Shaabi

Shaabi (Arabic for 'of the people') is the popular music of working-class Cairo, named in the 1970s when cassette culture let singers address the city's poor in their own idiom. It is built on the mawwal, an improvised vocal lament on hardship, love and fate, delivered over synthesizers, accordion, tabla and electronic percussion in place of the classical takht ensemble. *Ahmed Adaweyah*, its founding star, sang of street life with a directness censored from state media; successors such as *Hassan El Asmar* and *Hakim* commercialized the form, and its 2010s descendant, mahraganat, rebuilt it from electronic beats.