Abdel Wahab Mohamed

Two men named Abdel Wahab meet in "Fakkarouni" (1966): the composer Mohammed Abdel Wahab, who set it, and the lyricist Abdel Wahab Mohamed, who wrote it — a younger namesake and an entirely different man, a poet of words rather than melodies. Born in Cairo's Azhar quarter in 1930, he rose through the golden age of Egyptian radio to become one of the most sought lyricists of the century's second half, writing for nearly every major Arab singer. His words first reached Umm Kulthum in 1960 with "Hob Eih" — the song that also introduced the young composer Baligh Hamdi to her stage — and through the sixties he supplied her with further colloquial lyrics, among them "Zalamna el-Hob" and "Lel-Sabr Hedoud." Then came "Fakkarouni," whose scolding tenderness — they reminded me of you, as if I could forget — became one of the emblematic songs of her final decade. His gift was the compressed everyday phrase that sounds overheard rather than composed: reproach, memory and forgiveness folded into lines short enough for her to turn over endlessly. He died in Cairo in 1996, his name forever twinned with, and distinct from, the composer's.