities under the slogan Art for the War Effort, giving concerts to raise money for Egypt, and she continued until shortly before the war of 1973. Illness kept her from singing at the victory celebrations of that year; she visited the wounded instead and received a letter of thanks from President Anwar Sadat. She died in Cairo on 3 February 1975, and her funeral drew a crowd estimated at more than four million people, the largest gathering the country had ever seen. Her recordings are still broadcast daily across the Arab world, the Umm Kulthum Museum in Cairo keeps her belongings, and the fiftieth anniversary of her death was marked internationally in 2025.