They moved like a great river, four million souls pulsing through the streets of Cairo for the 1975 funeral of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, perhaps the most renowned Egyptian woman since Cleopatra. For much of the 20th century, it was said that the sole single event that could compel the Arab world—from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean—to listen as one was when Kulthum performed on the last Thursday of every month, a practice that continues, through her recordings, to this day. Now, 50 years after her death, 2025 has been declared by Egypt and throughout the Arab world to be “the year of Umm Kulthum.”
“The day of her death was etched in my 10-year-old mind,” recalls Dr. Khalid El-Shami, an oncologist at Sibley Memorial Hospital, in Washington, D.C. “She was mourned in every household in Egypt, including mine, like it was the death of the family’s matriarch. Women donned black mourning dresses, eyes closed shut from incessant sobbing, and a sense of an ending permeated the air.” At her funeral, mourners wrested her casket from the official pallbearers and carried it aloft through the streets of Cairo, to her burial place.
