Zaki Murad

Origins and early life

Zaki Murad, born Ibrahim Zaki Mordechai about 1880, belonged to the Egyptian Jewish community and was both a professional singer and a hazzan, a cantor in the synagogue, and he remained a Jew all his life; this fiche notes plainly that two of his children, Layla and Munir Murad, later converted to Islam, and it is by his own affiliation, not theirs, that he is recorded here.

Work and career

He came out of the classical Arabic vocal tradition of the late Ottoman period, singing the qasida and the dawr in the takht ensemble format, and he was among the first Egyptian singers to record commercially, cutting discs for Gramophone, Odeon and Baidaphon from around 1910 in the first great wave of Arabic recording. His voice and his command of the maqam made him one of the respected masters of his generation, in a musical world in which Jewish, Muslim and Christian musicians worked side by side; the AMAR Foundation, which restores early Arabic recordings, preserves his work.

He trained his daughter Layla Murad, who would become the greatest female star of Egyptian cinema and song, and he entrusted part of her instruction to the composer Dawud Husni, himself an Egyptian Jew. He also appeared in early Egyptian films. He died in Cairo in 1946, before the political turn that would drive out most of Egypt's Jews and largely erase their names from the country's musical history.