Zakaria Ibrahim’s life saw the rise and fall of simsimiyya music in his hometown of Port Said, before its reemergence in the Egyptian revolution.
The ancient-looking PA system was not meant to handle the immensity of sound produced by famed Nile Delta folk music ensemble El Tanbura as they warmed up for a show on the streets of Ismailia on a warm summer night in 2019 – one of several shows in the Suez Canal’s major towns marking 30 years since El Tanbura’s founding.
The volume and distortion made for a mash-up of the traditional music of the Delta with the signature sonic footprint of mahraganat, the contemporary urban youth music that rose from outdoor weddings in working-class neighbourhoods to take Egypt and much of the Middle East by storm during the last decade.
Overseeing the warmup with his characteristic smile was legendary musician Zakaria Ibrahim – El Rayes (a ship captain or a boss in general), the “godfather of popular art”, the “Pyramid of popular culture” – who passed away in Cairo on February 12 at the age of 72.
Zakaria founded El Tanbura in 1988 after struggling for nearly a decade to find players of the simsimiyya, one of the world’s oldest instruments. Sometimes called a box lyre, the simsimiyya is the smaller cousin of the tanbura, a five-stringed lap harp with roots stretching from ancient Egypt – it appears on art going back to the Middle Kingdom, about 2000 BCE – to India.
Rayes Zakaria’s work to revive interest in ancient instruments made him a giant of Egyptian, African and world music.
He was also a revolutionary artist – centring his life and art around using music to encourage if not enable change in Egyptian society and to support the people after the revolutionary moment inevitably ends.
He cared deeply about his songs, and about the history and culture behind each one, to the point where he was known to lose track of time and space.
But that was precisely the point of most of the music he helped create as the founder and singular force behind the El Mastaba Center for the Preservation of Egyptian Folk Music, Egypt’s – and likely the Arab world’s – most important institution dedicated to traditional music.
Port Said was in the thrall of dama during this time – a combination of party music and transcendental experience that combined popular love songs and Sufi music from different traditions in the Nile Delta and Canal zone and used the simsimiyya to produce the sound that captivated Port Said.
In the three years following 1967, Egypt fought the War of Attrition with Israel and the songs of the simsimiyya travelled across Egypt, taken there by the people displaced from the Canal zone by the war to serve as a reminder of their hometowns.
Zakaria moved to Cairo in the early 1970s to attend university, just as Egypt moved from the Arab nationalist politics of President Gamal Abdel Nasser to the more neoliberal and pro-Western policies of his successor, Anwar Sadat.
He became deeply involved in the left-wing student movement, ultimately serving a short stint in prison because of his activities.
At the same time, the music of the simsimiyya, which had been so deeply ingrained in the culture of Port Said and the broader Delta, became increasingly commercialised.
Zakaria Ibrahim’s musical roots
“Instead of being the way we were before, singing and gathering in the streets all together then leaving together, now, there is a situation where the one who is coming to attend has to pay the one who sings,” Zakaria once lamented, criticising what he saw as the commodification of the music of the people.
Meanwhile, the music of the zar, and particularly the rango, had all but become extinct except as a tourist curiosity.
“He was trying to redraw the ancient caravan routes, to highlight the healing, just like the Gnawa in Morocco,” Zine explained, referring to the North African country’s Sufi music.
To be sure, from the first moment Zakaria listened to Gnawa at El Mastaba, he could hear the similarities in mood, in the strings and songs from one end of North Africa to the other.
“Zakaria saw the connections between the healing power of Sufi music… the way others looked at tarab [virtuosic art music],” Zine explained.
“And he saw how the Moroccan government had finally come to support Gnawa and its culture, and he wanted to achieve the same for the spiritually grounded folk music in Egypt.”
The simsimiyya, the tanbura and the “rango” – a small wooden xylophone that together with the tanbura has long been the primary instrument of various types of ritual gatherings known as zar ceremonies – have a spiritual past, the source and route of which varies depending on who’s telling it.
Their modern origins centre around the conquest of modern-day Sudan in 1820 by Egypt’s Muhammad Ali and the participation, as slaves and free people, of increasing numbers of Sudanese, Nubians, Ethiopians and other East Africans in the burgeoning “Egyptian” army, as well as in cotton cultivation and trade more broadly.
With the establishment of Port Said in 1859 and the abolition of the slave trade at the end of the 19th century, major Egyptian cities right up to the Mediterranean saw a marked increase in sub-Saharan communities, and eventually neighbourhoods and quarters.
Their cultural, religious and musical practice intersected and embedded with local practices to produce various forms of modern Egyptian folk music, most of which are rooted at least partly in the Sufi and East African traditions that define groups like El Tanbura, Rango and other ensembles created or sponsored by El Mastaba.
One of the most powerful moments of the 18-day Egyptian Arab Spring uprising of 2011 was when El Tanbura marched – danced, really – into Tahrir Square, the symbolic heart of the protest movement.
El Tanbura sang revolutionary songs that were sung first against Israel in 1956 and 1967, underscoring both the stakes of the protests and whose side the politically grounded artists were on.
Six months on from the start of the revolution on January 25, El Tanbura was at London’s Barbican to perform with other musicians who played in Tahrir Square. This began a series of tours that would take them across the Arab world, Europe and Asia, including major festival stages like Glastonbury and Roskilde.
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