On February 12, Egypt lost one of its greatest champions of traditional culture. Zakariah Ibrahim, director of the El Mastaba Center for the Preservation of Egyptian Folk Music, and founding leader of the traditional ensemble El Tanbura, passed away in Cairo at age 72. It is difficult to overstate the contribution this man made to preserving and uplifting ancient traditional music of Egypt. (He took a particular interest in one of the world’s oldest lutes, the simimiyya.) But you can get a sense of Zakariah’s legacy from a remembrance written by our colleague Mark Levine for Al Jazeera.
In fact, it was Mark who introduced us at Afropop Worldwide to Zakariah in 2011, when we spent a month in Egypt researching our Hip Deep in Egypt series. You can hear Zakariah and El Tanbura in a program from that series, Hip Deep in Egypt: Living Traditions. During our stay, we visited Zakariah in Cairo at El Mastaba, a unique museum of instruments, documents, recordings and more, as well as a performance space. A warm, serene and patient man, Zakariah was among the most memorable individuals we were privileged to meet during that visit, which took place at a pivotal time, between the January 25 Tahrir Square uprising and the fateful elections that would ultimately undermine the goals of that rebellion.
Late in our time in Egypt, we traveled to Port Said to see El Tanbura perform by the Mediterranean, looking across the water to the Sinai Peninsula. After the concert, we retired with the musicians to an after-hours spot for a jam session that lasted nearly until dawn. It was an activity Zakariah referred to as “changing the mind.”
El Tanbura’s music is like nothing else, full of unusual textures and deeply hypnotic. Dancers at their concerts seem joyously entranced, traveling back centuries to the jangle of the simsimiyya, the heartbeat pulse of hand drums and the melodious chorus of male voices singing in unison.
We were privileged to know Zakariah, and we wish his family, musicians and colleagues courage and persistence in pursuing his worthy mission.
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