Roundtable 129

An Earwitness to History: Street Hawkers and Their Calls

in Early 20th-Century Egypt
ZIAD FAHMY
Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.;
e-mail: zaf3@cornell.edu
doi:10.1017/S0020743815001531

Historians have recently started listening to the past, contributing to what David Howes
has described as a “sensorial revolution in the humanities and social sciences.”1 In the
same way that all five senses are relevant to our daily understanding of the world around
us, they should be vital to our understanding of historical events. Interpreting how
peoples of the past sensorially experienced their world makes possible a richer, more
comprehensive grasp of historical events. A sensorially grounded historical narrative
is an embodied history that is connected to everyday people and lives. Historians of
the Middle East, however, with few exceptions, are still largely producing soundproof,
devocalized narratives of the past.2
In order to pursue a more sounded approach to history, historians can learn from an-
thropologists and media studies scholars, whose recent studies on contemporary Middle
Eastern media rely in varying ways on sounded sources.3 Most of these studies focus on
contemporary societies, however, meaning their authors are able to listen to the sounds
and soundscapes that they are studying. Historians usually do not have that luxury; we
must use different strategies to cull and tease out sound from our sources, which are
mostly textual. Also, most of these studies only deal with music, television, and film,
and not with noise, street sound, and soundscapes. Accordingly, the purpose of this
paper is twofold. Along with the other members of this roundtable, I hope to begin a
long overdue conversation among scholars of the Middle East about the importance of
researching sounds and soundscapes of the past. In the process, I attempt to demonstrate
the importance of sound in studying history and suggest some research strategies for
uncovering these soundscapes, especially before the introduction of recording technolo-
gies. In the second half of the essay I will present some of my preliminary research on
the calls of Egyptian street hawkers in 1920s and 1930s Cairo. This research is part of
an ongoing book project on the changing soundscapes of Egypt in the first half of the
20th century. As I hope to demonstrate, there is much to be discovered by incorporating
sound and soundscapes into our methodological toolkit for understanding the past. Be-
fore continuing our discussion, we must address some common misconceptions about
the nature of sound and its suitability for historical study.
For contemporary events, or for many historical events that occurred in the second
half of the 20th century, sound and audiovisual recordings are available for examination.
But how can researchers fill in the sensory gap when writing about historical periods
before the invention of recording technology? The obvious solution to this problem can
be found in the same texts that historians have been using all along, or, as R. Murray
Schaffer has eloquently stated, historians “will have to turn to earwitness accounts.”4
Not only have scholars been hard of hearing when examining historical sources, but
they have generally assumed that the available primary texts were written by authors
who were deaf and mute. Because historians silently read texts (visually) in the archive
130 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 48 (2016)

does not mean that the original writers were depicting only visual “observations.”
People acquire content, meaning, and information from their physical environment
using all five senses. Lest we forget, the very act of writing is as much tactile as it
is visual, and the information being conveyed will no doubt be full of multisensory
content.
Historians have no problem accepting the visual observations made within archival
texts, yet written documentation of sound and noise is often neglected. By attuning
ourselves to the sounds described within historical texts, we can inevitably see, or rather
“hear,” the perspective that the original author has conveyed regarding the sounds,
noises, and words that she may have heard. Moreover, writers do not just record what
they have seen and heard—depending on the events they are covering and the context
of the document they are writing—they can also detail olfactory, tactile, and gustatory
information.5
Each historical time and locale has its varied natural, animal, and human sounds
that play an important role in defining the place to its inhabitants. These sounds and
noises have an assortment of economic, environmental, social, and cultural implications
that are vital to a well-rounded historical understanding of the past. In Egypt, coffee
shops were (and continue to be) an extension of the street in that their spatial (and
sonic) boundaries usually expanded beyond their officially “enclosed” space. Weather
permitting, most Egyptian cafés sat more people outside on the sidewalks and on the
pavement than inside, with obvious sonic implications for the neighborhoods that sur-
rounded them. This meant that passersby, be they paperboys, street vendors, entertainers,
or simply pedestrians, could observe and listen to, if not participate in, the coffee shop
experience. As newer, louder technologies such as gramophones and radio sets were
introduced, the acoustic imprints of coffee shops must have dramatically increased.
Commercial activity was (and still is) loudly conducted in the sidewalks of these cafés
as dozens of street hawkers took advantage of the already seated and hence captive
cliental.
In interwar Egypt, street hawkers did not just sell their wares to coffee shop clientele.
A surprising variety of these hawkers had regular routes in most urban residential
neighborhoods. The loudness and pitch of their calls was essential to reaching inside the
homes and apartments of their intended consumers. More than just the actual words being
sounded, it was the unique inflection, tone, and pitch of a particular seller’s voice that
signaled from quite a distance the exact product being sold; the astute listener could even
approximate the distance and time of arrival of the salesperson, thus anticipating when
to walk down the stairs and conduct the transaction. For some products, vocalization by
the seller was not even necessary. Butane tank merchants, who are still heard throughout
Egypt, could signal their arrival to an entire neighborhood without uttering a single word.
Striking their metal butane cylinders with a wrench, they produced a familiar, loud and
rhythmic clanking that sonically carried for several city blocks signaling the arrival of the
truck or horse drawn cart. For smaller items, customers did not even need to descend to
the street for the transaction to occur. Most households had handy wicker baskets attached
to long ropes with which they could send down cash from the windows or balconies of
their apartment buildings and bring up change and purchased goods. In these scenarios,
of course, both the buyer and seller shouted the details of the transaction for all to
hear.
 Roundtable 131

In the interwar period, the plethora of calls and cries from street merchants dwarfed
what they are today. A contemporary observer in mid-1930s Cairo documented 165
distinct calls and cries by street hawkers, and that was just for the sellers of produce
and other food items.6 The sellers loudly and melodically emphasized the freshness,
ripeness, taste, size, or geographic origins of the foods they were selling. Comparisons,
often amusing or exaggerated, were sometimes used to drive the point home to buyers.
Tomatoes, for example, could be the size of pomegranates or as red as roses. Because
Egyptians preferred small cucumbers, they were often likened to kidney beans. Some
of the more unusual sale calls declared that their dates were as good as lamb. Pistachio
sellers compared their product to roasted game birds, and sellers of barbequed corn
announced that their corn was as tasty as roasted chicken. If the tenderness of the food
items they sold was important, the sellers would chant loudly that “even the toothless
can eat them.”7 Upon seeing a child playing in the street, candy vendors would yell out
ayat. li-ummak yā wād, or “cry to your mother little boy,” urging the young child to beg
his mother for money in order to buy candy.8 In part because of the transitory nature
of the street hawkers, their relationship with the Egyptian state was (and still is) often
adversarial and rife with tension. Unsuccessful attempts at regulating, documenting, and
taxing them began in the late 19th century and continue to this day. As my preliminary
research has shown, these regulations often attempted not only to dictate where and
when these merchants could sell their wares, but also to control their hygiene, the smells
and expirations of their food, the volume of their calls, and the number of times per day
they could make them.
Sometime before the mid-20th century, as indoor plumbing and water faucets and
pipes became pervasive in urban Egypt, the calls of the saqāyı̄n (sing. sāqa), or water
sellers, disappeared from the urban soundscape. This process was gradual. It began in
the late 19th century in new and well-to-do areas of Cairo, and spread in the mid 20th-
century to the rest of the city. The saqāyı̄n crooned aloud the traditional chant yiawad.
Allāh (God will compensate) to advertise their arrival to a neighborhood. Because the
profit margin for transporting water was minimal and it was expected that customers
should tip the sāqa, especially if he delivered the water to an apartment that was several
floors up, the chant “God will compensate” was in part intended to remind the customer
that a generous tip was needed and appreciated.
Of all the street hawkers we discussed, the water sellers in particular deserve a closer
look. As I just alluded to, by the early 20th century it was well understood that the entire
sāqa profession was becoming obsolete. Gradually, though consistently, the sounds
of the water sellers’ calls disappeared from the urban soundscape. As with many of
the changing social and cultural realities of early 20th-century Egypt, the ordeals of the
Egyptian water sellers are captured and memorialized—though with typical lighthearted
comedic flair—by the music compositions of Sayyid Darwish and the lyrics of Badi
Khayri. As I discuss in more detail in Ordinary Egyptians, Darwish and Khayri were
particularly adept at mimicking and amplifying the sounds and feelings of the Egyptian
streets.9 The Water sellers’ song, appropriately called “Yiawad Allah,” was written
only after extensive research, with both Darwish and Khayri sitting for hours in a coffee
shop near Harat al-Saqayin (the water sellers’ quarter) in Cairo. They spoke with and
interviewed the water sellers and, more importantly, listened to and copied the tone and
pitch of their calls. In the song, after repeating the chorus line “God will compensate,” the
132 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 48 (2016)

singing water sellers begin to list their complaints and grievances while acknowledging
the inevitable obsolescence of their profession. The song then turns to comic relief as
the water seller insults the foreign-operated water company, accusing it of poisoning the
water and suggesting to the listeners to go home and smash their faucets:

May God compensate (yiawad. Allāh) . . . May God comfort

All the hardworking water sellers . . . for we’re infuriated by the water company
The company’s foreign directors descended on us
They are forcing us out of our livelihood—which we inherited from our fathers
O people, why don’t you acknowledge our suffering
...
What an irritating company . . . its water is foul and polluted
It is disgusting . . . they even put chemicals in it,
Carbonates, phosphates, maybe even wine and some other ungodly powders.
...
O lady . . . why not come over here and taste my water for it is pure Nile water
Drink up and pray for me, for God will compensate
Now go and yell and frown in your husband’s face
Make him fly out and get you a container to carry my water
Afterwards you can smash your water faucets to pieces.

Egyptians did not go on mass and smash their water faucets, but the song resonated with
many of its listeners because, through the lens of the water sellers, it captured the reality
(uncomfortable to some) that Egypt during the 1920s and 1930s was a society very
much in transition. Despite its farcical nature, the song has an undertone of collective
nostalgia as it documented and acknowledged a disappearing way of life. In just a
couple of decades, the street cries of the traditional water sellers would be lost for
good.
Sound studies scholar R. Murray Schaffer appropriately asks: “Where are the muse-
ums for disappearing sounds? Even the most ordinary sounds will be affectionately re-
membered after they disappear.”10 Perhaps in this case, Sayyid Darwish’s song, recorded
in 1920, serves as an imperfect commemoration of the saqāyı̄n’s way of life, preserving
at least the memory if not the pitch and tone of his calls.
There are many more historical dimensions to be discovered if we are open to con-
sidering sound as a serious path of inquiry for understanding the past. Sound historian
Jonathan Sterne accurately declared that “there is always more than one map for a
territory, and sound provides a particular path through history.”11 With few recent
exceptions—including of course the contributors to this roundtable—historians of the
Middle East have yet to fully explore that path, making the past seem silent, devo-
calized, and one-dimensional.12 By calling for the incorporation of sound, noise, and
aurality in writing history, I am not suggesting the neglect of the visual, or for that
matter any of the other senses. I do not propose that listening and sound are more
important than the observed and the visual; yet if we are to ever give a more bal-
anced reflection (or, more aptly, echo) of the past, we must open our ears as well as
our eyes. In order to begin this process, we must look beyond our discipline toward
 Roundtable 133

anthropology, ethnomusicology, and even, as I have shown elsewhere, architectural and

acoustic engineering.13 By finding and interpreting new auditory data, historians can add
new sensory dimensions to their historical analyses, transforming how we understand
the past. As this IJMES roundtable and the growing field of sound studies have shown,
comprehending the daily experiences of ordinary people requires us to listen more to the
past.

N OT E S
1 David Howes, The Sixth Sense Reader (London: Berg, 2009), 35; M. Bull et al., “Introducing Sensory
Studies,” Senses and Society 1 (2006): 5–7.
2 For a more detailed argument about the need to incorporate sound in historical research on the Middle

East, see Ziad Fahmy, “Coming to Our Senses: Historicizing Sound and Noise in the Middle East,” History
Compass 11 (2013): 305–15.
3 Ibid. See, for example: Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette
Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Flagg Miller, The Moral
Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2007); Marwan Kraidy, Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009); Deborah Kapchan, Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance
and Music in the Global Marketplace (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2007); Ted Swedenburg,
“Egypt’s Music of Protest: From Sayyid Darwish to DJ Haha,” Middle East Report 42 (2012): 39–43; and Joel
Gordon, “Singing the Pulse of the Egyptian–Arab Street: Shaaban Abd Al-Rahim and the Geo-Pop-Politics
of Fast Food,” Popular Music 22 (2003): 73–88. Because it engages with some of the burgeoning literature in
sound studies, Hirschkind’s The Ethical Soundscape is a particularly good starting point for future studies on
historical Middle Eastern soundscapes.
4 R. Murray Schaffer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester,

Vt.: Destiny Books, 1994 [1977]), 8.

5 For one of the few articles on olfactory history by a historian of the Middle East, see Khaled Fahmy, “An

Olfactory Tale of Two Cities: Cairo in the Nineteenth Century,” in Historians in Cairo: Essays in Honor of
George Scanlon, ed. Jill Edwards (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002), 155–87.
6 See James Heyworth-Dunne, “A Selection of Cairo’s Street Cries (Referring to Vegetables, Fruit, Flowers

and Food),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 9 (1938): 351–61.

7 Ibid., 352–53.
8 Ibid., 354.
9 Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, Calif.:

Stanford University Press, 2011).

10 Schaffer, The Soundscape, 180.
11 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke

University Press, 2003), 3.

12 See, for example, Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians; Andrea Stanton, “This Is Jerusalem Calling”: State Radio

in Mandate Palestine (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2014); Carole Woodall, “Sensing the City:
Sound, Movement, and the Night in 1920s Istanbul” (PhD diss., New York University, 2008); Adam Mestyan,
“Sound, Military Music, and Opera in Egypt during the Rule of Mehmet Ali Pasha (r. 1805–1848),” in Ottoman
Empire and European Theatre, vol. 2, The Time of Joseph Haydn—From Sultan Mahmud I to Mahmud II (r.
1730–1839), ed. Michael Huttler and Hans Ernst Weidinger (Vienna: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, 2014),
631–56.
13 Ziad Fahmy, “Coming to Our Senses,” 305–15. For ethnomusicological works on the Middle East dealing

with some of these issues, see Frédéric Lagrange, “Musiciens et poètes en Égypte au temps de la nahda” (PhD
diss., Université de Paris à Saint-Denis, 1994); Virginia Danielson, The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kalthum, Arabic
Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Ali Jihad
Racy, Making Music in the Arab World: the Culture and Artistry of Tarab (Cambridge: Cambridge University
134 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 48 (2016)

Press, 2003); Martin Stokes, The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010); Richard C. Jankowsky, Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Karin Van Nieuwkerk, A Trade Like Any Other: Female
Singers and Dancers in Egypt (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1995).