Join us for a special lecture entitled "Modern Egypt: A Mixtape” with historian Andrew Simon!
Modern Egypt: A Mixtape
Long before social media platforms entered our daily lives, audiocassette technology empowered countless people to create culture, circulate information, and challenge ruling regimes. In this talk, we will approach modern Egypt as a mixtape where three voices take center stage. First, we will examine Egypt's “vulgar soundscape” and a pioneer of popular music, Ahmad ʿAdawiya, who was at the center of debates on the “death of taste.” Next, we will turn to Shaykh Imam, a blind performer and political dissident whose compositions circulated on non-commercial cassettes that undermined the tales told by politicians. Lastly, we will address Shaykh ʿAntar, whose unorthodox recitations of the Qur’an continue to endure online years after his audiotape recordings inspired the ire of religious gatekeepers. In placing ʿAdawiya, Imam, and ʿAntar into dialogue, we will elucidate the politics of popular culture and the extraordinary impact of an ordinary technology.
Andrew Simon is a historian of media, popular culture, and the Middle East at Dartmouth College. He was a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in downtown Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and is the modern history book review editor for the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Andrew is the author of Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press), which will be made available in Arabic by Dar El Shorouk later this year (2024). Currently, he is writing a biography of Shaykh Imam and is making his private collection of cassettes public in a digital archive for anyone to access.