Danielson, Virginia

Dāwūd Ḥusnī (1870–1937) was an Egyptian composer and musician born in Cairo to a Karaite Jewish family in Old Cairo. He showed an interest and talent for music while in elementary school and studied ʿūd , the pedagogical instrument of choice, on which he would learn the Arab sys…

Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1910?–91), an Egyptian composer, singer, and actor, was the best-known and probably the most successful modernist in Arab music of the twentieth century. Born in Cairo in the first decade of the century to a family of modest means, he grew up in the so-c…