Umm Kulthum

Umm Kulthum, born Fatima Ibrahim es-Sayyid el-Beltagi in the village of Tamay al-Zahayra in Egypt's Dakahlia Governorate, was an Egyptian singer and film actress known by the honorific Kawkab el-Sharq, Planet of the East. The daughter of a rural imam, she sang religious hymns in her father's ensemble as a child, dressed as a boy, and moved to Cairo in the early 1920s, working with the poet Ahmed Rami and composers such as Mohammed Abdel Wahab. From 1934 she gave a broadcast concert on the first Thursday of every month for forty years, and after the 1967 war she sang abroad to raise funds for the Egyptian war effort. Her funeral in Cairo in 1975 drew a crowd of over 4 million people.