The celebrated Egyptian singer Umm Kulthūm (d. 1970) is one of the most successful re-animators of the qas̩īda in the twentieth century. Her work, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, reveals a profound understanding of the qas̩īda’s movement from the personal to the public, from reflection to engagement, and from self to other/others. In response to urgent political transformations in Egypt and the Arab world in that period, Umm Kulthūm found in Aḥmad Shawqī’s (d. 1933) poetry, his praises of the prophet in particular, a malleable, versatile, and deeply impactful form through which to connect to her wide audience and summon them into a shared state of mind. Her selection of poems, her editing of them, and her final performances all attest to her ability to “translate” and “rewrite” the archetypal form for her times, revealing in it a call for outward engagement (social, political, historical) that can only arise from a most personal and inward of postures. This paper traces the journey of one of Shawqī’s praises of the prophet, Salū qalbī (Ask My Heart) into an evolving and ever-relevant political statement. When Umm Kulthūm initially performed the poem in 1946, it signaled a spiritual turn towards the individual search for balance and peace while at the same time expressing a collective stance against British presence in Egypt. When the song was deliberately reintegrated into Umm Kulthūm’s revolutionary repertoire in 1967, the political message was underscored, keyed, and unmistakably attached to the Nasser revolutionary effort. In the wake of the 2011 events in Egypt, echoes of this same song resurfaced. By re-framing this poem in song and in performance, Umm Kulthūm transforms it or parts of it into one of the most recognizable revolutionary statements; a statement that rang as urgent and true to a protesting crowd in 2011 as it did in 1946 and in 1967.