Republic or Death! (32 page)

It's a few hours after meeting Tarek, and I'm starting to think that every person I'm going to meet in this country will be afflicted by nostalgia for a past time and a past anthem. Perhaps it's because Egypt's recent torment – revolutions, military coups and Muslim Brotherhoods – means people find it's easier not to dwell on today. The reason I've come to Bahaa is to learn about his father, Salah Jahin, and about one of his most popular songs, the brilliantly named ‘Walla Zaman Ya Selahy' – ‘Oh, My Weapon, It Has Been a Long Time'. That song replaced ‘Alsalam Almalaky' as Egypt's anthem in 1960 (the tune of ‘Alsalam' somehow limped on for eight years after the fall of the monarchy). And for the next two decades, it seemed to set the tone for the Egyptians as a people fighting for the whole of the Arab world.

Salah wrote it at a time when Egypt was being turned upside down. In 1952, when he was just twenty-two, a group of army officers ousted the British puppet king, Farouk, and shortly afterwards Gamal Abdel Nasser, a handsome postal worker's son, took charge. He soon started trying to build a socialist utopia while also cracking down on anyone he saw as opponents, notably the Muslim Brotherhood. ‘My father hated Nasser at first,' Bahaa says. ‘When the coup happened, he was of course happy – Egypt had won its independence after three thousand years of foreign invasion – but he saw him as one of those fascists. It was only when Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal that he saw the better side of him: the man who was ambitious for the country, who wanted to make Egypt better. It was then he started to love him and wanting to join his project.'

Nasser's nationalisation of the canal was one of the political masterstrokes of Middle Eastern history. On 26 July 1956, he stood in a square in Alexandria and announced that he was ending British and French ownership of this key trading route from Europe to Asia. ‘The Suez Canal was dug by the sons of Egypt,' he said, going on to claim that 120,000 Egyptians had died in the process. ‘Today we declare that property has been returned to us. It will be run by Egyptians,' he announced, shouting ‘Egyptians' again and again to bring home the weight of what he was doing.

That one speech, replayed on news bulletins worldwide, transformed Nasser overnight: he went from being just another coup leader to the man who could stand up to the old imperial powers and win, an icon not just for Egypt, or the Middle East, but for the whole developing world. Britain and France weren't too pleased about the move, though, to put it mildly, and so conspired with Israel to retake control. Just a few months later, Israel invaded the Sinai peninsula – where Moses is meant to have received the Ten Commandments – and as soon as they did, Britain and France sent several hundred warships to guarantee the canal's safety. Egypt quickly agreed to an American-backed ceasefire, but Britain and France eventually bombarded Port Said, which sits at the northern end of the canal, and sent paratroopers in to capture it. They expected the city to rise up against Nasser, but instead found themselves fighting practically every one of its residents. They only withdrew after America basically ordered them to do so.

It was in the middle of this crisis that Salah Jahin came into his own. ‘He was a young man at that time, twenty-five maybe, and like everyone he'd become very patriotic and enthusiastic about everything that was happening,' Bahaa says. ‘So when the invasion started he wanted to go and fight. But he looked like me' – Bahaa points at his stomach – ‘and they told him, “You're fat. You don't have the physical fitness. You can't fight.” And he got very angry and said, “Okay, I'll fight with my words instead,” and so, among lots of other things, he wrote this song.'

The words Salah wrote couldn't have been more appropriate for a country that had just been invaded. ‘Oh, my weapon, it has been a long time,' it starts. ‘I long for you in the struggle.' The verses then hammer that message home in every possible way. ‘Who shall protect free Egypt?' asks one, almost guilt-tripping the listener into joining the army. ‘Land of the revolution, who will sacrifice for her sake?' In case that approach hasn't worked, the final verse tries flattery: ‘The people are mountains, seas, / A volcano of anger ready to erupt,' it goes, ‘An earthquake that will dig the enemies into their graves.' Salah's songwriting partner, Kamal al-Tawil, put those words to music that couldn't have been more fitting, its chorus the sort of stirring march you'd expect, but the verses filled with rapid horn stabs, making it feel almost more like a rumba than a patriotic cry. During the war, it (and a couple of other songs about the war) was played on the radio like no other music mattered, sometimes repeated every ten minutes. Four years later, it was still well liked enough – reminiscent of Egypt's defiance and success – that Nasser made it his anthem. (Egypt was actually part of the United Arab Republic at the time, an alliance with Syria. The anthem was usually played with Syria's far less rousing anthem, ‘Guardians of the Homeland', following it straight afterwards.) Its reach even extended outside the country – Iraq, encouraged by Nasser's pan-Arabic message, adopted the music as its (wordless) anthem in 1964.

I ask Bahaa why ‘Oh, My Weapon' was such a success, cherished above all the other songs his father wrote. He initially talks about the words, the passion in them, their drama and patriotism, but then, off-hand, he mentions what I believe is the actual reason. ‘Of course, it was also sung by the greatest female singer in the country,' he says. ‘That helped.' He doesn't add her name, because he knows he doesn't need to. There is only one person it could be. She's ‘the voice of Egypt', ‘the Star of the East', ‘the diva of Arabic music'. Her name's Umm Kulth
Å«
m.

*

You can count the number of famous musicians who have written anthems on one hand – unsurprisingly, really, given that most musicians are either anti-establishment and so might see anthems as an embarrassment to their art form, or they're sensible enough to realise that writing an anthem could easily backfire (imagine writing a song about your country's landscape one minute; the next seeing hooligans shouting it on the news). Haydn is the one name that immediately springs to mind with his melody for Austria's emperor that eventually became Germany's ‘Deutschlandlied' (the fact many people regard it as the world's greatest anthem has, I'm sure, more to do with his authorship than the tune itself). The other name that always seems to grab attention is Rabindranath Tagore, India's great poet and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote the words for both India's ‘Jana Gana Mana' and Bangladesh's ‘My Golden Bengal' (a great tune that strangely sounds like a soundtrack for people promenading along French riverbanks and contains such wonderful, innocent lines as, ‘The fragrance from your mangrove fields / Makes me wild with joy – / Oh, what a thrill!'). But both of those were adopted after his death so it isn't as if he wrote the poems specifically to be anthems. The only other ‘name composer' to come close to writing an anthem is Benjamin Britten, who in 1957 was asked to write one for newly independent Malaysia. However, his effort – each chord drenched in Britishness, despite his attempts to hide it – was swiftly rejected in favour of the melody from a cabaret tune (it's now illegal to play that cabaret tune, ‘Malay Moon', in the country).

Leaving aside classical musicians, you could perhaps make a case for the man who wrote Barbados's anthem. His name is Irving Burgie, and he has sold over 100 million records. But he wasn't a performer; he was a songwriter, responsible for most of Harry Belafonte's hits in the 1950s, songs like ‘Day O' and ‘Jamaica Farewell', and his name has never been written in lights like an actual singer. I visited him in New York once and he was quite happy to admit that even the children who play outside his apartment wouldn't know who he was.

But Umm Kulth
Å«
m, the woman who sang ‘Oh, My Weapon', was an actual superstar. When she walked out of her house, she was mobbed. When she wore a new dress, people copied it. And when she sang, people listened and they cheered and they wept.

Umm Kulth
Å«
m (her name can't be shortened; Egyptians call her the Lady if they want something snappier) was born perhaps in 1898 or perhaps in 1904 – they didn't keep records back then – and grew up in a mud-brick house in a small village in the Nile Delta. She was the daughter of the local imam, who boosted his meagre income by singing religious songs at weddings with Umm Kulth
Å«
m's brother and a nephew. He used to teach the boys in his spare time and Umm Kulth
Å«
m secretly listened in, then copied them ‘like a parrot'. When her father finally heard her sing, he was so shocked by the strength of her voice – she was a girl of about five – that he decided to teach her too and eventually began to take her along with him to weddings, where she initially sang disguised as a boy.

The novelty of this small girl who could sing better than a man (the disguise wasn't a very good one), and who could recite the Qur'an better than her father, ensured she was soon not just doing weddings, but private concerts for Egypt's richest families. Her father was gradually able to make ever-greater contractual demands – for transport, for refreshments, for money. He started managing her almost like a pop star and she soon moved into Cairo's theatres, into recording studios and into films, until, by the 1940s, she had sung herself into becoming the most famous person in Egypt, someone the public treasured more than any politician including, later, their president, Nasser. Her incredible – and incredibly long – songs of love and longing were inescapable, as was her face, every newspaper seemingly filled with photos of her in her trademark shades (she was sensitive to light). She was so popular that in 1946 one of the king's uncles even proposed to her, thinking that the rest of the royal family would surely see her as a suitable bride. They didn't. To them, she was still a common singer, one from the Delta at that, and the proposal was rescinded. Umm Kulth
Å«
m was left distraught.

It's almost impossible to understate just how big a name Umm Kulth
Å«
m was by 1960 when Nasser realised he was in need of a new anthem (he had until then been playing the old royal one under a new name). On the first Thursday of every month, she used to perform a concert, three or four hours long, that would be broadcast live across Egypt and many of its neighbours. Millions tuned in and there are tales of generals cancelling military manoeuvres just so they could listen, and of politicians giving speeches in the middle of them only to find out they got so little attention they had to pretend they had never happened and repeat them the next day. She was the sort of singer whom people loved to gossip about, and other musicians loved to complain about (she was once blamed for the death of a rival in a car accident).

You could say, then, that Nasser choosing one of her songs to be his anthem – and Umm Kulth
Å«
m accepting – is surprising; rather as if in 1958 President Eisenhower hadn't just drafted Elvis into the US military but asked him to record a new version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' while he was there. But there's a crucial difference. Egypt's music scene at that time was unlike anywhere else – a place where musicians really wanted to write patriotic songs (which they called anthems), swept up in the fervour of the time just like everyone else. They were also used to their songs being used for political purposes. During the Second World War, for instance, Germany, Britain and Italy all tried to commission Egyptian musicians to record songs that backed their cause. And after the 1952 revolution, most musicians raced to write songs backing it (Umm Kulth
Å«
m literally so, rushing from her summer house back to Cairo and recording a song called ‘Egypt, Which Is In My Mind and In My Blood').

Patriotic songs went on to be written about practically all of Nasser's policies. There were ones celebrating his nationalisation of the Suez Canal and songs celebrating his plan to build the Aswan Dam every bit as patriotic as ‘Oh, My Weapon'. Egypt became a country where musicians were actually expected to produce these songs. From 1960 onwards, for instance, Salah Jahin and Kamal al-Tawil wrote a song every year for the singer Abdel Halim Hafez to perform on Revolution Day. One year they decided they didn't want to do it, and were told they'd have their passports confiscated if they didn't change their minds. By then, Nasser had realised music could be a weapon for him – to help increase his popularity and that of his policies – and he made sure all such national songs were promoted, and also that he was photographed with stars at every possible opportunity, the stars more than happy to benefit in return. Given such propagandist motivations, maybe it's not such a surprise that Nasser chose one of Umm Kulth
Å«
m's songs to be Egypt's anthem rather than choosing some 200-year-old poem, or announcing a nationwide competition to find something suitable. Maybe the real surprise is that no other leader has done the same.

*

In the middle of his newspaper office, Bahaa lets out a big belly laugh. ‘He did at least become a better father after that,' he says of his father Salah. ‘I never saw him before then.' We're talking about the Six Day War of 1967, an event you wouldn't think would generate any kind of positive response in Egypt. That year, Nasser got reports that Israel was deploying troops on the Syrian border (it wasn't) and started to make increasingly aggressive statements pledging to ‘exterminate [Israel] for all time'. He was probably just playing to the gallery, but Israel couldn't be sure that he wasn't being serious, and decided to strike first. On 5 June, at 7 a.m., its entire air force took off; half an hour later, Egypt's didn't exist. Within, yes, six days, Israel had taken the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, Jerusalem and the whole of Sinai. Nasser was never the same again – he died of a heart attack three years later – and nor was Bahaa's father. ‘I didn't know him very well as a young man,' Bahaa says. ‘He lived in the night with his friends. He was never home, always out smoking and drinking and writing. But 1967 hit him in the heart. He was not the same man who loved life and loved being with people afterwards. That was finished. He became a man who stayed at home and never left his study unless he had to. That's the Salah Jahin I know intimately.'