Summary
Layla Murad (1918–95), daughter of the composer Zaki Murad, the leading Jewish performance artist of Egypt from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s — “Cinderella of the Egyptian screen” and second diva after Umm Kulthum — whose abrupt 1955 retirement after an unfounded 1952 press accusation of visiting Israel and donating £E50,000 to its government is treated in Chapter 3 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as a case study in popular culture and the politics of ethnoreligious identity (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1301-1310).
Details
- Murad first sang on stage in 1930 and appeared in her first film in 1935; Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab chose her as female lead opposite him in Yahya al-hubb (Long live love, 1938); under Togo Mizrahi’s tutelage her acting developed, and five musical romances directed and produced by Mizrahi from 1939 to 1944 featured her name in their titles; her marriage to Anwar Wagdi in 1945 was celebrated in the final scene of Layla bint al-fuqara’ (Layla, daughter of the poor), and they costarred in six more films before divorcing in 1950; after leading roles for Henri Barakat, Husayn Sidqi and Yusuf Shahin, and twenty-eight films and hundreds of songs in all, she retired abruptly and without explanation in 1955, living in Cairo until her death (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1303-1304).
- Among the likely factors in her withdrawal was a report circulating in the Arab and Egyptian press in September 1952 accusing her of visiting Israel and contributing £E50,000 to the Israeli government earlier that summer; Murad, who had publicly announced her voluntary conversion to Islam in 1946, declared “I am an Egyptian Muslim,” produced bank statements and other documents, and produced a letter from Wagdi affirming her a “genuine (samim) Arab Muslim beloved by all the Arabs whom she loves in return”; the Egyptian authorities concluded the charges were without foundation, but Syria persisted in a total ban on her films and songs (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1305-1306).
- She remained popular in Egypt — a film every year from 1953 to 1955, Ruz al-Yusuf openly discussing her Jewish origins, her rendition of “Is’al ‘alayya” voted best song of 1954 and a December 1954 concert before 4,000 — and during the 1958 United Arab Republic negotiations Abdel Nasser personally insisted Syria abandon the boycott, which it did; yet she could not be induced to end her retirement: “she seems to have felt that the milieu in which she flourished could no longer be sustained” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1307-1308).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Da’ud Husni, Levantinism