Egypt’s “first Broadway-style” musical comedy, Praksa (by Nader Salah el-Din & Hisham Gabr), which debuted at the Cairo Opera House in 2009, holds not only a significant place in Arabic theater history, but offers substantial material for consideration of socio-political questions of gender (in)equality, popular civic rights, and the “revolving door” of autocratic control in Egypt. Through comparative examination of a pivotal musical number from this seminal production and its two literary ancestors, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Praksa, Mushkilat al-Hukm (1960) and Aristophanes’ Ekklesiazousai “Women in Congress Assembled” (c. 392/391 BCE), the current paper will explore the boundaries and potency of socio-political satire in the ever-(yet somehow never-)changing dynamic of Egyptian authoritarianism. Frustrated with the feckless leadership of Farouk and oligarchic élites in 1939, Tawfiq al-Hakim surprisingly took dramatic inspiration for his satirical spin on bad governance from an unheralded, ancient musical comedy by an Old Comedian of ancient Greece. Aristophanes had offered a gritty satire of topsy-turvy inversion in which women, led by Praxagora, assumed men’s clothing, beards, and democratic authority to establish a proto-communistic program of wealth re-distribution whereby women would run state and home alike to keep their now emasculated men from further damaging Athens. The “do-nothing” men, represented by Praxagora’s stupid, old husband, however, are still seen in the end to be self-seeking drains on common resources. Al-Hakim follows Aristophanes fairly closely (as a handout with a complete, tripartite, structural analysis of the three dramas will show) through the three acts written in 1939, though he invents a philosopher/intellectual and a general to form, along with the women’s leader Praksa, a troika—naturally run by the military man in “Egyptian” Athens! Al-Hakim left composition of biting charges against corrupt monarchy until a final three acts and publication in the Nasser years. Like Aristophanes, he captures the dilemma of rulers’ corruptibility, no matter how noble their initial goals, by satirizing the triumvirate’s desire to install Praksa’s dim-witted husband as their puppet king, a front-man for their usurpation of the democratic revolution they inspired. Based on direct consultation and collaboration with the writing team of Praksa, the musical, the authors of the present paper will show and analyze the comic, musical trio in which Nader Salah el-Din’s Egyptian Arabic lyrics masterfully capture this moment: a coup by one-time democratic activists propping up a cuckolded, idiot king, their “windup-toy,” “ping-pong ball,” “robot,” beast of burden, a royal ass.

The historiography of modern Algerian Jewry - French citizens by dint of the 1870 Crémieux Decree - has long rested on the twin assumptions of the community’s near total embrace of French culture and language and the complete separation of Jews from Muslims as the twentieth century wore on. This paper seeks to focus the historical gaze on the interwar period in order to reveal an altogether different phenomenon: throughout the late 1920s and mid-1930s, Jews not only continued to sing in Arabic – professionally and to much acclaim, despite the best “civilizing” efforts – but did so in large numbers alongside their Muslim counterparts in a shared musical space. That this occurred during a period of increased record consumption in Algeria and the emergence of new technologies like radio and intersected with la guerre des ondes (the War of the Airwaves) waged by Germany and Italy against France and in tandem with a growing national movement, makes this all the more intriguing. Remarkably, even as certain Algerian nationalists accused Jews of corrupting Arabic song and all-Muslim musical associations formed to counter overwhelmingly Jewish orchestras like El Moutribia, the attempt to marginalize Jews within the Algerian soundscape fell largely on deaf ears. In fact, a turn to the primary sources reveals that Jewish music-makers not only defied attempts to exclude them, describing themselves and perceived by others as “Arab,” “oriental,” and “indigenous,” but gained an increasingly wide audience in the process. By directing attention to points of Jewish-Muslim convergence and competition in the oft-neglected realm of music, this paper, then, aims to highlight a particular moment in Algerian history, in which Jews, despite the colonial logic of the day, could identify and be identified as at once Arab and French.

Juxtapositions of old/new, urban/rural, serious/popular point to the complex political underbelly of colonialism, especially when it comes to music. Radio in the Maghreb presents an ideal context for studying this as its administrators considered the medium a “powerful instrument of propaganda and diffusion.” Most stations had their own studios with orchestras for western classical music; some also hired local ensembles playing indigenous music. In 1936, when there were from 15,000 to 30,000 radios in each major North African town and growing numbers of indigenous listeners, the Governor generals appointed official committees to oversee radio programming; in Rabat Moroccans were in the majority. Radio’s capacity to educate (or reeducate) and form taste had become too powerful not to control. In this paper, I examine musical repertoire on the radio in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia from 1928 to 1939, focusing on live performances and recordings of indigenous music. French writers of the time pointed to radio’s potential to distract locals from political unrest, and indigenous music’s potential to encourage radio sales and openness to the medium. Drawing on archival work in Paris, Aix, Nantes, Tunis and Rabat, I have concluded that French administrators, with the help of local elites, sought to shape public perception of indigenous peoples through exposure to their music, and local peoples’ attitudes toward French settlers through official support for it. Budgets for this grew substantial, especially at the radio. Importantly, Radio-Alger, Radio-Maroc, Radio-Carthage, and Radio-Tunis pursued such goals at different rates. Whereas, beginning in 1928, Radio-Maroc regularly presented “arab” music, eventually with “Chleuh” and other “berber” music, until the late 1930s radio in Algeria and Tunisia instead programmed concerts of “oriental” music (often Egyptian). Radio sheds light on not only varieties of musical taste across the region, but also evolving attitudes towards “Andalousian” music, whose importance as a marker of local identity emerged later in Algeria and Tunisia than in Morocco. Music on colonial radio thus points to how colonial administrations—from the Direction des affaires indigènes and the Direction des affaires chérifiennes to the Service des arts indigènes -- not only used radio to reach the broad population, but also increasingly promoted “Andalousian” music, despite some resistance, to both locals and listeners in France. From a postcolonial perspective, radio contributed to the “invention” of this tradition, perhaps as a way to suggest, or even forge, cultural unity in North Africa.

The changes in the way in which music was produced, circulated, and consumed in Algeria in the first three decades of the twentieth century helped to bring into being two seemingly contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, the rise of amateur musical associations, recordings, theatrical performance, radio, print, and a modernist discourse of revival helped create a strong sense of the collective meaning and nature of musical activity. Indigenous music formed the basis for a vision of an Algerian public, and became a major way in which Algerians organized themselves in the public sphere. These trends were closely connected to the delineation of the sense of an Algerian and Maghribi musical patrimony, held in common, passed down over the generations, and in need of salvage and revival. On the other hand, the new musical technologies, forms of social organization, and venues for listening and performance gave rise to a new sense of the individual mass media star, and created space for novel song forms that emphasized the role of the individual composer and performer over the sense of a collective inheritance. These two contradictory tendencies come together most dramatically in the realm of copyright. The new regime of author’s rights that was introduced in the early decades of the twentieth century was drawn upon not only by composers in new song genres, but also by musicians who worked within the traditional urban musical repertoires that were at that very moment being marked as patrimonial. This paper attempts to make sense of the embrace of copyright within the realm of the musical common. I begin with the 1927 dispute between two key figures in the early twentieth-century revival of Andalusi music in Algeria, Edmond Yafil and Jules Rouanet, over the former’s alleged attempt to copyright vast sections of the Andalusi repertoire in his name. I then touch upon the problem of authorship and copyright in the case of a song recorded by the Oran-based singer Joseph Guennoune in 1938—a song in a genre marked as patrimonial that traditionally involves the invocation of the speaker’s name within the text. These two disputes and their aftermath suggest the ways Maghribi musicians used copyright to both challenge and elaborate traditional notions of musical authority and transmission. I suggest that far from a contradiction, the assertion of author’s rights emerged from within the effort to delineate a notion of a collective musical patrimony.