It took Umm Kulthum time to find her feet in the big city in the early 1920s. Freed from the limitations of gender, her talent shone and she attracted the interest of noted musicians, who invited her to Cairo. Her father dressed her in a boy’s coat and black Bedouin headdress, leaving only her eyes and mouth visible. ![]() Joining the family ensemble, her powerful voice proved a novelty but also, as a woman performing religious songs, provocative. Her father supplemented his income by singing religious songs with his son and nephew, and his daughter would mimic them, later reflecting that she first learned to sing “like a parrot”. ![]() Umm Kulthum was born in a Nile delta village in about 1904 to an imam and his wife. ![]() ![]() It responds to a question posed by the ethnomusicologist Virginia Danielson, who wrote a biography of Umm Kulthum: “Is it possible that 50 years in Arab societies, where women appear to outsiders to be oppressed, silent and veiled, could be represented by the life and work of a woman?” And not just a woman, but one whose possible lesbianism and rejection of gender norms raised a few eyebrows in her lifetime. The musical depicts Egypt during a period of cultural fertility and seismic sociopolitical change.
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