Ottoman History Podcast - The Politics of Street Sounds in Interwar Egypt

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

with Ziad Fahmy hosted by Chris Gratien | During the interwar period, the recording industry reshaped Egyptian culture and politics through music. But as we discuss in part two of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," everyday sounds of the city are no less part of Egypt's political history. As our guest Ziad Fahmy explains, writing sonic history requires listening to the sources with ears attuned to the sentiments and sensibilities of past people. Together, we listen to a early recording of Egyptian street sounds and explore the world of sound that awaits within the textual record, focusing on how class dynamics played out on the soundscape of Cairo and Alexandria. We also consider how the rise of a new medium, radio, began to reshape the sonic life of ordinary Egyptians during the interwar period, paving the way for the media revolution of the 1950s and 60s.    « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman History Podcast, and I'm Chris Grayton. Cairo is one of the world's largest cities. Over 20 million people live in its metropolitan area. Not unlike New York City, New Delhi, Paris, or Istanbul, it's a densely packed place where peace, quiet, and privacy can be elusive. A few years ago, a global study of noise pollution made headlines in Egypt when Cairo came in at number two worldwide. With daytime noise levels averaging about 85 decibels, the rough equivalent of a blender continuously running nearby,

the New York Times once described 21st century Cairo as a city where you can't hear yourself scream. Cairo's been a big city for a long time, but its modern soundscape is dominated by noises that didn't exist before the 20th century. So what did it sound like a century ago? In this episode, we'll explore this question with a pioneer in the sonic history of modern Egypt, Ziad Fehmi, who teaches at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. But yeah, I'm not only in upstate New York, but I don't

live in Ithaca proper. And so my soundscape involves a lot of coyotes. And yeah, it's 10 p.m. That's when the coyotes start. And I love it. You know, so I might become a farmer or something if I stay here a little bit longer. Well, you get to have the best of both worlds then, as long as you keep going back to Egypt regularly. Exactly.

Yeah. Get my fill of all the different street sounds. Yeah. Come here and listen to the coyotes and wild turkeys. I actually grew up about an hour's drive from Ithaca in a quiet neighborhood called East Syracuse, or known locally as The Village. It wasn't a village in the agricultural sense, but our garage was a former barn, and the only thing between us and coyote country was a bunch of highways. Up until my college graduation in 2005, I'd never really left East Syracuse for more than a few days. I'd never even been on a plane.

But that fall, I went to study Arabic at the American University in Cairo. And having never been to a place with an intense urban experience, I quickly fell in love with the city. In retrospect, it was the basic features of any large city that made it such an exciting place for me, and the noise and commotion were integral to that. For me, Cairo was the coolest thing I had ever seen or heard. It certainly didn't feel like a blender running constantly in my ear for an entire semester. As Ziad Fahmy explained in our conversation about his latest book,

Street Sounds, that's what sonic history is really all about. It's not about trying to recover the sounds of the past, so much as trying to understand how people felt about them. I think there's a key hurdle to cross, sort of a hurdle of imagination to some extent. And when people write anything, they invoke and talk about all the senses. So there was a bit of methodological glasses that you sort of put on, and you just simply focus on texts that invoke sound. And when you do that, it's really everywhere. And as long as you understand as a good historian that this is not obviously capturing exactly

how the sound sounded like, it's more about how the people that did the writing in the archives or the memoirs or whatever other sources you're doing, how they were synthesizing all the different sensory material around them and writing it down. And I was there looking for, you know, footsteps, really trying to be as open and imaginative as possible. And almost anything that was connected to sound, I sort of took note of. Through the perception of sound, we can understand how Egyptians were thinking about a rapidly transforming city and society. And through the lens of sensory experience, we can get a much more intimate texture of daily life. In many ways, doing a sounded history and also

doing sort of a sensory history gets us a lot closer to the street level. Most of the sources, archival or otherwise, that invoke sound or invoke the senses tend to be written down by people that were right there communicating with everyday people in the streets. Looking through some of the same material that I've always looked at in the streets, looking through some of the same material that I've always looked at in the archives and elsewhere as well, you know, from popular magazines, memoirs, etc. When I start focusing on when these authors invoke the senses and invoke sounds, almost always it was a micro level, street level type of analysis. It definitely helps us also write a sort of a non-elite history. And at the same time, the streets, I think, are one of the few places where all elements of society interact, different genders, classes, et cetera, as opposed to looking at things from the top and from the top down. By examining sensory sources and sound and history,

especially when we get to the street level, we often also see interactions between everyday people in the state. It shouldn't be just about sound. It's really sensory history, and sound plays a part into it. And I think all the senses are interconnected. And it really just enriches history writing, I think. It allows us to know the past in a slightly different way or get to the past using a different path. I've not read really the theory in sensory studies, but visual is the least intimate, actually, when you think about it like mostly what historians use like textual sources they're they're dealing with the least intimate um sensory experience if we can generalize and sound is one of those things that gets us to a more intimate absolutely absolutely yeah and but but again to reiterate the texts have a lot of you know sound in them

we just pay attention to that, it can be very, very enriching. I very much enjoy doing this type of research. Did you have a moment where sound combined with either smell or touch in a way that kind of brought that home for you? Yeah, I talk about that, I think, in chapter three, where I talk about the early introduction of automobiles in particular. And that particular excerpt was from a sort of a satirical magazine. So you have to take it with a bit of grain of salt. The author was describing, this was I think in 1907 or 1908, and describing his first sort of bus ride. And the way that he described it, he invoked everything from the gasoline smell to the reverberation of the car itself with all the passengers swaying back and forth and touching each other because of the instability of the car was moving at higher speed, which he wasn't used to, to the noise of the engine and the noise of the horn. And he put it all together in such a comedic way,

but it had a lot of truth to it. He was exaggerating, obviously, and cursing this automobile invention, et cetera, in a joking manner. But in many ways, he really sort of put it together where all the senses were really at play there. When you're reading through all the different sources that you're reading and you find something like that, it definitely hits home.

So it really resonates. In his first book, Ordinary Egyptians, Ziad Fahmy dealt with the big political developments leading up to the revolution of 1919 and the rise of Egyptian nationalism. And in our first installment of the series on the sound of revolution in modern Egypt, we learned about some of the songs that arose from that context. Street Sounds is also a political history, but it focuses on the everyday politics of class encounters.

And rather than using sources like songs released on phonograph records, it deals with mundane sounds of the city, that while often in the background, are no less subject to interpretation. So let's use our imagination a little bit, and travel back to the 1920s. What if I were trying to make this podcast a century ago? I, an American with a microphone, would show up in Cairo intent on capturing its most authentic sounds. I meet with a government minister who promises to help me record the real, modern Egypt. And then I'm immediately whisked off to a bleak site on the edge of the city where we

spend an hour or so listening to an Egyptian military band marching in formation. Insisting that this is not the Egypt I came to hear, I hire a local tour guide to show me around. We arrange a recording of what I imagine as a more authentic musical performance. An ensemble performing traditional Sufi music to accompany a group of so-called whirling dervishes outside a mosque. Now this is the sound of Egypt. But I want more. I want to hear quintessential Cairo. I want to capture the sounds that you won't hear anywhere else.

And so we cross the Nile River to visit a market where I set up and record a camel getting a haircut. Do you hear the scissors? The men in the market pester the bridled camel to coax it to cry out in discomfort over and over for the microphone, and it sounds nuts. I leave the market exhilarated, having heard something that few Americans have ever witnessed, much less recorded. What I just described was based on a true story. In 1928, the Fox Movietone Company produced the early recordings of Cairo you just heard. American audiences would have been accustomed to moving pictures with voiceover or music, but this was a rare treat, video synced to actual audio recorded on the scene. It was an unprecedented level of realism. Yet what they were presented with was a highly

skewed representation of a foreign country, a military band, a Sufi ensemble, and some camel torture. You can check out the videos yourself in the digital collections of University of South Carolina libraries, but these clips don't tell us much about life in Egypt a century ago. They really only tell us something about the people who made them. However, the last clip in the collection, which you're about to hear, proved incredibly valuable to Ziad Fahmy in writing street sounds. In addition to the sounds I just played, the Fox Movietone crew recorded one other aspect of life in Cairo,

the bustle of a busy commercial street. And in the precious minutes of video and sound contained in the recording, we can hear a lot. Carts, bicycles, cars, shops, conversations, and even crude jokes. When analyzed by a trained ear, these recordings reveal a great deal about interwar Cairo's soundscape. Here's Ziad Fahmy reading from his book, with some of the sonic elements from the recording added to the mix. Shot on December 28, 1928, the unnarrated 15-minute film segment depicts a variety of street sights and sounds in two primary locations, the Camel Market in Mbebe, northwest of Cairo,

and Al-Mu'izzis Street near the Hussein District in Old Cairo. In all the recorded scenes, a large microphone was placed a few feet away from the camera on a four-foot stand by the main street. Some of the pedestrians, street merchants, and carriage drivers are too busy to notice the camera or microphone. A brass shop owner and his customers, for instance, do not show concern and appear largely oblivious to the camera filming them across the street. The microphone easily picks up the sounds of the brass containers and plates as they click against each other when customers handle them.

when customers handle them. Murmurs of conversation between the buyers and sellers can also be heard when no automobiles are passing by, drowning all other sounds with their loud motors and incessant honking. Mostly however, passers-by make sure to be filmed as they casually slow down or momentarily stop and glance up to look at the camera and microphone. The film crew allows some of the crowd to gather around the camera, with the most daring in the crowd performing for the camera. The tourist guide, who was hired by the film crew, shows particular eagerness to dominate these scenes, sometimes shooing away men and women who block the camera's view of him.

At other times, he participates along with others who are performing for the camera by talking to and directing those gathered around him. Comfortable in the knowledge that the American film crew does not speak a word of Egyptian Arabic, he even yells out a dirty joke and later ritualistically trade insults with several men off camera. What intrigues as much as the conversations, jokes, and insults are the other, more mundane background sounds being captured through the microphone. There are plenty of clearly audible traffic noises from bicycles, automobiles, a galloping horse, and donkey carriage and carts, along with a few horse-powered omnibuses as they

attempt to thread their way through the traffic and the crowds of pedestrians. All these sounds complement the steady sounds of conversations, whispers, and murmurs throughout the film. steady sounds of conversations, whispers and murmurs throughout the film. As expected, Al-Mu'izz Street, with all its shops right outside the Khan al-Khalili Bazaar and Al-Azhar University, are bursting with pedestrians and vehicle traffic sharing the same thoroughfare. These communal and competing uses of the streets necessitate yet another layer of various rings, honks, shouts, and even knocks and thumps in order to warn pedestrians to yield or part way for the incoming vehicles. were still not as numerous as animal-powered carts and carriages. When one occasionally passes by in the film, the distinctive roar of its engines drowns some of the other street noises. Before a car can be seen passing in front of the camera, its horn is heard for a full

25 seconds, repeating rhythmically the entire time. And the driver continues to honk as it passes the camera and the microphone, driving away into the distance. In fact, as can be clearly seen in the film, the right hand of the driver never lets go of the horn, which is attached on the outside of the car's door. It is important to be aware that had this camera crew shot and recorded on the very same day

scenes of the wealthier, less densely populated Azbakeya and Ismailiyah districts, with their large sidewalks for pedestrians and much wider boulevards and squares, the sounds of the streets would have been quite different. In these newer parts of Cairo, depending on the time of day or night, the sounds of automobile engines and electric trams would probably have dominated. One of the unexpected sounds for me was the prevalence of bicycle bells,

constantly ringing in both Al-Hussein and the adjacent Al-Mu'izz Street. On paper at least, ensuring that pedestrians were warned of incoming bicycles was important enough to the authorities in Cairo that as early as 1894 they required all registered bikes to have, and I quote, a bell or a horn to alert pedestrians. The noise laws regarding animal-drawn vehicles were less straightforward and somewhat contradictory. Whereas horse-drawn omnibus drivers had to be equipped with, and I quote, a whistle to alert pedestrians and other vehicles, horse and donkey cart drivers must drive their carriages as quietly as possible and have to keep their vehicles on the right side of the road.

Returning to the 1928 film footage, there is no confusion about loudness and noise when it comes to a cart driver and his assistant who can be loudly heard a few seconds before appearing on camera carrying a large kerosene fuel tank on their mule-drawn cart. To warn the pedestrians as they are expertly darting and zig-zagging their way through the crowd, the driver bangs loudly on the tank behind him with a stick and his assistant, sitting to his left, is shouting out to the pedestrians in front of him, Watch out, mister!

Get out of the way, you two! When he passes right in front of the camera he notices the film crew, looks straight into the camera, smiles and yells up quickly to the tour guide in jest. Take us with you Abu Ali, take us so we can work for you. Even though this movie somewhat captures a slice of a 1928 winter day in old Cairo, it is vital to remember that in addition to the specifics of a location, time is obviously a critical component in how a space is sensorily experienced. A useful historicizing exercise is to imagine how the sights and sounds at these very same locations were different in 1880 and in 1950. Some of the factors that came into play in this calculus include population size and density, and whether blaring radios

and noisy trams, buses, automobiles, and motorcycles are absent or present, and in what quantities? Examining a similar scene occurring in the same location, half a century earlier, may provide a fruitful comparison. As we just heard, that Fox Movietone sound recording did not capture a timeless Cairo that perhaps most interested foreign audiences, nor did it capture a static snapshot of Cairo that perhaps most interested foreign audiences, nor did it capture a static snapshot of Cairo's history. In the layers of street sound, we can hear layers of transformation in a rapidly growing city. When Great Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, Cairo was already one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean, at over 300,000 inhabitants. In Cairo terms, that wasn't so big.

At its height during the medieval period, Cairo was probably larger. Over the decades that followed, the city would change very quickly. By 1950, its population was over 2 million. The city would change very quickly. By 1950, its population was over 2 million. And during that era, Cairo grew even faster in terms of total area, with the rise of entirely new districts. Rail and roadways expanded and new bridges crossed the Nile to create new possibilities for movement and connection. At the turn of the 20th century, a Belgian company opened a tramway to link the different neighborhoods, making public transportation an integral part of daily life. The first automobiles and motorized omnibuses arrived in Cairo and Alexandria during the

first decade of the 20th century. Automobile use expanded during the First World War, and by the 1920s, private car ownership was rising among the wealthy class. Urban life was also changing in other ways. Electricity was introduced to homes and streetlights at the end of the 19th century. Cairo was becoming a city that never sleeps, and the pace of life was accelerating. All of these changes were uneven. They affected some areas more than others, and new modes of transportation shared the road with horses and donkeys. Many of the

modern conveniences of the city were only available to wealthy foreigners and the upper classes of Egyptian society. The same institutions that became vital to the modern city would serve as flashpoints of political tensions. Some of the first modern labor strikes and protests in Cairo involved tram and railway workers. There was also a cabbie strike as early as 1907, at a time when there were only about 100 motorized vehicles on the road. In 1919, during the post-war uprising against British rule, trolleys and tram stations became the first target of protesters. Within this context, the soundscape also became a political battleground, namely between two groups,

an ascendant middle class and the urban migrants and machines they feared were taking over. Distinction in general is something that takes place whenever the senses are invoked. In this particular case, it was class that I focused on, but other sensory historians have seen race play a part. And again, it's still distinction that takes place. And often people, that's what people do. So I want to ask more about sort of one of the main arguments you make about how class distinction is being worked out through the street sounds, through the sound in the cityscape. I don't think listeners will be surprised that the elite try to control all sorts of expressions, outward expressions of what they see as, say, the masses. But in some ways, sound has its particularities as opposed to maybe other

dimensions of this that we could think about. What was interesting was that it wasn't necessarily the elites, though the elites certainly do that. But it was most of those that were really crusading for more silence were the middle classes. And in many ways, I think it's because of their positioning, especially the upwardly mobile middle classes. And in many ways, they were trying to sort of prove their middle classness and potentially their eliteness as well in the future. And so they were the ones that typically made the loudest voices in the newspapers, etc., complaining about street merchants, loud radios, etc. And often it didn't necessarily lead to laws, but sometimes it did. So there were definitely laws on the books against beeping the car horn too loud, playing

radios past a certain time. Also, there are many laws, of course, regulating street hawkers. And I'm predicting your next question, which is the fact that most of these laws were not necessarily applied, or there are certain periods of time where the state attempted to do so. But of course, it was fairly unrealistic in order to apply this widely. And that's ongoing. So I recall, I think in the late 1990s, early 2000s, there was a governor in Alexandria that many of my relatives, upper middle class, middle class, would still remember fondly who actually, for a period of time, a couple of years, made these laws sort of banning the beeping of car horns. People could swear that for two years, there were fines that were imposed and the city became quieter when it comes to traffic noise.

But then the governor left and things sort of came back to normal, I would say. Can I ask more about a good distinction that you just made right there that we can maybe unpack a little? So the idea is that like the super, super elite who in some respects are ultimately in control of the government are actually removed enough from the sensory experience of the everyday that this is actually like a bottom-up pressure from this middle class is that what you're getting at yes absolutely i mean back in the period that i was covering i mean or maybe in heliopolis or in in some of the nicer suburbs in in zemalic which is in the 40s was uh a lot quieter even than today, etc.

And of course, today, most of the Egyptian elites live in these suburbs outside of Cairo, in a sense, escaping not just the noise, but the whole sensory bombardment that they feel is taking place in the urban areas. But generally, that's what I found. And many of sort of the editorials and newspapers especially, and generally, when it comes to these editorials and many of the writers that wrote about current events and what was happening at the time, they obviously had this, in a way, this civilizational type of mission in order to modernize, etc. The city is a place of commerce,

industry, and movement, but it's also a place where people live. And so it makes sense that those people, especially those who maybe paid a little bit more for their Cairo apartment, would want to be able to have some peace and quiet. But the thing is, a lot of the sounds that people complained about were really vital to their ability to live there and integral to the life of the city itself. A good example can be found in the sonic history of the legions of street hawkers who advertised their goods and specialized services to the residents of Cairo neighborhoods, announcing their presence with distinctive calls. Could you talk more about the street hawkers? They're calling, right? It's the calls of the street hawkers.

talk more about the street hawkers like they're calling right it's the calls of the street hawker can you just like give some examples of like what who what were the different roles that street hawkers used to play and what do they sound like yeah um there's still uh hundreds of street hawker probably thousands of street hawkers in kairi alexander etc but if i were to guess i would say there was a lot more of them back in the period I was covering in my book. But every street hawker has a particular call. And sometimes there are similarities if they're selling a similar product. But still, most listeners can differentiate between the different street hawkers, even if they're selling the same product. And typically, they would call out loud to advertise, let's say, their produce.

And often for those that are selling vegetables or fava beans, etc., they would often describe their goods in a particular way. And that would be the call itself. So fava bean sellers typically would yell out almonds because their fava beans look or taste like almonds in a sense, instead of just saying fava beans. So the tomato sellers would say they're as red as pomegranates, etc. And many of the street hawkers also would liken their vegetables to taste like meat because meat is more expensive and deemed as tasty by a wide portion of the population. So those particular nuts taste like roasted chicken or et cetera. But what's interesting about this was that many of these calls themselves uh even

sometimes to to the locals they weren't necessarily paying attention to what they were saying it was really more about the intonation and more about the the sound that was that was coming out and some didn't even understand what the heck with the street hogs were saying themselves so growing up in alexandria the the fava bean seller, almonds is loz in Arabic. But the way that it came out, it barely sounded like that. You know, he was like, loz! And he was just really loud. And he was just coming out.

Another perfect example is used merchant sellers that go around throughout Cairo and Alexandria. Their term that's being used is derived from the Italian. And in Egyptian Arabic, we call them robabikya sellers. And in Italian, it's robavikya, old things or old clothes. And typically what they yell out is just, bikya! Sort of comes out that way. But everybody knows that this is what they are and what they do.

And often also a lot of or many sellers don't even say anything or don't verbalize. And one of my favorites that I still remember, butane tank sellers would use a wrench and just smack on the butane tank and a particular rhythmic clanking. And that would definitely resonate. And you can hear it from a couple rhythmic clanking. And that would definitely resonate. And you can hear it from a couple of blocks away. There's a lot of creative ways of doing that. Today, some or many street sellers are using microphones as well. And so often with some of the similar calls, but using a microphone to help to expand their sound radius, I suppose.

What I found interesting was that often these very same people, when they were writing for these newspapers, it's about something that is happening now, often they were yearning for this imagined silence that they think modern societies should have. But some of these same people later on writing in their memoirs, they would often write about past sounds in a more favorable light. And so there's a sense of nostalgia that comes into play. So instead of the street hawkers, oh, they're loud,

disrupting traffic, et cetera. Now they fondly remember the street hawkers that went on the streets when they were children etc and how these noises sort of uh touched upon you know uh how their early childhood was was about and nostalgia about that period and that's something that definitely repeats as well i mean usually so it's not necessarily complete black and white over you know good noise versus bad noise it really also depends on where you are at the moment and what you're speaking on at that time. You know, I'm very familiar with this from Istanbul, a similar size city that has kind of similar history in some ways. And this kind of also nostalgia about the street hawkers, of which there's some remain, right? But there used to be a lot and

figures like orhan pamuk have kind of written very nostalgically as you said about it but actually it's people from like his class that were invested in cracking down on that can you say more about that that's the irony of it and in that typically at the moment, they complain about obstructing traffic, they complain about the noise, et cetera, but almost always memoirs. When people are recalling their youth or recalling even just 20 years back, and especially if some of these sounds are disappearing,

then all of a sudden they forget the inconvenience of the traffic obstructions and the loudness, et cetera. And they often remember fondly a lot of these same sounds. And I think that's universal. I hate to just generalize, but I think that's often the case. And you'll get to see that also reading novels, for example. Cairo was flooded with new and familiar sounds that became sites of contention as the city expanded during the interwar period. At the same time, a new medium emerged as a sonic bridge across

the space between Egypt's different neighborhoods, regions, and social classes. Of the many media that revolutionized life in the 20th century, radio is sometimes forgotten by historians. It's not visual like newspapers and television. And unlike highly durable and ubiquitous phonograph records, radio broadcasts were pretty ephemeral. Of course we do have early radio recordings from the interwar period, but radio was a sonic medium that by nature literally disappeared into thin air. Like street sounds, studying early radio requires relying on the textual record and oral history. Radio could be cheaply broadcast to large audiences simultaneously,

and it was easy to centralize. Think about the songs that you and most of the people you know know by heart. Not necessarily your favorite songs, but the ones that are common ground with people your age. There's a good chance that we're talking about songs that received heavy radio play. For Egypt, the earliest figures that would come to mind are composers like Muhammad Abdel Wahab, and of course, the legendary voice of Umm Kulthum. It's great music, but the reason why everyone knows these voices, fundamentally, is that someone decided that everyone in Egypt needed to hear them, and that someone was often the state, which used radio to shape national discourse and culture.

But as Ziad Fahmy explains, it didn't necessarily start out that way. I'm writing a book on radio now, and I published the first chapter as an article. And that chapter on that period of Egyptian radio history goes counter to that claim because it's set from 1928 until 1934, before the Egyptian state monopolized the airwaves. And so beforehand, it's a period of radio history in Egypt that's barely covered. And often it's also vulgarized by the state going back to that transition in 34. And there were about a dozen or so small stations between Cairo and Alexandria. A couple were in Port Said, and they were privately owned. And it was a bit of a Wild West period, and a sense of sort of discovery with the new technology, etc. Pretty much anything could be played on the radio,

and there's a lot of variety, and a lot of different discourses, etc. And for a variety of different reasons, and it wasn't just the Egyptian state, it was also the British as well. And the British wanted to go after sort of more of the BBC sort of state-owned model. And they also wanted to have Marconi Limited, which was a British company, to help run this Egyptian government station starting out. So there was this bit of a transition. And in late May 1934, the Egyptian government shut down all these private stations. And they started out sort of the official Egyptian government station, which was 49% owned and operated by Marconi Limited. And since that period, there was definitely more sort of a state control over what would be

broadcast. And literally, you would have these cultural gatekeepers filtering and what sort of media can be played, what sort of music, what sort of programming. And that shifted later on, of course, under Nasser as well, where the Egyptian radio wasn't just about internal consumption, but also beyond in the Arab world, but also elsewhere. But the model remained, and it was sort of a monopoly by the Egyptian state. And there was certainly a level of gatekeeping as far as what's proper music.

But it wasn't just about the music, because there was a lot of sort of different programming. And aside from the religious programming, children's programming, miniseries, et cetera, that would develop over time from 34 onwards. And broadly speaking, it was definitely sort of towing the line. And also with a lot of this type of civilizational uplift philosophy, where we will sort of uplift and educate the masses. Often when you did have more peripheral type of music from the countryside or Upper Egypt, it was really folklorized in a sort of artificial way. It was sort of in this type of niche type of music. So in that sense, it was also manufactured. That definitely had an impact on probably on increasing nationalism and ways of thinking about being an Egyptian from all the way from children's programming, all the way up to sort of more and more adult programming in the stations as well.

Only certain types of musicians can play. And often they were graded as well. So this is an A-lister, B-lister, et cetera, and the A-listers would get more time and so on. So the cultural dynamic definitely shifted, especially with radio, where with phonographs earlier and even later on, it was still somewhat expensive. But radio sets by the 40s and certainly by the 50s and this whole transistor revolution became really, really affordable. Aside from, as you know, a lot of coffee shops and outdoor places had their own radio sets, etc. So it had a tremendous impact. Yeah, we can talk more about that maybe carrying through to the Nasserist period, the 1950s onward. I think students of the Middle East today will probably be very familiar with how television was used, or have seen speeches of Nasser that are recorded on YouTube,

or performances of Umm Kulthum. But as you said, the radio was just starting to really become a mass-consumed item at that time. And probably most Egyptians were experiencing this media thing for the first time via radio rather than television, at least in the 50s. Even after it started, it was very expensive to get a black and white television set. And so radio was still the medium all the way and probably until the mid-1970s. And radio sets, small transistor radio sets, were affordable literally by everyone. The same speeches that were televised post-1960 were also played on the radio. Same thing with Umm Kulthum, etc. and most people probably heard Om Khaldun on the radio as opposed to television it wasn't really until the 70s

where more and more lower middle classes could afford actually television set but radio was a lot more powerful yeah I mean there's also there's so much that really hasn't been written on this period I mean there's nothing on Egyptian radio really but

it's not just about the music and Nasser and speeches and, you know, sports, for example. I mean, you know, the whole phenomenon of watching soccer and listening to soccer as well. There's a lot there culturally that had a tremendous impact on just everyday people in a variety of different ways. That is really just, you know, there's not much on it. Yeah. Oh, that's mind-blowing for me to think about, actually, that people got used to the habit of watching a soccer game by listening to a soccer game first, and then the television came along later. That's kind of interesting. Oh sorry i just remembered uh growing up uh in the

early 80s late 70s and there was a well-known soccer uh commentator his name is muhammad latif i think or captain latif and because uh people were used to listening on the radio but also because color televisions were just being introduced. And so most people were watching on black and white television at the beginning of every soccer match. He would specifically say, let's say, El Ahly is wearing red and it looks gray on the television set and the Zamanek is wearing white and it looks white. But also because he started out commentating on matches on the radio,

he was very, very descriptive in the way that he described the matches, even on television. And it's a whole different art and a whole different way of language use if you're commentating on sports on the radio versus on television. But a lot of these people were sort of transitional people between different mediums. And that's the case throughout media in Egypt. And people went from recording on phonographs

to recording on radio and television and making movies, et cetera. They would sort of cross these boundaries. المباراة وعلى يمينك دلوقتي فريق انترنسيونالي الزمالك هو اللي هاجم لابس الفانيلا الغمأة بتاع الطيران لان انت عارف الزمالك بيلعب بلابيض لكن لما لقى لبسه

بابيض وطالع لونج الشمال وبرعص وبيحط اول دقيقة كان بيحش بالنجول and they put the first minute of this four-part series on the sound of revolution in modern Egypt, we'll be carrying these themes over into the Nasserist era of the 1950s and 60s, a formative moment in the history of Egyptian national culture and a celebrated golden age of cultural production.

Alia Mosallam will be back to discuss what songs can tell us about the anti-imperial, technocratic vision of the modernizing Egyptian state, and how people received and participated in this story of a people in the making. And our discussion will not just be about history, but also memory, the memories that were nurtured by and flourished with support, but also memory, the memories that were nurtured by and flourished with support of the state, and the memories that survived in spite of it. Stay tuned.