Every Ramadan, an Arab star will make a music album for religious reasons. Pop stars have been releasing singles with religious themes and prayers every Ramadan, so it’s not that a new phenomena. Go back to the fifties, sixties, seventies and so on, you will find almost all Arab singers have at least a song with a religious theme. Truth to be told Sami Yousef (perhaps the first Muslim pop star) made those all hot again and many Arab stars got back into releasing religion inspired music. Very few of those singers has met much success in this style. In the past though releasing such an album means you are about to leave the music scene, but this is not the case here. Traditional religious albums has lacked music, where there are only vocals. The albums I listed to this year have music and some of it is original, of course the focus is on the words of the performer. It’s also understood the performers in those albums either do not ask for a fee for these albums or they just donate their earnings to a worthy cause. You can also notice that the the album cover for such albums is slightly different where it has large font, a clean look and little self promotion.
This year two albums were released in time for Ramadan and both were solid hits. Wael Jassar released a Roba’yeat Fi Hob Allah رباعيات في حب الله(poems in God’s love) selling more than 50,000 copies in Egypt alone. Alhkaya Almohamadyah الحكاية المحمدية (Mohammad Stories) by popular and quite capable Egyptian singer Angham sold an estimated 30,000 copies of her religious album that celebrate the women of Islam and their stories. To know how popular those albums, I headed to most popular the illegal sharing sites to find out how many many times have the albums been downloaded and I was shocked. Roba’yeat Fi Hob Allah was downloaded 207,000 times, Alhkaya Almohamadyah was downloaded 36,000 times. I mean this is funny people steal music that is supposed to make them better people, irony it’s.
On another notes, both albums have a high production value, both have amazing lyrics and both are timely. Of course you do not expect to have a music videos for any of those songs, but there are plenty of do gooders who make slid shows out of those songs.
As someone who follows Arabic music, those two albums are a new milestone where Arab pop stars who are on the A list release entire albums with religious themes that are both well thought and quite meaningful. Of course we still have a number of other singers who releases singles to celebrate Ramadan. Needless to say some are good, others are meh. But this Ramadan the Arab viewer had a lot of choices both on TV Drama and comedy as you know everyone in the Arab world with extra cash starts a TV station. I hope this will also mean making better entertainment. While we wait for Muslim Rock stars, we have Christian rock to use as a model where despite setbacks in music market, such style remains relevant in our day.
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