Ottoman History Podcast - Media of the Masses in Modern Egypt

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

with Andrew Simon, Alia Mossallam, and Ziad Fahmy hosted by Chris Gratien | The Egyptian revolution of 2011 is one of the most spectacular examples of how social media has played a pivotal role in political movements of the 21st century. However, in this final installment of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," we argue that the true beginning of Egypt's media revolution arrived with the cassette tape, which for the first time, made it possible for every Egyptian to be a producer rather than a passive consumer of popular culture. As our guest Andrew Simon explains, this veritable "media of the masses" was not only a means of disseminating commercial music. Western pop music and classics of the Nasserist era mingled with new underground music, religious content, home recordings, and personal voice messages on Egyptian cassettes, which circumvented and subverted state censorship. Artists like Sheikh Imam and the poet Ahmed Fouad Negm produced celebrated political satire that defined the sound of the Infitah era, much to the chagrin of state authorities and the commercial recording industry. In 2011, when Egyptians took to the streets to protest the Mubarak regime, Imam's songs along with a century of sound stretching back to the First World War filled Tahrir Square in Cairo, as a new generation produced new sounds of revolution. We conclude our series with reflections from Alia Mossallam and Ziad Fahmy on the sounds of the square in 2011 and what they reveal about change and continuity in Egyptian politics.    « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Chris Creighton. This is our final installment of a four-part series on the sound of revolution in modern Egypt. We started things off a century ago, at the end of World War I, with the songs and sounds of the Egyptian revolution of 1919. By the end of this episode, we'll be in the present, with the sonic memory of the 2011 revolution in Tahrir Square. We'll be joined again by some familiar voices, but first, let's hear from Andrew Simon, author of a book titled Media of the Masses, Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt.

It's not some sort of academic exercise. We have authorities in the present who are actively trying to monopolize the past. And unless we begin to seriously rethink the materials with which we can write history, we're essentially surrendering to those efforts in the present. In the case of Egypt, the National Archives are inaccessible after 1952. And oftentimes when scholars write about the archives, it's very frequently in this context of their inaccessibility, historical research being this matter of national security, documents not being available, being missing, restrictive research clearances. And something that I wanted to do in this story was to think about the

opportunities that all those obstacles bring. And it's a story that I want to tell of this period by looking at all the things outside of Egypt's national archives. One of those things being this realm of popular culture, cassette recordings, films, memoirs, the popular press, all these things that we frequently write off as entertainment that can really change fundamentally how we think about the past. It's tempting to think that the modern antithesis of the state archive is a smartphone. Social media, for all its flaws, has enabled anyone to become a creator and curator of content. We all walk around with a personal archive in our pockets. But if you're

as old as I am, or older, you probably remember a medium that was in some ways even more revolutionary, the cassette tape. It's really for the first time with cassette tapes that an unprecedented number of people can create culture, circulate information, and challenge ruling regimes. So courtesy of cassette technology, all of these people who were solely cultural consumers become cultural producers. And all of these things are taking place at this point in time where local gatekeepers, political authorities, cultural critics, religious guardians want to control the shape that culture assumes and who is producing it. We have, for instance, state-controlled Egyptian radio. This is something that goes back to actually the 1930s, but by the time that cassettes come onto

the scene, we have different committees at the radio, these are well known, that are screening the text to songs. That was called the text committee. And then if they approved to something, artists could record it, then it would go to the listening committee. Then if they approved it, it would go to individual radio stations, would either approve or reject it. Then it could reach a mass audience because people viewed radio as a school, as something that was supposed to craft model citizens. With cassette tapes, you or I, or anyone, could record their voice for the first time and reach a mass audience. And those resulting recordings also entirely circumvent state censorship. We have this office for censorship in downtown Cairo in the 70s that's

off of Asaralaini Street, and they're responsible for screening every single commercial cassette that's produced in Egypt and every personal tape that crosses Egypt's national borders. That office has 15 employees and seven cassette recorders. So this is something that proves to be a complete impossibility. Cassette tapes and their users shatter state censorship. Last thing here, too, is we have this apparatus called public culture. In Egypt, this is an actual mechanism that has an infrastructure where we have culture centers, culture palaces, culture clubs, culture caravans that go into the countryside where we have all these elite cultural figures that are trying to educate and enlighten Egyptians.

Cassette tapes are circulating outside of all these places and reaching an even wider audience. So it's the mobility of cassettes, the affordability and the usability that really infinitely expand the parameters of Egyptian culture and Egypt soundscape decades before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all these other things. It's worth briefly explaining in material terms what a cassette tape is. It's a reel of magnetic tape inside a plastic case. You can record things onto it, and you can play it back. This simple device has seemingly limitless uses, not only for audio, but for video,

data storage. With an audio cassette, you can record yourself, you can record the radio, or anything. You can copy other cassettes, and you can tape over things you don't need anymore, or would prefer to erase. A kid with a dual cassette deck is a totally uncensored radio host, recording artist, DJ, record label, pirate, and archivist all in one. At least that's how I remember it. Which is to say, cassettes are not merely a means of disseminating music, though this is what made them profitable for the recording industry. Yeah, I think one question is what was not circulating on cassettes because we have such a diverse range of content. And when people have thought about acoustic

culture in the Middle East before, it's often in relation to Islamic sounds. But one of the things to recognize is that the same people who listen to Islamic sermons also listen to Madonna. They also listen to Michael Jackson. They also listen to popular Shabi music. And so that was something that I wanted to show in the course of the story. So we have entirely new musical genres. Things like that Shabi music, where we have people performing in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, singing about everyday issues. Those songs are not circulating on state-controlled radio because they're about people's lived realities and they're not trying to mold model citizens. and they're not trying to mold model citizens.

We also have state-sanctioned performers who are on the radio. People like Umm Kothum, Mohammed Abdel-Wahhab, Abdel-Halim Hafez, all of these nationalist songs, love songs, songs that are supporting Egypt's ruling regimes. Those are also moving around on cassette tapes. We have popular jokes. We have personal messages. I mean, this is a period of time of unprecedented migration in the case of Egypt's modern history as a result of the economic opening, the oil boom. Phone lines were very unreliable in the 70s and 80s. People would record cassettes, put them in envelopes, and mail them to relatives in the Gulf, Iraq,

Libya to just stay in touch, to communicate. We have Western music, Madonna, Beatles, Rolling Stones, all that's on cassettes that are widely circulating in Egypt. And then we have religious content that is not approved by religious institutions. So we have people like Sheikh Kesh in Egypt, very popular preacher, is frequently challenging those in positions of power. We have this other guy discovered in the course of the research for the book, Sheikh Antar. He's someone who was a reciter of the Quran. He's banned by Al-Azhar, the preeminency of Islamic learning in and outside of Egypt,

because his Quranic recitations they found to be heretical. Whereas other people found them to be innovative. And so all of these things are moving around on tapes. I'm actually going to be putting all of these in a digital archive later this year. And one of the objectives of that is for everyone, scholars, students, just general people, listeners, to see the wide range of material that really came to shape Egypt's soundscape. Because there's a lot of things that we assume were not there, or that Egypt's acoustic culture shared little in common with other places

around the world, but that simply wasn't the case. And a lot of those cassettes, I'll say, have not made the leap online. So when it comes to Spotify and Remy, these other platforms, so many tapes that I've come across are not present there. And so they also allow different stories to be told about the past. So the song is Hubba Fut Wa Hubba Taht, and it's by Ahmed Adewaya, who's seen as being one of the pioneers of popular Shabi music. This is someone who is born in the 1940s. He learns how to perform not in a music conservatory, like many of his peers, but on Muhammad Ali Street in Cairo.

And then he has this chance encounter with this leading lyricist called Mamouna Shanaoui. And they end up releasing this song called the Sahad Dahambo in 1973. That's about two individuals who are trying to quench their thirst. One of them is a man looking for a lover, and the other one is a baby crying on the ground. That cassette goes on to sell over a million copies, not to mention countless more pirated copies. And it's one of those songs, and Adewiya and others like him that are condemned by critics for being vulgar, for causing the downfall of music, the end of high culture, and the death of taste in Egypt. If all these criticisms sound familiar, that's because we hear all the same criticisms about

Mahraganat music in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. And something that I want to show is that these are not new. These have a longer history. This song is one of those songs that incited the ire of a lot of people. It's simply about a man and a woman who resides above him. And the man is glancing up at the woman in a flirtatious manner and his glances are going unrequited. Many people found this song to be entirely meaningless. Others read into it and saw it as a very astute commentary on growing class divides in Egypt between the haves and the have-nots, the above and the below. Cassette culture also offers up an archive of material that challenges our notion of what cultural production even is. Much of what was recorded on cassettes was entirely personal, recorded for the family, a lover, posterity, or even an audience of one. So I think there's a lot of informal material that are produced by individual people that are not intended for a mass audience that I came across in the course of my work. So people recording family gatherings, house parties, personal

intimate conversations that are intended for love interests. I mean, people making mixtapes along the lines of what they did in the US and other places. I think too, I encountered tapes that were produced by state-controlled recording labels like Sono Cairo that surprised me. So there were a series of cassettes that were directed at children, at Egyptian youth. And these tapes were intended to teach them basic vocabulary words. So I came across one cassette where the words are on the back and it's like rooster, dog, tree. But then there are also some concepts there like admiration for the father.

And so we see these cassettes that are intended to be very educational in nature, aimed at Egypt's youngest demographic. We still have these kind of like enlightening efforts. We don't have the state surrendering to cassettes. We have them trying to mobilize them. But oftentimes, those recordings are not resonating with people nearly as much as what's not on the radio. Cassettes are also this fascinating window onto a particular period of Egyptian history that more or less overlaps with the emergence of cassette technology and the spaces in which

it's circulating, and that's the period of infitah, or economic opening of Egypt. And this is something you point out in the book, that normally this is a period of history where all we get is sort of the Cold War geopolitics and economics side of the story that you might encounter in a modern Middle East history textbook. So kind of looking from below through this medium of the cassette, what do we learn about this period that we don't get in that textbook story? Sure. So I think that this is a very dynamic time in Egypt's recent past. And it's often a time that in addition to there being solely a top-down focus around economic policies, it's so often just a precursor to the Arab Spring when it comes to those textbooks. It'll be a page

in those broader stories. And so that's something that I wanted to make a book in its own right. And I think when people focus on this, it's usually through these very watershed moments, like the 1973 war, or through authoritarianism. How did Nasser, Mubarak, Sadat consolidate power? Or through religion, the Islamic revival. And so I wanted to shift it to more mundane affairs, to people challenging people in positions of power, and then moving from the religious more to the profane. And two central things here are the economic opening that you pointed out and the oil boom. And one of the things that happens is the dawn of cassette culture directly coincides with the dawn of mass consumer culture.

And one of the things that became clear to me was how the economic opening, which is so often spoken about in terms of funding coming from the West to Egypt, is just as much, if not more so, about Egyptians working around the Middle East against the backdrop of the oil boom. And so the advent then of cassette culture, part of it is transnational in nature. We have an unprecedented number of Egyptians who are going abroad in search of higher wages, going not just to the Gulf, but also to Iraq, Libya, elsewhere. And one of the things they do, and this has been talked about before, is send money back home, remittances. One of the things they do, and this has been talked about before, is send money back home. Remittances. One of the things that's been less discussed is they also buy things and bring

them back home. And two of the most common purchases were electric fans and dual cassette players. And so we have then international companies like Samsung, Toshiba, Sony, with these licensed agents outside of Egypt, where people are making these purchases, bringing cassette technology back. And then eventually, those companies establish a presence in Egypt over time. And with this new cassette culture, a new consumer culture, one of the things that happens, one of the stories I tell, One of the things that happens, one of the stories I tell is that all of a sudden we have this idea of the modern home. And that is not about the people in the home.

Because so often when we think about modernity, it's about the effendia or about education, people becoming educated. Here, it's not about occupants. It's about objects. What objects end up in people's homes? And one of the most coveted commodities is cassette technology. And so I want to tell this story also of how commodities become coveted in the first place, what can leisure teach us about the Middle East in this period. And so I'm trying

to offer a cultural history of a story that we perceive to be primarily economic. And so one of the outcomes of the oil boom and the economic opening is we have more Egyptians with greater purchasing power than what they had prior. And with that purchasing power, it manifests in a number of different ways. So one of the things that happens is more people than ever before come to exert influence on the cultural arena. Many Egyptians open cassette recording labels. People that are coming from different fields prior, everything from like carpentry to plumbers. I mean, all you need is two cassette radios to record a cassette and then copy it. And so we

have all these people then contributing to the creation of Egyptian culture. In addition to that, one of the things that also gains ground at this point in time is smuggling as a popular practice. So a lot of the times I think when we think of smuggling in Middle East scholarship, it's about narcotics. The smuggling of hashish, heroin, all these drugs, that was happening, but that's only a tiny fraction of what people were actually smuggling. People are much more likely to smuggle a pair of shoes or a cassette player than a kilo of cocaine. And so that's something that I also wanted to show in this project where we have these vast black markets that are also taking off. And

then we have not only players traveling across Egypt's national borders, but also cassette recordings themselves that end up in Lebanon, Europe, the US. And that's where we see one of the artists, Sheikh Emem, who's recording these informal cassettes. These are cassettes that are being produced by people that are attending his apartment, by people that are going to political protests. And then they're ending up in all these different places, traveling near and far and completely bypassing cultural gatekeepers and political authorities. Some of the most celebrated Egyptian artists from the last decades of the 20th century operated entirely within the world of the cassette underground.

Foremost among them is a figure known as Sheikh Imam. ground. Foremost among them is a figure known as Sheikh Imam. Born in Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo, during the last months of the First World War, Sheikh Imam came of age during the interwar period we discussed in episode 2 of this series, and emerged as a voice of dissent during the 1960s, the heyday of Nasserism, which we discussed in episode 3 of this series. After Egypt's military defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967, Sheikh Emam's music was banned and he was imprisoned or detained repeatedly, yet this only added to his popular celebrity. Sheikh Amman is someone who relies exclusively on non-commercial cassette tapes because he's someone that is disdained by cultural critics and by ruling regimes. His life's almost bookended by two revolutions.

So he's born the year before the 1919 revolution, when Egypt is being occupied by the British. And then his songs are revived during the 2011 revolution after he passes away in the mid-90s. I mean, he's someone who comes from a small village. He loses his sight shortly after birth due to an eye infection. He receives this rural medicine administered by his mother that accidentally blinds him. He goes on to memorize the Quran. He thinks he's going to pursue Islamic studies in Cairo, but he's kicked out of his Islamic institute for listening to the radio, even though what he was listening to is Quranic recitation. The problem was the radio at the time was viewed as this gateway to unbelief and immorality,

irrespective of what it was broadcasting from the perspective of that institute's officials. So a man was living at that institute. And as a result of his expulsion, he's then made homeless. So he spends his nights then at Hussain Mosque, Al-Azhar, across the street from one another to this day in Cairo. And then he ekes out a living by reciting the Quran at people's houses, at local events. He ends up meeting this quite well-known music instructor. Shortly after that, he learns how to play the oud. He hears another blind man

playing the oud at a party, and that inspires him. Well, if he could do it, I can do it. And then he ends up meeting Ahmed Fuad Negam, who is this poet writing in colloquial Egyptian Arabic in 1962. And then they form this very dynamic duo that goes on to challenge the official stories that are being told by the Egyptian government. And they do this by entirely going around state-controlled radio, using those informal cassettes. Humameen is a good song through which to discuss that theme. Do you want to tell us a little bit about it? to discuss that theme. Do you want to tell us a little bit about it?

The inspiration for this song is the 1977 bread riots in Egypt. This is when we have Anwar Sadat cut subsidies on bread and other staples resulting in protests. And one of the things that happens is Ahmed Fouad Negam writes this song, Who Are They, Hum Mam Min, and then Imam sets that song or sets those lyrics to song. He composes it and this was what he did with a lot of other poems belonging to Nigam and also other people. And one of the

things when it comes to the lyrics of that song is they are echoing contemporary slogans that are also being chanted by people in the course of those protests in 77. Imam draws this very clear divide between the people and between those in positions of power. So at the beginning of the song we have this هممين واحنامين هم الأمر واصلتين هممين واحنامين احنا الفقر ومظلومين beginning of the song we have this, who are they and who are we? They are the rulers and the emirs. Who are they and who are we? We are the poor and the oppressed. So he's immediately siding with the people. And then he goes on to give all these other examples. They sport the latest fashions. We live seven to a room. They eat pigeon and chicken. We eat beans until becoming nauseated.

They ride in airplanes. We die in buses. Their lives move along pleasantly. They're one group and we are another. one group and we are another. And these lyrics resonate with various Egyptians who are encountering them in person and on cassettes, especially the Egyptian and Arab left more broadly. We often think about the 70s as this moment of the Islamic revival. The Arab left continues to endure, weakened, but Imam is really keeping this flame of resistance alive through songs like this in this moment. And this number is then revived in 2011. So even on the very first day of mass demonstrations, protesters take to the square in Cairo, and they perform this song. And one of the things that's so fascinating about this is they not only perform it verbatim as Imam sung it, they even in some cases altered the lyrics. So rather than saying, we live seven to a room,

they end up saying, we live 10 to a room. Conditions have worsened even since the 70s. And so all these songs continue to hold meaning and to resonate with people. And this is one of many songs that countered the official stories of what was happening. Because the bread riots, from the perspective of Sadat's regime, they refer to it as a thieves' uprising. Very different than the story that Imam is telling here. Sheikh Imam's music and the poetry of Ahmed Fuad Negim spoke to the lived realities of

ordinary Egyptians, but they were also poignant in their discussion of would-be high politics. discussion of would-be high politics. One of their signature songs, Nixon Baba, used an official visit of Richard Nixon to critique the government of Anwar Sadat. One of the things that I wanted to consider is how popular culture, which we often see as something that solely complements what we already know about the past, how it can radically change our understanding of what we think we know. And so I look at this single event, Richard Nixon's visit to Egypt. This is something that happens in the summer of 74. This is during the throes of Watergate. Nixon undertakes this broader tour of the Middle East to try to bolster his popularity. And also it's a tour for peace in the region.

And the first stop is Egypt, where Sadat welcomes Nixon with open arms, addresses him as his guest of honor, rolls out an actual red carpet at Cairo's airport, which he shuts down. Nixon is greeted with this honor guard. They get into this jet black Cadillac. They're part of this convoy of over 200 vehicles. They make their way to Oba Palace. They're traveling down roads that have been straightened, especially for that occasion. They're passing under archways that had been created solely for it. And people are holding up these black and white posters of the faces of Sadat and Nixon

that were mass produced and distributed ahead of time, and also cheering things like, welcome Nixon to a man of peace. We trust Nixon. Long live Nixon. Long live Sadat. And these are chants that they're hearing from sound trucks that the government had placed there that are leading the people and saying these things. So we have this office, an official office in Cairo, that is intended to coordinate Nixon's popular reception. And so there are all these parades. Cairo, there's a train ride from Cairo to Alexandria that stops at these different stations where people welcome and dote on Nixon. And then there's another parade in Alexandria once they reach there. So Imam and Nigam are hearing and are seeing all of this. And Nigam

pens this poem, Nixen Baba, and then Imam sets it to song. And it offers a very different story of what's taking place. One of the things that it does is it immediately connects Nixen to Watergate. It says, Welcome, Father Nixen, O you of Watergate. Nixon to Watergate. Says, welcome, Father Nixon, O you of Watergate. And this is the exact connection that Nixon wanted to erase by undertaking this visit to B. Gimwin. So, Imam then, well aware of Nixon's shattered credibility, says that he's going to refuse to greet him out of ignorance. And one of the things that he does in the song is he offers this complete counter-narrative of Nixon's local reception. And so one of the things he does is he compares the parades taking place to a Zephyr, to a wedding procession. And in this wedding procession, Nixon plays the part of a groom who won married as a last resort.

And if you listen to cassette recordings of Nixon Baba, some of them have ended up on YouTube, SoundCloud, other places. The song's also been reinvented by other artists like Mariam Saleh, well-known independent artist in Egypt, who turned it into an electro rock version of it during the revolution. We hear Imam audibly spit on Nixon after he says this line. They also compare it to a czar or an exorcism ceremony in which Sadat's officials are compared to spiders and convulsing whores. And Sadat is leading this exorcism. He's at the head of the parade. And so all of this imagery would have been scenes with

which most Egyptians would have been familiar, but it completely undermines the story that Sadat wants to tell. And this is something that undermines it not only at the time, by traveling on tapes to different places. Imam is permitted to travel abroad for the first time in 1984. He goes to countries like Algeria where he performs the song and the audience is singing along with him because they encountered it on cassettes before he even arrived. But it also undermines the story the government wished to tell in the long term because this unofficial anthem almost becomes the official anthem of this event. And this is an event that Sadat wants to forget because Nixon,

after he undertakes this tour, he resigns in the White House a matter of months later in 1974. Sadat in his memoirs, In Search of Identity of Bethlehem when he's writing on this, he devotes a single sentence to Nixon's visit. He says, Nixon came to Egypt and that preceded a terrible whirlpool of political turmoil in the US. This is something he wants to forget, but this song doesn't allow him or doesn't allow other people to forget. And this is one of many narratives that do this. They also perform a song that counters the story about another president's visit. The very next year, Valéry Jacquard d'Estaing comes from France. There's another song d'Estaing that flips the script on that visit. Same thing with the bread riots. Same thing with the 1967 war.

And so that was something that I wanted to unpack when it comes to stories like this. عزموك فقالوا تعالى تاكل بمبون وهريسة قمت انت لابنك ضيق صدقت ان احنا فريسة طبتلي حقوق بالذفة يا عريس الغفلة كفة هاتوشك هدلك دفة شو باش من صحب البيت None of what we've described is totally unique to the history of Egypt. But Simon argues for the special importance of the cassette in Egyptian history, or put differently, that Egypt should occupy a singular place in the global history of cassette culture.

One thing to recognize is that cassettes were not replaced by CDs in Egypt. So we have CDs coming onto the scene in the 90s, but due to them being significantly more expensive, CDs, we've all encountered this, I'm sure, scratch, and then they are not usable anymore. So due to their lack of durability, their lack of affordability, cassettes continue to be a major medium into the 2000s from the 1970s. It's really the USB that diminishes the popularity of tapes. That said, even when I was in Cairo as recently as trips in 2017, 18, beyond that, I would go to cassette shops, which continue to exist.

And I was even speaking to the owner of one of them where there's thousands of tapes. This is in Khan al-Khalili outside of the Hussein Mosque. And tapes containing popular music, all the genres we discussed. And I asked him, do people still buy tapes? And right after I asked him this, this guy came up and was like, I want to buy 40 cassettes. And he was coming from the countryside. And this was unscripted. And so people are still purchasing tapes. And then there's certainly that nostalgia factor. And I think one of the things that that ties into is cassettes were so meaningful to so many people due to their usability. The fact that it was not just something like the radio where you were listening to what was being broadcast to you. You had very little say over what you were hearing. Sure,

you could change the station, but you still only heard a limited number of voices. And so with cassettes, people could actually make a playlist for the first time. They could record those family gatherings. They could record concerts they went to. They could record in cinemas for films they attended. They could record whatever they wished. in cinemas for films they attended. They could record whatever they wished. And I think that that agency that cassettes afforded also inspires people to remember them quite fondly because oftentimes it was those people doing the recording and not just of music, but of those personal messages. And even in the course of like after this book came out, one of the things that was most fulfilling to me is Egyptians writing me and recalling the cassettes that they created,

which in many cases they even still have at a point in time where it's difficult to find a cassette player, yet alone a CD player. I mean, even think of our computers. All this is to say that in 2011, cassettes and the memory of the culture they made were very much alive. The inspiration is the 2011 Egyptian revolution. And so a couple of weeks after graduating, I flew from North Carolina to Cairo for this intensive Arabic fellowship that was based on the American University in Cairo's old campus, directly on the border of Tahrir Square. And that fellowship coincided with Mubarak's downfall, which I

witnessed firsthand during those mass demonstrations. And that's what piqued my interest in sound, in media, and in pop culture in the first place. So new artists that were coming onto the scene that became known in the course of the revolution, people like Rami Asam who were singing the chants of protesters, setting them to song, but then also the revival of older performers, not only people like Umm Kothum who are quite well known, but also Sheikh Emem. So hearing his songs being performed in demonstrations decades after his death and thinking about why are these numbers still continuing to resonate with people. We also have poetry that's being performed in the square. We have all the slogans that are being chanted in

these rhyming couplets, all these things that could be easily memorized to the point where children walking in front of my apartment in Munira off of Asar al-Aini or calling for the downfall of a regime. So all of these acoustic elements, beyond just what I was seeing with my eyes, were what captured my curiosity. In the span of less than three months, protests that erupted in Tahrir Square of Cairo and spread throughout Egypt succeeded in forcing then-President Hosni Mubarak, In the span of less than three months, protests that erupted in Tahrir Square of Cairo and

spread throughout Egypt succeeded in forcing then-President Hosni Mubarak, who had held power for almost three decades, to step down. And the protests produced a seemingly endless volume of content. Blurry cell phone recordings captured by often anonymous protesters and witnesses mingled with journalistic coverage on Al Jazeera, BBC, and CNN. To the outside world, the media spectacle was part and parcel of the revolution. Some analysts even got it backwards, explaining the protests as if they were caused by social media. However they come to understand the revolution, future historians will have lots of audiovisual sources to work with.

Beyond the endless mess of links on YouTube, there are organized projects like 858, an archive of resistance, that have worked to collect and properly tag videos from the period. It's a trove of protest footage, speeches, interviews, oral history, and of course sound. Tahrir produced an avalanche of sound that we can listen to today. But what did these sounds mean to the people who experienced them? What place do they occupy in their memory? And what sounds echo back in their heads when they think of that time a decade later?

I chatted with our sonic historians, Ziad Fahmy and Alia Mosallam, about what they remember from the time. And then, I compared what they said with what's available online. They actually covered a lot of the defining sonic elements, as well as a few things that you won't really get from the videos out there. So I'm not going to play any of the sounds from the online collections. We'll leave things to your imaginations, aided by our capable narrators. What really resonated with me initially was the non-vocalized sound. In particular, in the first 18 days, the whole battle of the camel and etc. Many of the protesters were fighting

back against the police and some of the thugs that were hired by the police. And what I distinctly remember, sort of the noises of people chipping away at the sidewalks in order to get literally ammunition and rocks to throw at the police. But also they would take away a lot of the metal police barricades and they would beat against them with wrenches and make other noises to sort of encourage people to fight on against the police. It's more of a moment where it just touches at the core of the violence that was ongoing. There's a particular siren. I don't know if it was a siren of the Amn-Markezi state security vans or ambulances or the fire engines, but there's a siren that the slow siren

of some of some sort of vehicle that was coming in that that was happening between the 25th and the 28th and i wasn't there and and so but the images of the the tear gas and the people suffering really you can imagine how uh it was obviously a multi-sensory experience. If I'm in a protest in Germany, for instance, and I start to hear fireworks, or at one point, like in an environmental protest, I heard tear gas canisters being shot, and I just couldn't control like my growing panic, even though I didn't, I might not have had that reaction in 2011, but it just, it throws you back. Also in the middle of a revolution or a large crowd, the reverberations of all the different noises that are there among the peoples that you're almost touching shoulder to shoulder,

certainly has an effect. And that would, you know, not just memorable, but it sort of gives you a courage to go on and move on in that particular period at that time. Just remembering what it's like to open your mouth, to chant something and to hear it in tens of thousands of voices. This is such an incredible experience. I think it's what makes a revolt or revolution revolution this sense that you're with people something has to be chanted or sung even if it's charged you know something has to be said in unison just to know that you're part of something bigger on the 25th of january there was an attack on the square after midnight and then we sort of ran into the streets of downtown and there was a significant group that was in like

one of these side streets in bebelu it was dark we were in a very narrow street and all the all the buildings were dark and then people started chanting you know families or people come come together it's freedom we're calling for freedom for you and us and i remember like lights opening sporadically and in the building and i remember how okay we were a number we're more than 10 but we were not huge but because it was the streets were so empty and it was such a narrow street it echoed so loud that was a very also very significant moment and that comes with remembering the chant when i remember remember those sounds, and when I hear the chants, I also smell things. I smell the tear gas and the streets. And yeah, and I relive the moment. Many of the basic early songs by Rami Assam were basically just early chants

that people were chanting. People who I interviewed in Pursaid, like Tambura and Ishak Mageia, the bands that I had and the singers that I had spoken to in Pursaid were suddenly on the square and they were saying, these are the songs that we sang in 1956 and now we've added a stanza or now we've added extra lyrics

that talk about now. People were also making up songs on the spot and this is something that I heard from Captain Ghazali and people in Suez that they would make up songs on the spot and this is something that I heard from Captain Ghazali and people in this in Suez that that they would make up songs together while they were in the ditches and I couldn't understand how a song could be written collectively and still somehow remembered but I could see it in the making. There was definitely new songs that were made for that revolutionary moment but often in many of the circles

within Tahrir Square, people were singing Said Darwish's songs going back to 1919. People were blaring songs of Abdul Halim Hafez and, you know, from the 50s and 60s like Surah. Surah was always playing. Surah was a very iconic song of the 50s and 60s. And it was about how this is a perfect moment. And we want this picture of us as a perfect people and a perfect moment. And people were singing it again. What's interesting about this is that the reason that these songs are memorable is in part because of the state. Because most of these songs were eventually deemed as

appropriate and nationalist and part of the Torah and part of the tradition of Egyptian music, even though, say, Dervish's songs early on were certainly vulgarized as something new, not really part of traditional classicism. But in time, by the late 1920s, early 1930s, after his passing, they became part of the mainstream and part of the cultural traditions of Egypt and of Egyptian nationalism. And the fact that they were invoked by the people against the state once more, after they were deemed as sort of benign nationalist songs, is very, very interesting, where they sort of they touch the chord. On the day of the 25th of January, when we finally got into the square, and we weren't sure what to do, you know, we finally made it to the square, which is something that had been impossible for the protests for the 10 years before. And there was like this recurrent, eternally recurrent moment of okay, now we're here, what happens now? And people started singing which is an iteration of a song by, you know, Sheikh Imam and Ahmed Fouad Nig would say, you know, we're going to spend the night on the square. Decisions were made in that way.

Sometimes people change the lyrics or it becomes alive at the moment and new songs are born and where you're sort of incorporating some of these elements. So it's very much something that is ongoing and moving and malleable and changes. And that's fascinating to me. On one day, there was a group of people from Nubia and they were chanting,

This was a moment where Mubarak might step down, but Omar Suleiman was in the picture and there was all this confusion. And they were like, you know, going through the crowds with the daf and singing, we've come from Aswan to tell you, neither Mubarak nor Omar Suleiman. And you would see people with Aoud just playing a lot of these very, very still relevant songs. And people knew them by heart because they're being played by state media

and because there were dozens of covers of these songs throughout the ages. And people exactly know the lyrics by heart. There was this incredible chant, something, they were wolves and we were lions. And it was like a call for the street for Mohammad Mahmoud to remember.

And it was so moving, because it just articulated this idea. I mean, this was a battle, like a really bloody, epic almost battle that was taking place in the middle of the city. And there was so much blood spilt. And it was a call for the street to never forget that we fought like lions. I'll never forget that. And you'll never know who came up with it.

I'll never forget that. And you'll never know who came up with it. And it doesn't capture the number of people that died on that day or that week. But it's just something that, I mean, if I'm in my 70s or 80s and someone asks me about that moment, that'll probably encapsulate it for me. I remember when I interviewed Captain Ghazali at some point, he didn't, Captain Ghazali was someone who was part of the band, Wilay del Ord, who were in the canal area resisting from the 50s, and then especially during the War of Attrition period. And he was a poet, and he was someone who used to train people on how to do these street combats.

He was a number of things. But he actually wrote down all the poems and songs of that period and he and he published it himself and i would read i was interviewing him and i would ask him you know like it says the date of the song but i wanted to know the context so what what was the event what was happening when this song was written and he said it doesn't work that way and what he used to do is we used to sit and he used to talk about events and then he would make me read the song slowly and at the end of a song he would say do you understand? do you understand, Osteza? do you get it now? and it's that that you don't

interpret these things you don't say you know so this was about this moment he'll tell you about the moment all you want to hear about it but if you're gonna hear the song you have to feel it and i was very moved at the time but i didn't really understand how much easier but also much more gratifying it is to tell a moment through something that you might have heard during that moment or like a lyric that encapsulate that moment or a sound until after i'd experienced it myself but it was it was very exciting and then it was significant in terms of my research because people were always singing on the square and you know... Sorry, just a moment. I've done a lot of interviews, and that, my friends, is always a sign that it's time to wrap it up. But the century-old story we've covered over these episodes will continue.

It'll go on as long as the feeling of estrangement and the relief of having made it back safe and sound. As long as people are together. as long as they have something to fight for, as long as they remember what it all sounds like, the songs, the chants, as long as they can still hear the echoes of the past. The song is as old as the experience. and sounds from the background, visit our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. I'm Chris Creighton. Thanks for listening.