Umm Kulthum: Artistic Agency and the Shaping of an Arab Legend, 1967–2007 by Laura Lohman (review)

In her profoundly interesting first book, Laura Lohman examines the post-1967 career and legacy of Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian popular singer, a transcendent character symbolic of utopian Egyptian and pan-Arab aspirations. Presenting a classic example of how to convey a sophisticated ethnomusicological analysis to a broad audience in the humanities and social sciences, the study demonstrates how useful ethnomusicology can be for the historical study of the state, and how a gifted and politically astute artist is able to use and be used by the state to mutual advantage for the purposes of advancing nationalist agendas in very different eras.

This book will be especially useful for those working in the conjoined fields of popular culture, identity and nationalism, and life history studies of star image-making and audiences. Beyond illustrating the traditional categories of “classical” versus “popular” as “intersecting domains,” it adds a vital contribution to the historical study of music and war. A dense but readable combination of history and ethnography, it also brings ethnomusicology into productive relation with museum and cultural heritage as well as tourism studies, fusing the ethnomusicological and museological literature by paying careful attention to how museums and café culture in Egypt design and produce authenticity so as to celebrate and perpetuate Kulthum’s legacy.

Kulthum’s music and legacy as a living force in the Egyptian and pan-Arab experience past and present is revived through this study for instance in how we are simultaneously returned to Kultuhm’s lament for Abd al Nasir and introduced to the world of Egyptian cassette culture and popular dance. As Lohman relates, today the power of Umm Kulthum is experienced by millions globally, her musical influence extending far beyond the Islamic sphere. For instance, it has become a source of identification by Mizrahi Jews in Israel through Ben Zahava’s adaptations. And, through American Idol–type televised vocal competitions in the Arab world, even gifted non-Muslim Americans have been inspired and enraptured by the emotional and sonic qualities of Kulthum’s vocal art. In such an expanding heritage, this book has a relevance which extends far beyond the confines of any particular discipline and ideally well beyond academia. For example, surely Shakira will read it—or should, considering her use of “Inta Umri” on the Oral Fixation tour in Paris in 2007.

In adding to Virginia Danielson’s study The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (2008) and Scott Marcus’s Music in Egypt: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (2007), ethnomusicologists will find fertile ground here for future in-depth studies of vocalists who have been inspired by Kulthum, such as Ben Zahava, Shakira and the young American Jennifer Grout. More generally, as Lohman introduces in the final chapter, Kulthum’s legacy has a broad comparative relevance for the study of popular Arabic music as regards the crafting of tradition and modernity, specifically in terms of the way in which Umm Kulthumm was able to generate shared ecstasy (tarab) in her audience, bringing us naturally to Jonathan Holt Shannon in Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria, also published by Wesleyan University Press (2006), and trance music more generally [1]. This makes Lohman’s study an additional critical work for anyone interested in tarab music, wherever they might be working in the Islamic world and Arab Diaspora.

The six chapters explore Umm Kulthum’s later career from the time of the Six-Day War in 1967 to her death in 1975, her funeral having been attended by 4 million mourners from all walks of life. Thus the book starts with her work as an already mature artist in a period of performance activism that propelled her into the international arena, where she became a unifying modernist and yet traditionalist icon for the Arab world. Each chapter successively deepens our appreciation for the artist’s...