Last February, the annual Nile Parade brought people from across Cairo to Qursaya Island, a short boat crossing from Giza on the Nile. The island, home to local farmers and fishermen, hosted a day of workshops, an exhibition, food and live music, with attendees learning about challenges facing communities along the Nile from Ethiopia to Egypt and dancing to Nubian and Sudanese music.
For many residents, such gatherings are rare. Cairenes seldom get to sit in public spaces, on the grass, and listen to music with people from different social classes and backgrounds. Yet the city has long had an immersive soundscape of rhythms, horns and calls to prayer, with music spilling from car windows, street cafés and passersby.
State control of public space
Scholar and urban anthropologist Omnia Khalil said in a 2025 interview: “What does it mean to have a city that is disappearing on purpose? The Cairo that we know has disappeared already.”
Khalil pointed to the military government of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and its restructuring of Cairo since the 2013 coup. The approach has been described by Robert Flahive as “regime-security urbanism: the reorganization of space to limit the potential for mass mobilization.”
After the Arab Spring, the current government has sought to prevent future uprisings by redesigning the capital to make organic gatherings difficult. It has also placed strict regulations on public events, including artistic ones.
Fewer accessible venues
Development and cultural worker Rawya El Attar said that organizing artistic events was more accepted before the revolution. “We had a lot of festivals that were not costly. Bands like Massar Egbari would play music for free, and you’d find people of all classes, from the streets to the 1%.”
El Attar, who has worked in Alexandria and Cairo, has observed events being closed down unless they are held in official spaces tied to Western cultural centers or the government. “It’s a way to control the gatherings. Also, when you go to a national place, they don’t give you the space for free, and this is where the problem starts,” she said. “You no longer have access to renting a place or a garden and just putting on a festival.”
She added: “Egypt was never poorer.” Even if street festivals still existed, professional musicians can no longer afford to perform for free. “It’s really hard to find someone who has the emotional capacity to do anything other than survive Egypt.”
Foreign funding and its limits
El Attar grew up in the upper middle class and was educated in the French system at a time when Egyptian cities were more alive with the arts. As an adolescent, she did not question the involvement of French or German institutes in the Egyptian art scene, but as a university student she came to see their funding and monopoly as a continuation of colonialism.
Egyptian art practitioners have long relied on Western funding, which has kept them from maintaining their own ecosystem. “We used to have salons where people played music together, but those spaces are no longer there,” El Attar said. “Those spaces have become the French, German or other foreign institutes, which are now closing their doors bit by bit.”
While some lament the decrease of Western funding and the loss of access to Western-run art spaces, El Attar said the new reality has been freeing despite financial difficulties. “It took me a long time to realize that I don’t want to do things the way they do them,” she said. “Hallelujah!”
She recalled: “The manager of the conservatoire in Tunis once told me that in Egypt, music was never related to class or intellectualism. You didn’t need to have money; you could learn it in the street, in village circles and in the mosques. That’s how Egypt became the hub for arts in North Africa and the Middle East.”
A segregated music scene
With public space and accessible independent cultural events in decline, most concerts are confined to places with strong financial and etiquette barriers. Contemporary art forms are heavily segregated:
- Mahraganat belongs to the working class.
- Rap sits somewhere in the middle, depending on the artist’s financial success.
- Most other genres and performance art have moved to exclusive and expensive places, such as concerts at the Pyramids of Giza or at Cairo Jazz Club, which requires social media screening and a dress code.
- International artists increasingly skip Cairo and perform in gated communities and holiday destinations like El Gouna or the Mediterranean North Coast.
As these shared music spaces disappear, Egyptians of different classes struggle to access each other’s lived experiences. An upper-class member will not understand Mahraganat dance.
