Word: kalthoum
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...Egyptian Singer Um Kalthoum, who barely two months ago was inciting the Arabs with breathy ballads about Israel's coming defeat, has a new job. She is directing a campaign to collect gold, jewelry and stashed-away cash to help Egypt's battered economy. If her daily pleadings have not convinced the Egyptians of the costliness of their rout by Israel, Gamal Abdel Nasser has. Last week he promised his people "a real, cruel and difficult struggle ahead." And "economic struggle," he told the fellahin, "means economic sacrifice. We must eliminate all privileges...
...Kalthoum sings of love, of the bittersweet pangs of passions lost or longed for, unfurling verse upon verse of ballads that last for over an hour. Like a sorceress weaving a spell, she sings on and on, spinning variations on the same simple phrases, until 3 a.m. Then her millions of listeners, feeling spent, exhilarated and somehow cleansed by this solemn ceremony of joy, return to normalcy-until the next time...
...Hours. The ritual has been going on for 32 years, making squat, swarthy Um Kalthoum, now a matron of 64, the most famous personality in the Arab world, better known than Nasser, especially among desert folk. When she appeared for the first time at Lebanon's Baalbek Festival last month, her followers came by the busload from points as distant as the Persian Gulf. Her two concerts in the 4,000-seat tent theater amid the Roman ruins were sold out months in advance, and scalpers got up to $250 for tickets. While she conducted the 20-piece orchestra...
...poor fellah's daughter who started out posing as a boy-because proper Arab girls did not then perform in public-Um Kalthoum as a child often sang Koranic songs for five or ten hours at a stretch. Her pay: 1$ per performance. At 15, she bought her first dress, later switched from religious to romantic songs, and instantly became a Pan-Arabic institution. King Farouk awarded her Egypt's highest civilian decoration, and she reciprocated by singing political songs, first, Farouk, May You Live Forever and later, for Nasser, Gamal and the Nile Are Creators...
Eternal Shrine. Today, with an annual income of $130,000, Um Kalthoum is the wealthiest woman in the Middle East. For her two performances at Baalbek, she pocketed $28,000, or four times the yearly salary of Nasser. She lives in a villa on Cairo's Zamalik Island with her doctor husband, a prosperous venereal disease specialist. There are no signs that the "Star of the East" is fading. The Arabs think that with age her voice has become mellower, richer, more touching. As her followers in Egypt like to say: In the Middle East only two things never...