The Song Before the Uprising: Arabic Protest Music's Long History

The image that many people remember from the early days of the Egyptian uprising in January 2011 is Tahrir Square, packed with hundreds of thousands of people, the crowd making noise that felt like more than protest — felt like song. That's because it partly was song. Arabic protest music has a history stretching back at least to the 1950s, and the music that played in and around Tahrir Square in 2011 was both ancient and contemporary simultaneously.

Sheikh Imam is the figure who defined Egyptian protest song in the second half of the twentieth century. Working in partnership with the poet Ahmed Fouad Negm, Imam created a body of work that criticized Nasser, Sadat, and the Egyptian ruling class in language that was too poetic for censors to fully suppress and too clear for audiences to misunderstand. His songs were passed on cassette tapes through underground networks when they couldn't be performed publicly.

The tradition Imam drew on was older than himself. The mawwal — a vocal improvisation form in colloquial Arabic — has been a vehicle for social commentary for centuries, its structure flexible enough to carry both love poetry and political critique. The form of the zajal (popular poetry with colloquial vocabulary and internal rhyme) provided poets with a framework for politically charged verse that could be dressed in apparently innocent traditional clothing.

In Lebanon, Marcel Khalife's settings of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry created perhaps the most aesthetically sophisticated protest music in the Arabic world. Darwish's verse about Palestinian exile and longing found in Khalife's oud arrangements a musical context that gave the words additional emotional weight. The combination moved listeners across political and sectarian lines that would otherwise have separated them.

The Moroccan group Nass El Ghiwane, formed in Casablanca in 1970, brought a different approach: they drew on gnawa and Sufi musical traditions, using traditional instrumentation and spiritual-music frameworks to carry politically charged texts. The effect was electrifying and the approach relatively protected — it was harder for authorities to suppress music that looked like religious tradition than music that looked like direct criticism.

When the Arab Spring arrived, it had a soundtrack already composed. The Egyptian rapper MC Amin's songs circulated on social media before and during the protests. The Tunisian MC El Général's "Rais Lebled" — "President of the Country" — was shared so widely online that Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's government arrested him. He was released after the uprising, and the song became an anthem.

Protest music doesn't start revolutions. But it articulates what revolutions are for — the longing, the grievance, the vision of what could be different. In Arabic music, that articulation has been happening for a long time. 2011 gave it an unusually large stage.