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    The Egyptian Rapper Wegz Wants to Take Arabic Hip-Hop Worldwide

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    The 25-year-old has become a streaming star without releasing a full album. He just wrapped his first shows in the United States, and hopes to take his music even further.On the ninth stop of his first world tour, the Egyptian rapper Wegz finished soundcheck at the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. and relaxed on a worn black leather couch wearing a gray Carhartt fleece jacket and cream New Balance 990 sneakers. In his unflashy attire, passers-by might not have recognized one of the biggest artists in the emerging Arabic music scene calmly awaiting his set time.“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Wegz, 25, said. “Just revert people back to minimalism.”His numbers, however, have been growing. Wegz has been the most-streamed artist on Spotify in Egypt since 2020. In 2022, he was named the most-streamed artist on the platform across the entire Middle East and North Africa, and became the first Egyptian artist to perform at the FIFA World Cup final. He sold out concerts in London and Berlin before arriving in the United States last month as the first Arab artist with a global tour backed by the concert giant Live Nation.“He has been one of the pioneers who have taken Egyptian rap to a different place,” Salam Kmeid, head of content marketing at the regional music platform Anghami, said in a video call from Dubai. (Wegz’s track “El Bakht” is now the most streamed song of all time on the service.) “As an Arabic hip-hop movement, he has taken it to a different scale.”In the middle of his current tour — after the European leg had wrapped up but before his first dates in North America — the war between Israel and Hamas began. Wegz, who has been outspoken in support of Palestinians, has made it clear that he has no intent of soft-pedaling his views as he works to reach a broader global audience. He recently posted a video on Instagram of a pro-Palestinian rally in New York City, and announced that a portion of the proceeds from his tour will go to relief efforts in Gaza.“I will raise awareness about the cause along the way and condemn the dehumanizing and killing of Palestinians,” Wegz said in an interview. “I’m hoping to try to heal from all the horrific images I’ve seen in order to start seeing a better life so we can sing and dance and get back to enjoying what we do.”His rise has coincided with a wave of attention and appreciation for Arabic music. The Palestinian-Algerian rapper Saint Levant’s “Very Few Friends” and the Palestinian-American Lana Lubany’s “The Snake” both went viral on TikTok. On television, shows like Hulu’s “Ramy,” Netflix’s “Mo” and Disney+’s “Moon Knight” heavily feature Arabic music in thoughtful ways.“I think there’s a lot of talented people around the globe,” Wegz said, speaking in English. “I might be very talented as well.”Wegz performing at the FIFA World Cup final in 2022. He was the first Egyptian artist to take the stage at the event.Fareed Kotb/Anadolu Agency, via Getty ImagesSince his debut single “Batalo Fake” (Arabic for “No Longer Fake”) arrived in 2017, with an appearance from his fellow Egyptian M.C. Hesham Raptor, Wegz has been praised for his lyrics, which exude self-confidence while exploring themes around identity and the socioeconomic reality for youth in Egypt’s urban neighborhoods. While hip-hop with trap beats remains his foundation, his tracks also dabble in dancier production and Afropop. His most successful song to date, the uncharacteristically vulnerable “El Bakht” (“The Luck”), features a melodic rap about a brokenhearted lover over a syncopated beat, strings and plucked acoustic guitar.Despite his strong streaming numbers, Wegz still hasn’t released a full album, though he insists he’s working on one that he plans to put out after his tour. He attributes his success as a singles artist to being a lifelong student of his craft — a voracious listener nerding out about global music cultures.“I see myself as someone who’s here to show people things they might not have known about because my passion is the research of things, basically,” he said. “I want to know how you guys started this. I just keep digging and digging.”Born Ahmed Ali and raised in the coastal Egyptian city Alexandria, Wegz grew up in a modest area with his father, a math teacher, and his mother, a nurse and head of a children’s foster home. He has six siblings — some from different marriages — and last year told the Emirati entrepreneur and interviewer Anas Bukhash that he moved frequently as a child but made new friends fast. He added that he had been eager to take risks when his family urged caution (though his mother encouraged him to explore, which expanded his worldview).He developed a love of books at an early age, and wrote short stories and poems. His first exposure to music came from being surrounded by religious anthems, but as a teenager he branched out on his own, seeking secular music.“I tried to go online and go to internet cafes and listen to YouTube,” he recalled in the basement of the Washington venue. Wegz has said he grew up listening to American rappers including Young Thug, Future and the duo Mobb Deep, as well as the Egyptian singers Ahmed Adaweyah, Dalida, and Mohamed Mounir, and the Algerian musician Cheb Mami.His taste is eclectic, he pointed out, noting that he has “had a phase of every type of music in my life at least once.” (His current passion? Yemeni music, which emphasizes narratives: Even if an artist is “just staring at the tree, there’s a song for it where you can actually tell us how you feel about this tree and how you feel about being outside today.”)After some attempts at writing music, Wegz recorded his first song at 17 to have something private he could “share on his phone” with a handful of his friends. Working in a studio for the first time “was amazing,” he said. “It was what I wanted.”Just a few years later, he was getting attention in Egypt with “T.N.T.”, a haunting track produced by fellow Alexandrian rapper L5VAV that blends heavy trap percussion with Egyptian mahraganat, a style that combines low-fi, minimalist synths and edgy, heavy bass. (“I’m a big boss shaking up this great hall/I go heavy on that beat like I’m Rick Ross,” Wegz boasts in the song.) In 2020, “Dorak Gai” (“Your Time Is Coming”) — an aggressive but subtle diss track produced by the powerhouse Egyptian musician Molotof — put Wegz on the map throughout the Middle East and North Africa.Wegz gave credit to L5VAV, a frequent collaborator who appears on their hit “Khod w Hat” (“Take and Give”), for helping him hone his lyrical skills and navigate his early rise. “He helped me take music seriously,” Wegz said, with affection. “It was very motivating being around such an inspiring character.”Now he’s set his sights on reaching listeners beyond the Arabic-speaking world while still emphasizing genuine Arabic sounds and rhythms in ways that push the culture forward. “If the global eye is on you right now,” he said, there’s an opportunity to spotlight “the old things that we always had.”Kmeid, of the streaming service Anghami, said Wegz plays a vital role in Arabic music, and beyond. “He is actually the voice of his generation,” she said. “We do see how the Egyptian scene specifically sees Wegz as that young artist who came out of whatever background or history he had, a very simple person who really believed in his dream.”Wegz has plans to expand his brand beyond music, looking toward designing merchandise and a career in acting. Arabs have a rich history as traders, he explained, and that’s something he’s always kept in mind.“For now, I’m making music because I really love it and I have fun doing it,” he said.“People have fun listening to it, and I’m making money out of it. This is amazing.”“Overall,” he added, “I hope to always use my voice for good as long as I live.” More

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      Whose Queen? Netflix and Egypt Spar Over an African Cleopatra.

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      Egyptians say the influential streaming service is dragging an ancient queen into a modern, and decidedly Western, debate — about Black representation in Hollywood — in which she has no real place.On this much, at least, everyone can agree: Cleopatra was a formidable queen of ancient Egypt, the last of the Macedonian Greek dynasty founded by Alexander the Great, who went on to even greater posthumous fame as a seductress, immortalized by Shakespeare and Hollywood.Beyond that, many of the details are fuzzy — which is how one of the world’s dominant streaming services ended up in an imbroglio with modern-day Egypt recently, called out by online commenters and even the Egyptian government for casting a Black actress to play Cleopatra in the Netflix docudrama series “African Queens,” which airs on Wednesday.Soon after the show’s trailer appeared last month, Netflix was forced to disable comments as they turned into a hostile, and occasionally racist, pile on. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, the government agency in charge of heritage, declared the show a “falsification of Egyptian history.” A popular television host accused Netflix of trying to “take over our Egyptian culture.” An Egyptian lawyer filed a complaint demanding that the streaming service be shut down in the country.For the show’s makers, the four episodes about Cleopatra were a chance to celebrate one of history’s most famous women as an African ruler, one they portray as Black. But for many Egyptians and historians, that portrayal is at best a misreading, and at worst a negation, of Egyptian history.Despite her Macedonian Greek lineage, the producers of the show say question marks in her family tree leave room for the possibility that her mother was of another background: The identities of Cleopatra’s mother and grandmother are unknown, leading some experts to argue that she was at least partly Indigenous Egyptian.“We don’t often get to see or hear stories about Black queens, and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are tons of them,” Jada Pinkett Smith, who produced “African Queens,” said in a Netflix-sponsored article about the show.Cleopatra was descended from a line of Macedonian Greek kings who ruled Egypt from 323 B.C. to 30 B.C., when it was annexed by Rome, and many scholars say she likely had little, if any, non-Greek blood. The Ptolemies — as all the dynasty’s kings were called — tended to marry their own sisters or other relatives, leaving few openings for new blood, though there is some evidence that she had a Persian ancestor, according to scholars.A sculpture of Cleopatra in the workshop of the Egyptian artist Ibrahim Salah in Giza in 2020.Mohamed Hossam/EPA, via Shutterstock“Statues of Queen Cleopatra confirm that she had Hellenistic (Greek) features, distinguished by light skin, a drawn-out nose and thin lips,” Egypt’s government said on Twitter on April 30.Modern battles over Cleopatra’s heritage and skin color have erupted time after time, finding fresh fuel with each new Hollywood casting, from Elizabeth Taylor, who played her in 1963, to Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga and Gal Gadot, all recent contenders to portray her in various projects.Netflix’s casting of Adele James, a biracial British actress, is a reflection of Western arguments over Black representation in Hollywood and whether history is too dominated by white narratives that revolve around European primacy.But it stirred up a very different debate in Egypt, where many view identity and race through another lens. For many Egyptians, the question is whether Egyptians and their ancient ancestors — geographical location notwithstanding — are African.“Why do some people need Cleopatra to be white?” the show’s director, Tina Gharavi, wrote in a piece defending the casting in Variety last month. “Perhaps it’s not just that I’ve directed a series that portrays Cleopatra as Black, but that I have asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that.”Egypt sits on the northeast corner of Africa. Its relationship with the continent, however, is deeply ambivalent.Today, it holds membership in the African Union and other continental groups. But in Greek and Roman times, historians say, Egypt was seen as a major player in the Mediterranean world, the gateway to Africa, rather than fully African.Since Arabs conquered Egypt in the seventh century, bringing the Arabic language and Islam with them, Egyptians have shared more cultural, religious and linguistic ties with the predominantly Arab and Muslim Middle East and North Africa than with the rest of Africa.Elizabeth Taylor during the filming of the movie “Cleopatra” in Rome.Associated PressThe ancestors of today’s Egyptians include not only Arabs and native Egyptians, but also Nubians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, Circassians, Albanians, Western Europeans and other conquerors, traders, slaves and immigrants who landed in Egypt at various points over the last two millenniums.For all its diversity, Egyptian society often prizes light skin and looks down on darker-skinned Egyptians. But many Egyptians and historians say the racist slurs hurled online at Ms. James, while abhorrent, distract from the real issue. The show is dragging an ancient queen into the middle of contemporary Western debates in which she has no real place, they argue.“How can someone who’s not even from my country claim my heritage just because of their skin color?” said Yasmin El Shazly, an Egyptologist and the deputy director for research and programs at the American Research Center in Egypt.Ancient Egypt and its wonders have long been a trophy in Western culture wars. In 1987, Martin Bernal’s book “Black Athena” argued that European historians had erased Egyptian contributions to ancient Greek culture. Though many scholars agree that much of the evidence it cited was flawed at best, the book became one of the canonical texts of Afrocentrism, a cultural and political movement that, among other things, seeks to counter ingrained ideas about the supposed inferiority of African civilizations.According to some Afrocentrists, ancient Egypt was the Black African civilization that birthed not only African history and culture, but also world civilization until Europeans plundered its technologies, ideas and culture. The pyramids and the pharaohs became sources of pride for these Afrocentrists — and Cleopatra, for all her Greek blood, a potential heroine of the movement.“Cleopatra reacted to the phenomena of oppression and exploitation as a Black woman would,” according to the Hamilton College classicist Shelley Haley, a professor of Africana and an expert on Cleopatra who consulted on the Netflix show. She argued that Cleopatra’s potentially mixed background made her a person of color: “Hence we embrace her as sister.”A still from “Queen Cleopatra,” which stars Adele James.NetflixThis kind of thinking frustrates many Egyptians, historians and Egyptologists. Egyptians, too, are fiercely proud of the pyramids and the pharaohs, even if they are two millenniums removed, and they would like Afrocentrists who hold such views to back off.For many Egyptians, the pharaohs — whose skin color and ancestry are still a matter of scientific debate — were Egyptian, not African. The Black American comedian Kevin Hart was forced to cancel a planned show in Egypt in February after an uproar over his past comments that the pharaohs were Black Africans.It does not help that some Afrocentrists hold that modern-day Egyptians descend from Arab invaders who displaced the Black Africans of ancient Egypt, a theory many Egyptians consider both offensive and inaccurate.“An African-American who’s never been to Egypt saying that ‘this is our heritage and modern Egyptians are these Arab invaders’ is very insulting,” Ms. El Shazly said.Some historians say the modern fixation on whether Cleopatra looked more like Elizabeth Taylor or Ms. James would have felt alien to the ancients.In Cleopatra’s time, Alexandria, the capital of her kingdom, was a cosmopolitan port city bustling with Greeks, Jews, ethnic Egyptians and people from all over who, the Cambridge University historian David Abulafia said, largely saw themselves as part of the Hellenistic world. They identified by culture and religion, he said, not by skin color.“Race is a modern construct of identity politics that’s been imposed on our past,” said Monica Hanna, an Egyptian Egyptologist. “This use and abuse of the past for modern agendas will just hurt everyone, because it’ll give a distorted image of the past.”Though Egyptian critics of the show have denied any racist motives, some Egyptian commentators say their society’s internalized racism and inferiority complexes turned up the volume of the Cleopatra outcry.Unable to take pride in modern-day Egypt’s political repression and cratering economy, some Egyptians “link their identities to ancient glories” or attempt to signal their superiority to the rest of Africa by emphasizing their European roots, said the Egyptian writer AbdelRahman ElGendy.Seizing the chance to whip up Egyptian pride, government-owned media dedicated airtime on three different evening talk shows recently to slamming “African Queens.”The same day, a government-owned media conglomerate announced that it would produce its own Cleopatra documentary. Its film, it pointedly noted, would be based on the “utmost levels” of research and accuracy. More

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      in Music

      A Ban on 19 Singers in Egypt Tests the Old Guard’s Power

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      Leaders of a musicians’ licensing group are trying to curb mahraganat, a bold genre wildly popular with young people. It is not clear if they can.CAIRO — The song starts out like standard fare for Egyptian pop music: A secret infatuation between two young neighbors who, unable to marry, sneak flirtatious glances at each other and commit their hearts in a bittersweet dance of longing and waiting.But then the lyrics take a radical turn.“If you leave me,” blasts the singer, Hassan Shakosh, “I’ll be lost and gone, drinking alcohol and smoking hash.”The song, “The Neighbors’ Daughter,” has become a giant hit, garnering more than a half- billion views of its video on YouTube alone and catapulting Mr. Shakosh to stardom. But the explicit reference to drugs and booze, culturally prohibited substances in Egypt, has made the song, released in 2019, a lightning rod in a culture war over what is an acceptable face and subject matter for popular music and who gets to decide.The battle, which pits Egypt’s cultural establishment against a renegade musical genre embraced by millions of young Egyptians, has heated up recently after the organization that licenses musicians barred at least 19 young artists from singing and performing in Egypt.The organization, the Egyptian Musicians’ Syndicate, accused Mr. Shakosh and other singers of the genre, known as mahraganat, of normalizing, and thus encouraging, decadent behavior, of misrepresenting Egypt and of spoiling public taste.Hassan Shakosh appearing in the video for his song “The Neighbors’ Daughter.” Hassan Shakosh, vis YouTube“They are creating a chaotic movement in the country,” said Tarek Mortada, the spokesman for the syndicate, a professional union that issues permits for artists to perform onstage and that while technically not an arm of the state, is governed by state law and its budget is supervised by the state. “What we’re confronting right now is the face of depravity and regression.”The barred singers have been iced out of clubs, concerts and weddings. Some have continued to perform abroad or at private parties, but they have had to say no to advertising deals and other income opportunities.The syndicate’s stance has also cast a pall over Egypt’s cultural scene, sending a strong message that artists are not free agents and must still toe restrictive lines set by civil and state institutions. The musicians see the syndicate as an outmoded entity desperately clinging to a strictly curated vision and image of Egyptian culture that is smashing against an inevitable wave of youth-driven change.“They can’t get themselves to be convinced that we’re here to stay,” said Ibrahim Soliman, 33, Mr. Shakosh’s manager and childhood friend. “How can you say someone like Shakosh misrepresents Egypt when his songs are being heard and shared by the entire country?”Fans were incensed. One meme depicted the leader of the syndicate, a pop singer of love classics from the 1970s, ordering people to stop singing in the bathroom.The battle mirrors cultural conflicts across the region where autocratic governments in socially conservative countries have tried to censor any expression that challenges traditional mores. For example, Iran has arrested teenage girls who posted videos of themselves dancing, which is a crime there. And in 2020, Northwestern University in Qatar called off a concert by a Lebanese indie rock band whose lead singer is openly gay.But online streaming and social media platforms have poked giant holes in that effort, allowing artists to bypass state-sanctioned media, like television and record companies, and reach a generation of new fans hungry for what they see as more authentic and relevant content.Iran’s draconian restrictions on unacceptable music have produced a flourishing underground rock and hip-hop scene. The question facing Egypt is who now has the power to regulate matters of taste — the 12 men and one woman who run the syndicate, or the millions of fans who have been streaming and downloading mahraganat.Mahraganat first rose out of the dense, rowdy working-class neighborhoods of Cairo more than a decade ago and is still generally made in low-tech home studios, often with no more equipment than a cheap microphone and pirated software.The head of the Egyptian Musicians’ Syndicate, Hany Shaker, center, during voting for the group’s board members in 2019. Mahmoud Ahmed/EPA, via ShutterstockThe raw, straight-talking genre — with blunt lyrics about love, sex, power and poverty — mirrors the experience and culture of a broad section of the disenfranchised youth who live in those districts set to a danceable, throbbing beat.But its catchy rhymes and electronic rhythms quickly went mainstream and now echo from the glamorous wedding ballrooms of Egypt’s French-speaking elite to exclusive nightclubs in Mediterranean resorts to concert halls in oil-rich Qatar and Saudi Arabia.“Mahraganat is a true representation of this moment in time, of globalization and information technology, and of social media in directing our tastes,” said Sayed Mahmoud, a culture writer and former editor of a weekly newspaper called “Alkahera” issued by the Ministry of Culture. “If you remove the reference to drugs and alcohol, does it mean they don’t exist? The songs represent real life and real culture.”They are certainly more direct, avoiding the sanitized euphemisms and poetic hints of sexuality that characterize traditional lyrics.“We use the words that are close to our tongue, without embellishing or beautifying, and it reaches people,” said Islam Ramadan, who goes by the name DJ Saso, the 27-year-old producer of Mr. Shakosh’s blockbuster hit.Many lawyers and experts say the syndicate has no legal right to ban artists, insisting that Egypt’s Constitution explicitly protects creative liberty. But these arguments seem academic in the authoritarian state of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, which has stifled freedom of speech, tightened control on the media and passed laws to help monitor and criminalize so-called immoral behavior on the internet.The syndicate’s executive members have adamantly defended their move, arguing that a key part of their job is to safeguard the profession against inferior work that they say is made by uncultured impostors who tarnish the image of the country.And government authorities have reinforced the message.In 2017, a special division of the police that targets moral crimes arrested the makers of a mahraganat song, and promised to continue searching for work that “presents offensive content for the Egyptian viewer or contains sexual insinuations.”A wedding in 2015 in Salam City, a suburb on the outskirts of Cairo.Mosa’ab Elshamy/Associated PressIn 2020, after a video circulated showing dozens of students at an all-girls high school singing along to “The Neighbors’ Daughter,” the Ministry of Education warned schools against the “noticeable” spread of songs that incite “bad behavior.”A short time later, the minister of youth and sports vowed to “combat depravity” by banning mahraganat music from being played in athletic arenas and sports facilities.The head of the syndicate, Hany Shaker, defended the ban on a late-night television show, saying, “We can’t be in the era of Sisi and allow this to be the leading art.”So far, the syndicate claims to be winning the fight.“We have in fact stopped them because they can’t get onstage in Egypt,” said Mr. Mortada, the organization’s spokesman, adding that it went so far as to ask YouTube to remove videos of the banned singers. It has not received a response from YouTube, he said.But who will win in the long run remains to be seen.The syndicate’s very structure smacks of a bygone era. To be admitted and allowed to sing and perform onstage, an artist must pass a test that includes a classical singing audition. The test is anathema to a genre that relies on autotune and prioritizes rhythm and flow over melody.While the syndicate’s efforts may be keeping mahraganat out of clubs and concert halls, the music has never stopped.Mr. Shakosh’s popularity continues to rise. He has more than six million followers on Facebook and over four million on Instagram and TikTok, and his music videos have exceeded two billion views on YouTube.He is one of the Arab world’s leading performers. Since he was barred, he has performed in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iraq, and “The Neighbors’ Daughter” has become one of the biggest Arabic hits to date.“It’s not the same old love songs,” said Yasmine el-Assal, a 41-year-old bank executive, after attending one of Mr. Shakosh’s concerts before the ban. “His stage presence, the music, the vibe, it’s fresh and it’s all about having fun.”Mr. Shakosh would not agree to be interviewed, preferring to keep a low profile, his manager said, rather than to appear to publicly challenge the authorities. The ban has been harder on other artists, many of whom do not have the wherewithal or the international profile to tour abroad.They have mostly kept quiet, refusing to make statements that they fear could ruffle more feathers.Despite the squeeze, however, many are confident that their music falls beyond the grip of any single authority or government.Kareem Gaber, a 23-year-old experimental music producer known by the stage name El Waili, is still burning tracks, sitting in his bedroom with a twin mattress on the floor, bare walls and his instrument, a personal computer with $100 MIDI keyboard.“Mahraganat taught us that you can do something new,” he said, “and it will be heard.” More

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      in Music

      'Arab Divas' at the Arab World Institute: Singers Who Took Center Stage

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      A multimedia exhibition in Paris offers a rich flashback to a period between the 1920s and the 1970s when many female performers took center stage.PARIS — The diva sings of love and unmitigated lust. Dressed in a scarlet evening gown with her hair pulled high, she cries out to her beloved, longs for a night of undying passion and yearns for the sun not to rise.The vocalist in the 1969 concert video is Umm Kulthum: the Arab world’s greatest 20th-century performer, possibly the best-known Egyptian woman since Cleopatra and the star of the exhibition “Divas” at the Institut du Monde Arabe, or Arab World Institute, in Paris. The show, which runs through Sept. 26, is a richly illustrated flashback to the period between the 1920s and the 1970s. It portrays unveiled and openly voluptuous women performing on stage and screen without fear of censorship or religious condemnation, and feminists, political activists and pioneering impresarios facing down the patriarchy.Costumes worn by the Lebanese singer Sabah in the 1970s, on display at the Arab World Institute.Alice SidoliBesides costumes and jewelry, passports and posters, album covers and high-heeled shoes, visitors get to watch footage of female performers wiggling their hips in mesmerizing moves and posing on the beach in hot pants. The overall picture contrasts sharply with present-day Western perceptions of the Arab world as a place where women are veiled from top to toe and silenced by all-powerful men.“The exhibition knocks down a fair number of clichés and preconceived ideas about this part of the world. Women actually occupied center stage, embodied modernity and were not at all absent from history,” said Élodie Bouffard, the exhibition’s co-curator. “They sang, acted, made people cry, broke hearts and showed off their bodies just as Western actresses did at the time.”“These images are still very present in the minds of younger generations,” she added. “They don’t just represent the past.”The institute’s president, Jack Lang, who was France’s culture minister in the 1980s and early 1990s, recalled in an interview that when he was a boy visiting Cairo, he sneaked into a theater where Umm Kulthum was performing, and was “stunned, absolutely breathtaken.” He later heard another singer, Fayrouz (the exhibition’s other major diva), while touring in Lebanon as a young actor, he said, then gave her a medal as culture minister in 1988.A poster from the 1968 movie “Bint El-Hares” (“The Guard’s Daughter”), which starred Fayrouz, center. The poster is included in the Paris show.Abboudi Bou JawdeThese women were not just exceptional vocalists, Lang noted: Some participated in their country’s struggle for independence from the colonial powers, Britain and France, and joined in a wave of nationalism that swept across the Arab world. “The emergence of these divas coincided more or less with a time of collective emancipation,” Lang explained. “The music sung by them is an extraordinary expression of freedom.”The exhibition opens in pre-World War II Cairo, the artistic and intellectual hub of the Arab world, where concert halls and cabarets proliferated, many of them established by women, the exhibition co-curator Hanna Boghanim said. Women also had a significant role in the film industry, she added, working as “directors, producers, actresses, costume makers, talent scouts.”Many of these women came from very humble backgrounds, including Umm Kulthum, who is introduced in a velvet-curtained enclosure in the show. Born in a village in the Nile Delta, she first performed disguised as a boy, singing religious songs that bewitched the crowds. Eventually, she came into her own, as a woman and as a voice, and became famous for her improvisational style. Her songs sometimes went on for more than an hour.Her story is told through photographs, album and magazine covers, videos, and bright-colored costumes created for the 2017 biopic “Looking for Umm Kulthum,” directed by the Iranian-born artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.An installation at the Arab World Institute featuring stills and video from Shirin Neshat’s 2017 biopic “Looking for Umm Kulthum.” Alice SidoliThere are no loans from the Umm Kulthum museum in Cairo, the curators said; they were too complicated and expensive to organize. Nor are there loans from Fayrouz, who is still alive, despite requests made via the family and entourage of the reclusive vocalist. Her section contains posters, album and magazine covers, photographs and other paraphernalia, some compiled by a dedicated fan.By contrast, the section on the half-Algerian, half-Lebanese diva Warda is full of her personal possessions: sunglasses, medals, earrings, passports, an oud instrument, a brown leather suitcase and an Agatha Christie crime novel. Born in the Paris suburbs, Warda made her debut as a child in her father’s cabaret in the city’s Latin Quarter and became a successful recording artist before moving to Algeria in 1962, the year the country gained independence from France. There, she married an army officer who stopped her from singing. Her career took off when she moved to Egypt a decade later.The exhibition gets racier as it goes along, culminating with the last wave of 20th-century Arab divas, including the Egyptian-born Dalida, who became a superstar in France. Interspersed among displays of sequined evening gowns, stilettos and powder compacts are video monitors that show a woman singing from a hot tub and rows of others lifting their legs in skimpy outfits worthy of the Folies Bergère.In the decades since, the place of female performers in Arab countries has changed. Islamist movements and migration from rural areas have made parts of society more conservative about women’s dress and public behavior. That has led to assumptions in the West that Arab women are veiled and constrained today, as opposed to the decades when the divas reigned. The Egyptian-born performer Dalida in Giza in 1959. She became a superstar in France.D.R. Orlando ProductionsTo Coline Houssais, the author of “Music of the Arab World: An Anthology of 100 Artists,” these then-versus-now perceptions, which the exhibition risked encouraging, were misguided.“There are two visions of the Arab world,” she said in an interview. “One is: ‘They’re barbarians, they’re Islamists.’ The other is: ‘Everything used to be so good before. It was a golden age.’”“The Arab world’s development is measured using ultra-Western criteria, such as whether women smoke or not, or whether they wear short skirts,” she said. There were “more important factors, to do with equality: the number of women who work, women’s civil rights,” she added.Despite the coronavirus epidemic, the show is a hit with Parisian museumgoers, and visitors to the exhibition appeared to validate Houssais’s assessment. On a recent afternoon, onlookers seemed intrigued by the story of these stars of yesterday, who bucked contemporary stereotypes about Muslim women in France.“It’s really very interesting to find out about the emancipation of women in these societies and to see the contrast with today, even in terms of hairstyles,” said Camille Hurel, 23, a visitor to the show. “These were strong personalities who were known all around the world.”“Nowadays, I have the feeling that there isn’t as much freedom of expression,” she added.Randa Mirza and Waël Kodeih’s installation, “The Last Dance” (2020), featured in the Paris show, brings together the two D.J.s with vintage footage, converted to a hologram.Thierry RambaudHoussais said that, in fact, the Arab world today was mostly populated with people under 30, a generation “glued to social media, completely open to the world, and leading their own private revolutions against their families and their communities.”The notions of family, community and religion were fading, and these societies were in the middle of a major “recomposition,” she noted.“There are still 1,000 places in the Arab world where you can wear a bikini, snort coke and listen to American music,” she added. 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