From Ocean to Gulf, Heritage Music of the Arab world: Fatheyia Ahmed, third and last episode

Akram Rayess , Thursday 29 Jan 2026

A series by Ahram Online, in partnership with the AMAR Foundation.

Fatheyia Ahmad or Touha Personal archives

After featuring the Sultana of Tarab Music, the Prince of the Arabic Violin, the Master of the buzuq, Hajja Zeinab El Mansouria, the rich music of Yemen, episode 1 and 2, Arab songs of satire and resistance, the music of Tunis, episode 1and 2, Fatheyia Ahmed, the singer of two regions episode1, 2, we end our series with the final episode of Fatheyia Ahmed.

Music is a powerful force for healing and reconnecting us with our roots and shared humanity in a world of numerous challenges.

From Ocean to Gulf: Heritage Music of the Arab World is a new series by Ahram Online, in partnership with the AMAR Foundation (Foundation for Arab Music Archiving and Research). Focusing on the early years of recording in our region—which reflected a modern, cosmopolitan repertoire and coincided with the Renaissance era that flourished in Egypt between the mid-19th century and the 1930s—this initiative aims to introduce audiences to the iconic figures of Arab music whose contributions have enriched our intangible cultural heritage and inspired generations worldwide.

From left: Fatheyia Ahmed, accompanied by her husband Ismail Saeed. Next to them is the Turkish oud player and composer Yorgo Bacanos (1900-1977), Eftalya Hanım, and her husband, the Turkish violinist and composer Sadi Işlay (1899 – 1969). Both Bacanos and Işlay visited Cairo between the late 1920s and early 1930s. Source: Archives of Murat Özyıldırım (Turkey)

Improvisation

British-born Egyptian Engineer and amateur musician Tarik Beshir elaborates further on Fatheyia’s improvisational capacities. He asserts that Fatheyia Ahmed was one of the best vocalists of her time. In terms of vocal abilities, one might think she is second best to Oum Kalthoum and perhaps not as regal-sounding as Asmahan. However, when it comes to improvisational ability, she stands in a league of her own among the female singers of her generation.

Whilst improvisation, according to Oum Kalthoum (and many female singers following that school), is heavily dependent on vocal prowess, elongated phrases (designed to evoke emotion), trills, and octave singing to demonstrate range and power, Fatheyia takes a completely different, more learned route.

It is the route of the old school, the "Mashaykh," where improvisation means putting together melodic sequences (instantaneous composition if you like) that demonstrate a strong grasp of the characters and pathways within the modal system, "The Maqām."

Therefore, it is her mental prowess and experience that is on show rather than just her vocal prowess (which is outstanding nonetheless), and the voice becomes a vehicle that delivers her wealth and knowledge of maqāms. Beshir provides two examples: the Zanjiran mawwāl “Shoufou el Halawa” that precedes the song "Ya halawt edonya" and the mid-section improvisation in "Ya Tara” (the long radio version).

Fatheyia - Ya di el-Gharam (dour composed by Daoud Hosni)

Sample labels from Fatheyia’s shellac records.
The words “Imported Recording” appear on the Alamphone label.
Archive: Dr Fahd el-Faras (Kuwait), Henrique Tabchoury (Brazil), and AMAR

Discography

While the repertoire of Fatheyia’s radio recordings has not been commercially released on vinyl, tape, or CD, this collection of songs has been disseminated and revived regularly over the years through the efforts of radio broadcasters and programme anchors. It is fitting to mention their names in tribute to their efforts. The first was Mahmoud Kamel, succeeded by Hala El-Hadidi in the program “Alhan Zaman” (Melodies of the Old days).

Others who followed this path include Ibrahim Hefny and Tarek Mustafa. Additionally, dedicated online music forums have extended the outreach of Fatheyia’s repertoire over the last two decades, which is based on three primary sources: shellac records, three musical films, and radio recordings. Still, little has been revealed to date about her live performances. This area remains a significant gap in further understanding Touha’s vocal capacities and improvisational dynamics.

Amr Nosehy, a student and aspiring researcher in the history of early recording in the region from El-Masoura, notes that Fatheyia’s collection of shellac records remains the only surviving trace of her musical practice before the radio and musical film era. In the world of 78 rpm recordings, she seems to have recorded for only three companies: Mechian (Egypt) in its early days, Columbia, and Odeon.

Additionally, Professor Fahd El-Faras (music researcher who was previously the head of the Music Education Department at the Faculty of Education in Kuwait) informs us of a short-lived record label that Fatheyia established under her own name in association with Mechian. Some of her records were released in the two Americas under the label Alamphone, based in Brooklyn, New York, and founded and owned by the Lebanese-Syrian American Farid Alam Al-Din, known as Fred Alam.

In compiling a list of these recordings, Nosehy relied on the commercial catalogues of the three companies, as well as Fatheiya’s records from the AMAR Foundation archive, since the catalogues alone were never complete. The list includes a total of 41 titles composed by Sayid Darwiche, Abu El-Ila Mohammed, Ahmad Sabri Nagridi, Daoud Hosni, and Qasabji with a wide range of musical forms from theatre songs to mawwāl.

From left: Fatheyia, Sami El-Shawwa, and the Turkish singer Safiye Ayla (1907 – 1998). Archive of Dr Ahmad AlSalhi (Kuwait).

Post-Nahda Survival and Exclusion

Fatheyia Ahmed’s life and career were shaped by personal and structural hardship. Her first husband seized her earnings under the pretext of managing her affairs, while her decision to prioritize motherhood contributed to her gradual withdrawal from public life in the late 1920s. Several historians note that her competition with Oum Kalthoum effectively ended only with Fatheyia’s retreat from the musical scene.

When she attempted a return in the 1930s, the cultural scene had already undergone significant shifts. Accelerated modernization and Westernization reshaped musical production and reception, placing Fatheyia at a significant disadvantage.

By the 1940s, female vocal modernity had crystallized into two dominant models: Oum Kalthoum’s synthesis of tradition and gradual reform, and Asmahan’s embrace of cosmopolitan modernism. Fatheyia Ahmed did not align fully with either at a moment when the field increasingly demanded singular modern identities. This misalignment was compounded by sharp asymmetries in institutional support.

Oum Kalthoum’s longevity was sustained by an extensive network of elite composers and intellectuals, highly skilled orchestras, and the expanding infrastructures of state radio, cinema, and commercial media. Fatheyia, by contrast, depended largely on her own vocal authority, often performing with comparatively modest ensembles that were gradually reduced to radio recordings.

Fatheyia’s career thus offers a critical lens for examining the limits of the Nahda when confronted with an emergent musical modernity, Nahda representing the era since mid 19th century when renewal from within was the dominant norm, whereas modernity is the period starting from the 1930s when renewal through the introduction of external musical and cultural elements from Euro-American traditions became the main standard.

Her case illustrates how musical modernity required not only artistic merit and adaptability but also access to and compliance with new regimes of institutional affiliation, visibility, and cultural productivity. The decline of Fatheyia’s career thus reveals that Arab musical modernity was shaped as much by processes of exclusion as by narratives of progress.

It invites a reassessment of Nahda and modernity historiographies towards more attentiveness to silence, disappearance, and loss. It is also a call to seek comparative studies of Fatheyia with key figures such as Sami Al-Shawwa (1889-1965) and Saleh Abdel Hayy (1896-1962), whose post-Nahda paths reveal alternative modes of adaptation to the same historical changes.