were displayed in vertical cases rather than in storage boxes or drawers, I detected an interesting pattern among the cassettes. In almost all of these shops, Umm Kulthūm occupied the top row in the display cases. Only when the shop or stall also sold recordings of the Qurān was she displaced from the top rung, and in some instances she shared this honor with recordings of the holy text.37 Even in those stalls in which tapes were arranged horizontally, Umm Kulthūm occupied the first row at what would be the top were the case to be righted vertically. In Aleppo, Umm Kulthūm often shared the high spot with other religious vocalists.
The association between Umm Kulthūm, musical authenticity, and her occupation of the highest strata in Syrian cassette shops was demonstrated graphically one afternoon at a small cassette shop near the Victoria Bridge and Hijaz Railway Station area of central Damascus. This particular stand consisted of a vertical display case standing upon a table that held another horizontal case as well as a large cassette player. Running the shop was a young man from Ḥasaka, a town in the Kurdish region of northeastern Syria, and he was accompanied on this particular day by two young men, one from Ḥamā in central Syria and the other from the Ḥawrān region in the south. I approached the stand and asked them if they had any tapes of Khiḍr Yās, a well-known Iraqi singer who was scheduled to give a performance in Syria that month. The young man produced three tapes and placed one in the cassette player for me to listen to it. After a few minutes and the perfunctory questions (You speak Arabic!? Where are you from? Why did you learn Arabic? What are you doing here?), I spoke with them about their musical preferences and asked what they thought was the best music. I had been following up on Iraqi singers after discovering that many rural residents and the denizens of the microbus stations frequently listen to them. After debating the qualities of various Iraqi singers such as Khadr Yas, Alī al-Issawī, and Kāzim al-Sāhir (the popular artist), the young man asked me if I wanted to hear something really good and authentic. When I said yes, he stood for a moment thinking, then grabbed a chair, stood on it rather precariously, and reached up to the top shelf of the display case to bring down a tape of Umm Kulthūm’s “Amal ḥayātī” (Hope of my life). “This is the real thing,” he seemed to be saying as he placed it in the cassette player; to me, his putting in the tape spoke better than any words to his understanding of authenticity. We stood there, the three of us, listening to the great voice, which for these young men, like so many others, was the voice of tradition, perhaps even of the Arab nation (Danielson 1997).
After Umm Kulthūm, I was surprised to find Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ occupying the second tier in the stratigraphy of musical authenticity in Syrian cassette shops. This Egyptian crooner, popular among youth and especially women but often considered a symbol of vulgarity by the cultural elite during his lifetime, has been resurrected as an icon second only to Umm Kulthūm (and the Qurān), at least in popular cultural displays. In almost all instances when Umm Kulthūm occupied the top rung, Abd al-Ḥalīm Ḥāfiẓ would occupy the second. Only rarely was he displaced by others, and then usually by Muḥammad Abd al-Wahhāb or religious singers.
To my initial surprise, however, Abd al-Wahhāb did not always occupy the third place of pride in Syrian cassette-shop stratigraphy, though he almost always is mentioned among the Big Three. In fact, he often was exiled to a side display case or mixed indiscriminately with other artists having some relation to him or to musical heritage: Ṣafwān Bahlawān (a Syrian artist who studied with Abd al-Wahhāb and adopted his style of singing), Ṣabāḥ Fakhrī, and so on. Often Abd al-Wahhāb occupied his own corner. Instead, after Abd al-Ḥalīm, a variety of contemporary popular singers jockey for third place: Amru Diab, George Wasoof, Diana Haddad, Nawāl al-Zughbī, and other Egyptian, Lebanese, and Syrian singers. In fact, the majority of the shops and stalls feature a revolving collection of recent pop hits as well as the numerous “variety” collections and theme tapes, such as “ ‘Variety 1998,” “The Most Beautiful Dabkāt of 1997,” “Best Songs,” and “Love Songs 2002,” produced by the shop owners themselves or, less often, by local studios. All of them, of course, are bootleg compilations.
This stratigraphy suggests that the older artists and hence older aesthetic values are not on the verge of extinction, as critics of the contemporary pop song claim. Yet, there is a strong sense among musicians and intellectuals that the older generations represent a Golden Age that never will be repeated. This is why the modern pop songs are considered to be such a threat; there appears to be no alternative. Unlike the West, where contemporary genres and styles have displaced but not entirely replaced the older, there is a fear in Syria that once the present “cultivated listeners” pass on, there will not be a generation capable of appreciating the older music and of promoting its aesthetic standards. This is confirmed in the music conservatories, where students are shunning the study of the Arab instruments, instead flocking to the piano, violin, clarinet, guitar, and other European instruments.
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were displayed in vertical cases rather than in storage boxes or drawers, I detected an interesting pattern among the cassettes. In almost all of these shops, Umm Kulthūm occupied the top row in the display cases. Only when the shop or stall also sold recordings of the Qur