الحب كله El Hob Kollo (All the Love)

On 28 September 1970 Gamal Abdel Nasser died, and Egypt’s voice fell silent with Egypt. Umm Kulthum — who had sung for the July regime, raised hard currency for the war effort after 1967, and mourned Nasser as a personal loss — stopped performing for three months; contemporary accounts say she weighed retirement itself. Her return came on Thursday, 7 January 1971, at the Qasr el-Nil cinema in Cairo, carried live by radio across the Arab world. The new song that anchored the evening was “El Hob Kollo” — All the Love — words by Ahmad Shafiq Kamel, music by Baligh Hamdi, who came early to the hall that night to supervise the final touches on his score.

Kamel was the poet of “Enta Omri,” and this lyric is that song’s argument grown older and more absolute. Where 1964 declared that life begins with the beloved, 1971 completes the audit: all the love there is, loved in one person; all of time, lived for him. The colloquial doubling — “el-hobb kollo… zamani kollo” — presses the seal twice on each line. The past is a road walked “through a long night,” with no heart alongside and no beautiful shadow near; the question “what was I before I saw you?” expects, and receives, no answer. In Kamel’s arithmetic a life is measured by nothing except its love.

The refrain turns that philosophy into ritual. “Pour for me, fill the cup, pour again — of love, of you, of the light of my days”: the cupbearer of the classical Arabic wine ode is summoned into an Egyptian colloquial love song, the goblet filled with love rather than wine, and being seen for the first time is described as a second creation. Baligh Hamdi shaped the passage as a returning cycle made for the concert hall — each reprise a fresh pour, each pour demanded by the audience. A story told in the Arab press holds that he adapted the melodic germ of the introduction from “Ashiqtuhu,” a song by the Saudi singer Fawzi Mahsoun — the kind of magpie borrowing, whether or not one credits every detail, that fit Baligh’s famously absorbent ear for popular melody across the region.

Then comes the shadow that gives the song its late gravity: “Hide me from time itself, hide me… I fear for this great joy — that time will take it, or take me.” The adversary of this love song is not a rival or the beloved’s coldness but time, named plainly. Sung by a woman past seventy to a country just out of mourning, the plea carried a double meaning no listener missed. The great joy was the music itself, and everyone in the hall understood how much time was left.

“El Hob Kollo” became one of the last summits of the Umm Kulthum–Baligh Hamdi partnership that had begun with “Hob Eih” in 1960, a companion piece to “Alf Leila wa Leila” in his late, expansive manner: long instrumental spans, cyclical refrains engineered for repetition, joy insisted upon at scale. It endures because its celebration is not innocent. The song knows what it is holding, and how briefly — which is why the fullest declaration of love in her late repertoire ends, in the passage quoted here, with a request to be hidden.