Singers perform under green light on a stage beneath a checkered balcony. — Eslam Karika, a micman, sings at the street wedding while DJs behind him mix the beat.

Cairo, 2013

Mahraganat: Who’s Your Local Musician?

In 2012 and 2013 I went looking for the singers behind mahraganat, the electronic wedding music of Cairo’s informal neighborhoods. Each one passed me to the next.

Mahraganat means “festivals.” By 2013 the music was everywhere in Cairo, coming out of phones and out of speakers bolted onto tuk-tuks and scooters. I had lived in the middle of it for a few years before I understood what it was, and how it spread without stores, labels or any official channel.

I had friends in Egypt’s music business, and the more official musicians among them looked down on mahraganat singers, who weren’t allowed into the musicians’ union and often weren’t allowed on the radio. So I went out to find them. Often that meant walking through a neighborhood and asking, “Who’s your local musician?” One person passed me to another, then another, until I found a singer, usually one who worked weekends at weddings, hyping up the crowd.

Sometimes the trail led higher, to the bigger names who were moving into films, acting and celebrity.

Half of Egypt’s 85 million people were under 25, Martina Kix wrote in NEON, and the musical alternatives were the classic songs of Umm Kulthum, who died in 1975, and Mohamed Mounir. Rather than turn to American pop, she wrote, young Egyptians were making something of their own. As she put it, “With mahraganat, the rebellion is in the sound, not in the lyrics.”

A mixing session and the metro: 3rd Street

Two young men at a desk in a room with red flowered wallpaper, one wearing glasses and large headphones over a laptop. — 01

Men standing in a Cairo metro car, one young man in a hooded sweatshirt with an older man’s arm around him. — 02

A wedding staged by Sardina and Salsa

Sardina and Salsa ran a business that staged many of the weddings in Matareya, one of the neighborhoods where mahraganat began. The biggest party I photographed was theirs, on March 4, 2013.

NEON called Sardina one of the fathers of mahraganat. “The guys learned everything from me,” he told Kix. In March 2011 he uploaded “Mahrajan Baheyya” to YouTube. He told Kix it became a kind of soundtrack for the protesters in Tahrir Square; I spent a lot of time in the square and don’t remember hearing it.

A red flare fills a packed night crowd with smoke; one man is held up above the heads of the others. — 03

A singer in a cartoon T-shirt shouts into a corded microphone with his fist raised, a crowd in pink light below. — 04

Hands work the knobs of a worn mixer beside a cigarette and a case of CDs. — 05

A singer with spiked hair sings into a microphone in deep red light between silhouetted young men. — 06

Young men crowd around DJ decks and a case of CDs on a stage clouded with red smoke. — 07

Seen from above, hundreds of boys and young men fill an alley with their arms raised. — 08

Scraps of white paper fall over boys looking up into the night. — 09

People watch from a curtained balcony on a dark building washed with red light. — 10

“Celebrating loudly here is no sign of being progressive.”

— Martina Kix, NEON, on a wedding in Imbaba (translated)

Women and children seated before tent cloth printed in blue and gold clap as young men dance in front of them. — 11

A man smokes at a computer under a black wall painted with a treble clef, a star and a phone number. — 12

Two tall speakers stand on chairs against a peeling mint-green wall marked with handprints. — 13

“We get requests to play at weddings every day.”

— Ahmed Karika of Dawshageya, to NEON (translated)

Dawshageya, the noise makers

The band I stayed with longest was Dawshageya, from Matareya. I chose them, as I wrote at the time, because they were a working band, down in the streets every week plying their trade. They opened up to me and called me whenever something was happening.

Its singers included Ahmed Karika, known as Khashaba, and Eslam Karika. When Kix reported on the band for NEON in late 2013, it had been together about a year. It was, as I told her then, a middle-famous band. Its members had all demonstrated in Tahrir Square, she wrote, but they did not want to rap political messages; they wanted their music to make moments free of politics. Kix put their fee at 5,000 to 10,000 Egyptian pounds a performance, a fortune in Matareya, where a month’s rent was about 50 euros. In the summer high season, Ahmed told her, they rapped on stage almost every day.

“After the revolution people want to celebrate again,” Ahmed, then 25, told her. “When we played at a wedding, five thousand people came. Four streets were blocked.” Eslam’s long curls were gone: his 18 months of military service were due to start within weeks. Politics, he told her, had become far too complicated. “People should laugh and dance and have fun!” That, Kix wrote, was how Dawshageya saw the task of mahraganat: “to let people forget everything for one night. And then another night.”

A barber holds a young man’s face and shaves his cheek with a straight razor. — 14

A young man fixes his hair in a bedroom mirror while a small boy copies him in the reflection. — 15

From behind, a hand combs heavily gelled hair in front of a carved wooden mirror. — 16

A young man in a leather jacket stands in a perfume shop lit blue as an arm reaches toward him with a dropper. — 17

A singer in a cap holds a stage light toward the camera while children dance around him in a street. — 18

A young man climbs from a window onto a metal stage truss hung with video panels. — 19

A groom in a suit helps a bride in a white gown and veil out of a red convertible as a crowd looks on. — 20

A smiling keyboard player at the edge of a stage above a busy street. — 21

People pass beneath a stage scaffold in blue smoke and colored bulbs; a woman in a white headscarf in the foreground. — 22

A young man sits on speakers roped onto a pickup truck while men wait in the street. — 23

From above, young men walk down an alley strung with colored bulbs and lined with scooters and covered cars. — 24

A blurred singer in a red jacket holds a microphone; behind him a young woman peers through floral curtains. — 25

Three performers with microphones in front of floral curtains, a woman’s face visible between them. — 26

Close view of hands holding a homemade gun under a brown leather jacket and a Superman T-shirt. — 27

Hands roll a joint over foam plates of lupini beans and fruit on a patterned chair. — 28

A group of young men and a woman pose for a photo shoot against a bare wall beside a softbox light. — 29

A young woman with short dark hair adjusts her brow in a mirror while young men stand behind her. — 30

Two singers with microphones in the foreground above a dance floor lit electric blue. — 31

Phone to phone

The music didn’t spread on CDs or through stores. Songs moved by Bluetooth from phone to phone, onto Facebook and out of speakers fitted to scooters and tuk-tuks. “Smartphones are the record labels of the mahraganat movement,” Kix wrote. Dawshageya’s Facebook profile had almost 30,000 fans until unknown hackers broke into it in April 2013, Kix reported; when she wrote, it had just under 1,900. “Not everyone likes our music,” Ahmed told her.

A boy’s face is lit by the phone in his hands on a dark street, a second young man looking on. — 32

A young man in a hood types at a laptop in a dark room painted with glowing neon figures. — 33

A scooter with two speakers built into its front panel and a light strip beneath, another scooter behind. — 34

A young man wires a small amplifier beside a scooter on a lit shopping street. — 35

A young driver beside a tuk-tuk dashboard screen showing a list of music files in an orange cabin. — 36

8% goes to the movies

Oka, Ortega and Shehta of 8% (Tamanya Fil Meya) had gone from mixing tracks in a home studio and sharing them on Facebook to having songs reworked into advertisements and being flown to weddings in the Gulf. In October 2013 I got onto the set of their first feature film, 8%, on its last day of shooting, a long day that ran into the night. The film was shot in 13 days to open for Eid al-Adha.

A clapperboard with Arabic writing is held up at an iron gate beside a boom microphone. — 37

A man in a Hulk T-shirt lifts a Mickey Mouse costume head on a pink-draped outdoor stage with a film camera nearby. — 38

Costumed actors, one in a Mickey Mouse suit with a red bow tie, stand on a pastel stage beside a film camera and crew as children watch. — 39

Actors in bright clothes rehearse beside an iron gate while crew hold a boom and a light. — 40

Cast and crew rest on a sofa in a sunlit room with smoke in the air and a tripod in front. — 41

An actress has her makeup done on a bedroom set while a camera operator watches in the foreground. — 42

Now, on a hot dog cart in New York

Since I made these photographs, mahraganat has become, truly, the music of Egypt. Official resistance did not stop it: in February 2020 the head of the Musicians Syndicate, Hany Shaker, banned mahraganat singers from performing in festivals, clubs and cafés.

Now I live in New York, and I like walking past the hot dog stands, many of them run by Egyptians, and hearing the latest mahraganat. Often I don’t know the songs anymore. The distribution is so wide on Spotify that official recordings are easy to find.

One night while I was photographing Sardina and Salsa, they asked me to record with them in the studio. A little shout-out from that session, with my voice in it, opens “Ilkan 3al 5atr,” which I posted to SoundCloud in March 2013.

In print

The story ran in the German magazine NEON in its February 2014 issue as “Tanzen im Chaos,” with text by Martina Kix, across eight pages. Getty Images distributed the photographs through Reportage by Getty Images.

NEON magazine spread, pages 122-123, from the February 2014 story “Tanzen im Chaos.” — 43

NEON magazine spread, pages 124-125, from the February 2014 story “Tanzen im Chaos.” — 44

NEON magazine spread, pages 128-129, from the February 2014 story “Tanzen im Chaos.” — 45

NEON magazine spread, pages 126-127, from the February 2014 story “Tanzen im Chaos.” — 46