1. There are long strings of edicts and laws from the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century in Egypt circumscribing the lives of performers. See van Nieuwkerk 1995 for an excellent historical review of women performers’ status and Racy 1977 and Danielson 1997 for a historical understanding of the changing status of performers in this century. See also Nelson 1985 on sama‘ (listening) for debates surrounding the propriety of musical performance in religious discourses.

2. For many Cairene women, visiting saints’ tombs and mosques serves as both social outings and popular religious practice. Relations between devotees and their saints are often very intense.

3. By this I mean sha‘bi, literally, “popular”. This term carries connotations of both class status and adherence to practices understood to be traditional, patriarchal, and socially conservative. The term tends to include the urban working class, urban trade and craft classes, peasant immigrants to the city, and also those from the petite bourgeoisie who work in offices by day but return to traditional home lives in the evenings. Sha‘bi also has nationalist overtones, similar to those evoked by the term awlad al-balad (sons of the country), those who staunchly support the nation in opposition to the infiltration of the inauthentic and foreign cultural and political agendas (see El-Messiri 1978). Cairene musicians I knew felt that awlad al-balad were rarely found among younger generations today.

4. Historically sons were expected to help provide financially for aging parents. This practice is becoming attenuated, in part as a result of the increasing nucleation of families. Still, older people express both acquiescence and dismay that sons often do not make an effort to respect the older ways or their parents’ needs. This is especially the case in this community, where extended families and occupational collaboration between generations endured until recently. Now modern practices and ideologies linked to professionalism, to which the younger generation aspires (as they must in music to be competitive), forms a rift between the elderly and their children.

5. The Muhammad ‘Ali Street neighborhood is composed of a half kilometer of music stores, lute-crafting workshops, and musicians’ cafés. Performers live in the six- to eight-story buildings above the stores and cafés with other crafts families and small workshops. The street begins at ‘Ataba Square, a traffic-jammed transport and market nexus on the border between Islamic and downtown Cairo. It climbs two kilometers through famous old neighborhoods of Islamic Cairo to the paired mosques of Sultan Hasan and the Rifa‘i Mosque, right below the Citadel that crowns the summit. Approximately a kilometer west of the community is Ezbekiyya, once the main theater district. Its private and state-sponsored venues once produced shows ranging from classical taqasim music to popular plays and opera. The street was named after Muhammad ‘Ali, the Albanian-born ruler who governed Egypt from 1805 until 1848, whose plans for the street were part of his attempt to reshape Egypt based on modern principles and concerns about military access, sanitation, and leisure entertainment (see Abu-Lughod 1971; Behrens-Abouseif 1985; Mitchell 1988).

6. While the development of a pan-Arab press was crucial in Egypt to early nationalist thinking (as Benedict Anderson [1991] might suggest), wider public sentiment during this time of incomplete literacy was sparked by vernacular nonprint media such as film and live entertainment. Especially Umm Kulthum’s concerts are remembered as having been imbued with nationalist sentiment. Even for those born after she died (in 1973), her voice has remained the voice of Egypt, or rather what was great about Egypt in the twentieth century (see Danielson 1997). Cairenes consider taxis to be the popular “venue” for the current recorded music scene, and until the early 1990s, Umm Kulthum prevailed “there.” For a detailed discussion of the relationships among nationalism, language, and popular culture during the nationalist era, see Armbrust 1996.

7. Many performance-related terms like impresario, brofa (practice), and theatro (variety show), along with music composition terms found in Cairene Arabic, are derived from Italian.

8. Veiling means neo-Islamic veiling, which is composed of a longish triangular scarf that covers the hair and is pinned under the chin. For a thorough discussion of the cultural politics of veiling, see MacLeod 1991.

9. In the past, and occasionally still, for a small minority of people, a wedding typically lasted three days and included several live orchestras, dancers, and singers. In the 1990s, on any given Thursday night, the family I have partly described above would have been performing at these weddings, which were usually held outside in smaller streets (where many weddings are still held). The rented sound systems now used in wedding entertainment are notable for ever-increasing decibels, a trend that musicians and listeners attribute to Western “disco” influences. Most musicians I knew did not like these trends in popular music but believed this is what people expect. Many are aware of their own hearing loss caused by the high-powered sound systems.

10. Their uneasiness is not fully reflected in most nonperforming Cairenes’ view of their community. Cairenes characterize the community as a remnant of a fading popular life and of entertainment that was family based and seem unaware that performers still live there or that they now perform in nightclubs. Karin van Nieuwkerk (1995) found that nonperformers considered members of this community to be good people, because of their historical work at weddings and ritual celebrations. However, the same interviewees felt that singers and dancers who lived and worked on Pyramids Road were little better than prostitutes and only interested in money.

11. There is a pattern of Saudi men marrying Egyptian women when on vacation in Cairo. Although some marriages are contracted in good faith, others allegedly only last for the period that the Saudi vacationer is in Egypt, after which time he repudiates his wife. (Divorce is relatively easy in Islamic law.) To the degree that such “summer marriages” do occur (no statistics are available), they are seen as proof of the immoral, predatory (and male) character of Arab tourists. There are also stories about wives of such Arab men who, unattended and with access to excessive money, are left to spend their time luring young Egyptian men into relationships. These stories mostly circulate among young Egyptian men, and their telling almost always contains an element of astonishment, whereas the “summer marriage” stories are considered common knowledge.

12. Does nostalgia have a center? As a narrative vehicle, nostalgia points to what is not there, making the past fan in and out of self-chosen points. Nostalgia works, for those who cannot afford to criticize, to separate oneself from a present, whether due to a sense of complicity or a sense of helplessness in the face of present problems. It also serves to derive legitimacy or show association or difference through emotive historical means, perhaps to substantiate or invalidate the present. Nostalgia is one of the few choices that subordinated people have: if there is no ascertainable future, one might thus at least choose one’s conception of the past.

13. This is reflected in the postindependence ascendancy of Egyptian mass culture and political leadership across much of the Middle East, which dissolved in the wake of Sadat’s signing of the Camp David Peace Accords with Israel, Egypt’s subsequent expulsion from the Arab League, and recurrent economic uncertainty.

14. Even with all the recent nostalgic fascination with departed Egyptian royalty—who were essentially powerless under the British and were finally booted out by the revolution—there is no public nostalgia for any past cultural items brought in by the British.

15. While I was living in Cairo, one of the most popular long-running musicals was called Shari‘ Muhammad ‘Ali. Perhaps the best-loved and longest-running Ramadan series, called “Layali al-Hilmiyya” (Hilmiyya Nights), is about the community on al-Hilmiyya Street that converges with Muhammad ‘Ali Street. For an excellent discussion of such television serials, see Abu-Lughod 1995b. The many classic films set in the community include Ahibbak ya Hasan (I Love You, Hasan; 1958) about a young woman (played by Na‘ima ‘Akif) who comes to the community on Muhammad ‘Ali Street and rises to fame; Shari‘ al-hubb (Street of Love; 1958), in which ‘Abd al-Halim Hafiz plays a young man who exceeds his sha‘bi Muhammad ‘Ali Street background and becomes famous; and Khalli balak min Zuzu (Pay Attention to Zuzu; 1972), about a student at the university who, amid rampant classism, redeems her worth (and wins her sweetheart) after being revealed as a dancer from a sha‘bi family of dancers on Muhammad ‘Ali Street.

16. The problem is that there is still cachet in these images and their uses that together, in some contexts, form a kind of symbolic capital (à la Bourdieu 1977). Such images have served to reinforce the community’s precedence in the—albeit diminishing—wedding market, although these antiquated images also typecast community members as throwbacks in a professionalizing market. The idea of symbolic capital gains special use in contexts that include mixed class, ethnicity, and special groups, especially in historical perspective. To the degree that symbolic capital is publicly identified with, or attributed to, a special group (in this case, a performance community), it can also become an ideological burden at different points in that group’s history. Such contexts point to the potential double valence of symbolic capital.

17. Islamists are composed of several related groups, most based around the southern city of Assiut, that have worked to bring down the government through preaching against corruption, offering social services that the government has failed to provide in the south, and waging a guerrilla war with the government. They have gained most publicity through their campaign to terrorize Western tourists, on whose money the government relies heavily. Many Cairenes I knew felt that Islamists’ violence was wrongly guided by misinterpretations of the Qur’an, which, they felt, provided proof that Islamists were not Muslims. Patrick Gaffney’s (1994) work provides excellent insights into this movement.

18. The religious conservative movement touches a deep vein for many lower-class communities like that on Muhammad ‘Ali Street, who have not fully shared in the benefits of educational and economic liberalism to the same degree as the aspiring middle classes.

19. Images of southerners come in two major forms. In films, from the 1930s to the present, southerners most often appear as clever but uncultured and ruthless men. These men either form excited roaring congeries in an outrage wrought of their own misunderstanding of some sequence of events (usually concerning honor) or are singular figures of treachery who attempt to kill, kidnap, or trick a hero or heroine. In the background small groups forever drink tea and yansun (southern anise tea). A more contemporary image comes from migrant male laborers to Cairo from the south. They are recognizable by their southern dress, and they dominate certain lower-class service and unskilled labor jobs. They are the frequent butt of Cairene jokes.

20. Nag‘ Hammadi was originally famous as a tourist destination both for the significant Pharaonic sites in the vicinity and for the discovery of the Gnostic manuscripts there. However, in early 1995, when gunmen attacked Italian tourists, it had become the southernmost site of Islamist-connected violence up until that time. The attack was widely publicized, but no one said anything about it on the train, which had been attacked numerous times and was heavily guarded. Later, southern friends of mine interpreted this incident as a case of innocents who got caught in blood-feud crossfire. They likewise interpreted much of the violence between Islamists and government forces as rooted in older feuds and vendettas.

21. This migration genre is most famously exemplified by Taha Husayn’s autobiography (1932).

22. My Cairene friends were well aware of the changes in their habits, and women were often embarrassed to show me pictures of themselves from years past that showed them dressed “immodestly.” Twice, when religious talk got serious, two of my Cairene friends asserted that they thought the world was likely coming to an end soon and they felt the need for repentance. When I was in Cairo, I could see their point, with the high level of environmental pollution, social pressures, illness, and lack of prospects. This feeling would melt away after a day in the south, despite the poverty that also existed there.

23. Southerners tell rumors of migrating female immorality from Cairo to the south. Some Coptic men friends of mine once got together to warn me of the impending peril I faced were I to return to Muhammad ‘Ali Street. They claimed that though I thought I knew those women, I could not really know or trust them. They told me that unsupervised women from that neighborhood used to come down south in traveling shows and essentially act as prostitutes in the 1930s and 1940s, comparable only to the visiting nurses of the same period, who were also known for their alleged debauchery. Although none of these friends were born before 1950 or had ever been to Cairo, they assured me that they knew better than I did about the famous neighborhood in Cairo.

24. ‘Afifi, a local man, was sometimes hired for his cross-dressing performances of singing and dancing for men at wedding parties. Men regarded him as a subject for hilarity rather than for serious moral scrutiny.

25. These ideations take up conceptual coordinates similar to early explorers’ perspectives on travel as discussed in Johannes Fabian’s (1983) discussion of time, space, and culture.

26. Their appearance in a recent French movie, Latcho Drom (1993), about Gypsy/Romany music from the Indian subcontinent to Spain gave precedence to this marketed identity, although their own identification with this ethnicity at home is much more ambiguous. Gypsies seem to call up romanticist nostalgia for many Europeans, resonating with an imagined prerationalized, preindustrial age (see Hoggart 1958; Williams 1973).

27. This rather optimistic view of commoditization as a practice in which everyone benefits finds its theoretical source in Simmel (1978), who focused on productive exchange to the neglect of productive labor. A similar spirit animates the popularized enthusiasm surrounding the issue of globalization.

28. See Benjamin 1969. I do not mean to somehow condemn the liberatory possibilities of listenership. It could be argued that willingness to listen, buy, and imagine the people behind world music in itself constitutes political engagement that has subtle agency in the way we align our international politics and the degree to which we may be less willing to “otherize” particular groups.

29. Because of their proximity to Luxor, which is a major tourist center for Westerners, these musicians are used to being scrutinized for glimmers of an authentic past, the original Egyptian Pharaonic culture. Tour guides and guidebooks often depict residents as essentially unchanged since Pharaonic times. Luxorites working in the tourist markets make blatant use of such tendencies to sell their wares.

30. See Barthes 1975 for provocative commentary on the pleasure of recognition.

31. Charles Taylor (1992) discusses this in depth, noting that Rousseau first articulated this as an intuited moral evenness. Such self-awareness also has bearing on romanticist understandings of the artist’s sensibilities that are present in narratives of Cairene musicians who have had conservatory training and southern musicians who have traveled abroad.

32. That is to say: “Look at the stems [stains, spittle] still hanging to the headpiece, it must be the real thing.” Larry Shiner discusses criteria for authenticity in tourist art, remarking that “in the context of the ‘primitive art’ market, the art-versus-craft distinction undergoes a paradoxical reversal” (1994, 227). In the case of performance, there is yet more shifting about and aesthetic confrontation, both visually and aurally.

33. See Coco Fusco’s Couple in a Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey (1993). Robert Rydell’s (1987) work on the world fairs provides historical instances of staging others. Mary Douglas’s (1966) discussion of boundaries and danger is also helpful here, as is Ray Bradbury’s fictional Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), which explores the lurking fearful fantasies that have typically surrounded traveling circuses.

34. I am extending Gregory Bateson’s (1972) use of the term in his discussion of schizophrenia here to indicate a kind of culturally shared schizophrenia.

35. These women rely on management and hired guards to protect them from audiences in Cairo, but apparently do not have such protection in nightclubs in the Gulf states.

36. Ibn Khaldun (1958), the great social historian of the fourteenth century, described the rise and fall of polities, believing that urbanity was inherently corrupting while rural tribal life was moral and politically strengthening. His model suggested that these two sociospatial entities provide foils for each other. As the urban center’s defense is gradually weakened by increasing moral and political decay, it is easily attacked and conquered by disciplined peripheral groups. In turn, such conquering groups over time become urbanized, weakened, and corrupt and eventually fall to conquering peripheral groups.

37. Recognition by these musicians that their foreign audiences did not understand the words that they were singing would occasionally lead to mischief in the lyrics.

38. This resembles Redfield’s (1956) great/little tradition. To refresh that concept, consider the American tradition of the synthesizer player at reunions, anniversaries, and some weddings, who performs everything from old rock (Beatles) and musical hits (the themes from Dr. Zhivago and The Sound of Music) to Ave Maria, all set to the same digital rumba beat.