Enta Omri

By 1964 Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab had both spent decades at the summit of Arabic music, yet they had never made a song together. She had started out as a child in the village of Tamay al-Zahayra in Dakahlia, singing religious hymns with her father, who at first dressed her in boys' clothes because singing was not considered acceptable for country girls. Since 1934 she had given a concert on the first Thursday of every month, a ritual that would last forty years. Abdel Wahab, for his part, was one of Egypt's most prominent musicians, a composer she would only come to work with late in her career. Enta Omri, You Are My Life, was their first collaboration, with words by the poet Ahmad Shafik Kamel. Because it brought the two giants together for the first time, the song became known in Arabic as the meeting of the clouds. Abdel Wahab set it in maqam kurd, a mode often used to express freedom, romance and gentleness, and Umm Kulthum performed it in 1964. Sono Cairo released the recording in March 1965. It became one of the hundreds of Umm Kulthum songs that remain widely loved today. Many singers have taken it on, among them Amal Maher, whose voice is considered one of the closest to Umm Kulthum's own, and Sarit Hadad. More than half a century on, Enta Omri is still heard as the moment when Egypt's two most powerful musical voices finally met.