Agence France-Presse CAIRO: When Omm Sameh sings, trendy students, young intellectuals and tourists looking for a taste of the exotic sway to her captivating sounds. The voluptuous, dark-eyed singer sings to the Prophet Mohammed and his descendants, to Jesus and to unseen spirits to the pulsating rhythms of drums and strings. She is one of the last surviving Zar performers, a musical form that originated in Africa and is rooted in mysticism and spirituality. The practice, traditionally a healing ritual performed by women for women, had been confined to a small group that used musical instruments such as the tamboura, a string instrument dating to ancient Egypt, to pacify spirits and cleanse the soul. The purification rite involved music and chants, with drums beating slowly at first but gradually getting louder and faster until the women worked themselves into a trance. The Zar was shunned by the religious establishment, which considered it a pagan ritual according to a strict interpretation of Islam. Practiced mainly in the southern rural parts of Egypt, and beyond in Sudan, the ritual was equally snubbed by urban cultural elites. The form survived only as a subculture and was on its way off the cultural map before Ahmed Al-Maghrabi, who heads a cultural center in Cairo, took the initiative to preserve the dying art. You can imagine how such a mixture made Islamic puritans feel, said Maghrabi. Maghrabi brought together Omm Sameh and other surviving Zar performers to create a more modern Zar troupe called Mazaher which performs at a recently established performance space in downtown Cairo, Makan. The number of performers has now dwindled to 25, but Maghrabi began to archive their repertoire of about 200 songs that are based on oral tradition. After us, there will be no more Zar. The new generation does not like it, says Omm Sameh. My own children refuse to listen to it, complains the 56 year-old. Like Omm Sameh, Raafat Mustafa, now 45, learned the Zar from his parents when he was just a child. He has been performing for 25 years now. During my father s time, we worked every night, remembers the musician nostalgically. Now it s over, he says, wearing crisp white traditional robes, his mustache neatly trimmed. While Mazaher is occasionally commissioned to give private performances where, traditionally, an animal, often poultry, is sacrificed, for Maghrabi it is more about the music. We don t kill animals and we avoid songs that offend some sensibilities, said Maghrabi, giving as an example the song of the convent, which talks of drunken men in monasteries where alcohol flows freely. A spectator once asked for it behind my back and a Coptic (Egyptian Christian) woman was outraged, he said. We try to avoid this type of situation and stick to art. Occasionally, those more familiar with the traditional Zar throw in a request for their favorite tune, but most just come for the relaxed atmosphere. Foreigners love Zar, even if they don t understand the words, says Omm Sameh, as three Italian women bob their bodies to the drum beats around her. Makan manages to bring together foreign tourists and young Egyptian fashionistas, clapping and tapping their feet under soft lights. The young and the intellectuals discover a world they thought was primitive and unfashionable, and the foreigners find it exotic, says sociologist Malak Roushdi. The new-found demand for the music will allow Mazaher to give a small tour of Italy and Germany in the autumn, says Maghrabi explaining however that these performances will not bring in big money for the musicians. They get LE 1,500 to LE 2,000 ($260 to $347) per night, which they have to divide between the members of the band, says Maghrabi. The price for an entrance ticket at Makan is between LE 5 and LE 20 ($0.8 to $3.5). To help the form survive, it must receive assistance from the state, says Rajeh Daoud, the head of the Cairo Conservatory of Music. They must consider the Zar a cultural heritage and not a religious one, he says. This no one will object to.
