Layla Murad

Origins and early life

Layla Murad was born in Cairo on 17 February 1918 to a Jewish family: her father Zaki Murad, born Ibrahim Zaki Mordechai, was a celebrated hazzan and singer of Iraqi-Jewish origin, and her mother Gamila Salmon was of Polish-Jewish descent, so that she was Jewish on both sides and grew up in the Jewish community of Egypt.

Work and career

She began singing as a child in her father's shadow, made her first film at fourteen, and in 1938 Mohammed Abdel Wahab cast her opposite him in Yahia el-Hobb, which made her a star. Through the 1940s she was the highest-paid actress in the Arab world, with twenty-eight films, among them Layla the Bedouin, Layla the Schoolgirl and Ghazal al-Banat, and hundreds of songs that are still sung. This fiche states plainly that she converted to Islam around 1946-1947 at the time of her marriage to the actor and director Anwar Wagdi, and that she remained a Muslim afterwards.

Her career then met the politics of the region head on: after 1948 rumours accused her of donating money to Israel, a charge she denied and which Egyptian investigation found baseless, but which was repeatedly revived, sometimes by the Syrian press, and which shadowed her for years. In 1953 the Free Officers' government chose her to sing the anthem of the revolution, an official vindication. She stopped acting in 1955, at thirty-seven, and lived out forty more years in near-total retreat from public life, refusing interviews.

She died in Cairo on 21 November 1995. The scholar Hanan Hammad's biography, published in 2022, documents both her ancestry and the campaign against her from the archives.