Reclaiming a spiritual tradition: The women bringing Egypt's sacred chants back to life

The first time I realised something was missing from Egypt's religious soundscape, it was not in a mosque or a shrine, but on TikTok. A short video showed a woman in her fifties sitting among a family gathering, chanting a famous poem in praise of Imam Hussein. Her voice was strong, luminous, and entirely unselfconscious — the kind of voice that fills a room and holds it. 

What made the clip extraordinary was not only the beauty of her performance, but its rarity: a woman, seated at the centre of a mixed gathering, leading devotional praise as men and women listened.

The woman was Hajja Karima, a chanter born and raised in Upper Egypt, who appears at moulids, shrines, and informal gatherings, chanting with a spontaneity that feels almost out of time.

Watching her, I was struck by an older absence. I had grown up in Upper Egypt around Sufi rituals, moulids and dhikr circles filled with men and women alike, yet I could not remember ever seeing a woman lead religious chanting in public.

History teaches us that women were once central to Egypt's sacred soundscape, yet their voices were later driven out of public religious life, and today a new generation of female chanters — from rural shrines to social media and concert stages — is quietly reclaiming a spiritual tradition that never truly belonged to men alone.

A tradition erased, not lost

Women were never strangers to Islamic devotional sound. Dalia Hussein Fahmy, Professor of Arabic Music at Ain Shams University and author of the paper, Songs of the Madāḥāt as a Model of the Folk Song, traces female religious performance back to the foundations of the modern Egyptian state.

"Sheikha Umm Muhammad is one of the oldest women whom we know recited the Quran and chanted in Egypt. She lived in the time of Muhammad Ali," Dalia tells The New Arab. 

"She used to lead Ramadan nights in the harem, travel for performances, and Muhammad Ali admired her so much that he sent her to Istanbul to recite there."

By the early twentieth century, women were chanting and reciting the Quran on the national broadcasts.

"Sakina Hassan recited the Quran on Egyptian radio. We still have recordings of Surah Taha and Surah al-Najm," Dalia explains.

"Mounira Abdo began reciting when she was 18 and became very famous."

Yet that history was abruptly interrupted in the 1940s when religious authorities issued a ruling banning women from reciting the Quran and chanting on the radio.

"The issue was not religious," Dalia insists. "Mounira Abdo was being paid almost the same as Sheikh Mohamed Rifaat. That created competition. So the male reciters and chanters prepared a fatwa to ban women from the radio so that they could control the field.”

Women were removed from broadcasting — but not from religious life. "They remained," Dalia says, "because women were still needed in religious gatherings to recite the Quran and chant for other women. For women's religious events, you had to bring either a woman or a blind sheikh."

'My tongue never stopped praising'

For Hajja Karima, chanting was never a calling she chose, but a presence that never left her.

"I'm from a small village near Abu Tig in Assiut," Hajja tells The New Arab. "When I was seven, my mother used to chant while baking bread and doing housework. That's how I fell in love with praising the Prophet."

Hajja says she learned through repetition. "As a child, when I heard Sheikh Ahmed al-Touni chanting 'I praise the one whose feet smell of musk,' I felt something strange and beautiful and kept repeating it until it lived inside me."

For decades, she sang only among family and neighbours. But then in 2015, her husband filmed her chanting at the Mawlid of Imam Hussein and posted it online. That's when things shifted.

"My Sufi sheikh appeared to my sister in a dream and said, 'Let Hajja chant,'" she says. "From that moment, my ordinary voice took off. People started calling me."

For Hajja, chanting is not a profession but a state of being. "I am a very shy woman, but when I chant, I feel my soul fly to the Prophet."

She refuses to chant on demand. "If my spirit doesn't go to the one I'm praising — like Sayyida Zaynab at her shrine — I fall silent. I'm not practising a trade. This is something I only do when I feel it."

Heritage researcher Haytham Abu Zeid says Hajja belongs to a tradition that was never truly erased — only pushed outside institutions.

"There are two kinds of chanting," he explains. "There is the rural and Upper Egyptian chanting of the moulids, like Yassin al-Tuhami, Ahmed al-Touni and Hajja Karima."

The second became Egypt's official voice of religion. "Taha al-Fashni, Ali Mahmoud, and Abdel-Samee' Bayoumi — these were the giants of central chanting."

But, he explains, women always existed within that elite world. "We had Karima al-Adliyya شىي Mounira Abdo, but Hajja Karima is not an extension of them."

Haytham believes the Upper Egypt and rural chanting is not real chanting, "They are singing religious verses, not practising true religious chanting. They disregard the rules of Arabic grammar and break the foundations of chanting — from proper pronunciation to the melodic composition of the text and everything in between."

From Al-Azhar to the stage

One of Egypt's new generation of female chanters is Iman al-Sawalhi, who grew up immersed in the language of Egypt's classical devotional poetry, a tradition she had mastered from an early age and later channelled into religious chanting.

A native of Dakahlia in the Nile Delta, she was determined to refine her natural talent through formal study — enrolling at the Arab Music Institute after graduating from the Faculty of Islamic Studies, and training rigorously in vocal maqamat and registers through Quranic recitation and devotional supplication.

"Much of her musical education came from listening closely to the great chanters of the past, particularly Sheikh Nasr al-Din Tubar," Iman tells The New Arab. 

Despite the practical challenges of travelling frequently to Cairo for performances, Iman encountered little resistance at home. "Once my family recognised that chanting had moved from a private talent to a professional calling," she shared. 

Today, she performs regularly at concerts held under the auspices of Al-Azhar, drawing audiences not only from Egypt but from Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. 

Her path back into sacred sound has also been shaped by religious institutions themselves. "I started chanting when I was eight, right after I memorised the Quran," she explains.

Iman's career gained momentum in 2014. "I began working professionally, entered competitions and won advanced positions," she says. "After that, radio, television and talk shows started inviting me."

She was among the first women to break through nationally. "Before, there were very few female chanters — Aya al-Tablawi and myself," she says. "Then the door opened for women."

Criticism, she says, never fully disappeared. At a conference in Alexandria in 2016 marking the Night Journey (al-Isrāʾ wa-l-Miʿrāj), Iman encountered a familiar challenge — one that has followed her throughout her career.

"A scholar once told me that a woman's voice is awrah (intimate parts)," she recalls. "I debated him until the discussion ended. But most of the time, I choose silence."

Reclaiming the stage

Dalia explains that what is new today is the emergence of fully female ensembles. "Women now take complete control of the group — from the instrumentation to the singing."

She points to Al-Haurr as a clear example of this shift, noting that in the past, women typically chanted either within male-led ensembles or accompanied by male musicians, rather than forming and leading their own groups.

Al-Haurr is Egypt's first all-women Islamic chanting ensemble — a group of female voices performing madīḥ, Sufi hymns and classical devotional repertoire. Founded in 2017, the choir brings together trained singers who perform on cultural stages, at religious events and in festivals.

Founder Na'ma Fathy's journey into religious chanting began not in rebellion, but in formal tradition. She enrolled in the School of Religious Chanting, founded by Sheikh Mahmoud al-Tuhami, under the Cultural Development Fund at Prince Taz Palace in Cairo, where she studied with some of Egypt's most respected chanters.

Outside the classroom, she grew up immersed in the devotional world of the moulids of Sayyida Zaynab and Sayyida Nafisa, listening closely to masters such as Sheikh Yassin al-Tuhami and Mohamed al-Kahlawi.

Yet for Na'ma, training alone was not enough. As she moved through a field almost entirely controlled by men, she began to ask why women were expected to remain on the margins of sacred sound.

"When I created Al-Haurr, I asked: why should men monopolise religious chanting?" she told The New Arab.

"In 2016, we were the first in Egypt and the sixth in the world."

When the group announced auditions, young women poured in. "They had been waiting for this chance," Na'ma recalls.

What Al-Haurr built was not just a choir, but a new space for women's religious voices. "After us, other women's groups appeared," she says. "But we were the ones who opened the path."

Dalia believes the deeper transformation lies in technology: "Women are now in the army, the judiciary, everywhere. So chanting opened too," she says.

"Social media has given women a space without male censorship — unlike radio and television."

This is why Hajja — albeit shy, rural and outside institutions — can now reach thousands. And when women like her chant today — in shrines, on stages, or across a phone screen — they are not merely being heard. They are reopening a spiritual archive long kept out of reach, and reminding Egypt that faith, like sound, was never meant to be contained.

Ahmed Dahaby is an Egyptian journalist who is passionate about identity, culture, and Egyptology, with an avid interest in literature, music and cinema

Follow him on Substack: @dhabyzzzz