1 2018 Issue Edited by Grammargal 2 The Voice of the Arabs The Radio Station That Brought Down Colonialism Abbas Metwalli 3 Contents 1. Introduction, by Ahmed Said 6 2. The Emergence of Egyptian Radio 12 3. The Founding of the Voice of the Arabs 18 4. Mohamed Fathi Al-Deeb 27 5. The Voice of the Arabs during Nasser’s Era 34 6. The Influence of the Arab parameter 37 7. The Call for Arab Nationalism 58 8. Arabic Broadcasts from Cairo 62 9. The June 1967 War 66 10. A Commentary by Ahmed Said 68 11. The Maligned Ahmed Said 73 12. Ahmed Said, by Sayed Al-Ghadhban 76 13. The 60th Anniversary, by Fahmy Omar 79 14. The Voice in the Eyes of Foreigners 81 15. Whose Voice 85 16. Nasser’s Rule & The role of Radio 91 17. Nasser’s Other Voice, by William S. Ellis 93 18. The Voice of the Arabs during Sadat’s Era 97 19. The Broadcasters’ Massacre of 1971 99 20. Mohamed Orouq 112 21. May 15,1971 in the Memory of Egyptians 117 22. The Voice of the Arabs, a school of Innovators 118 23. The Voice of the Arabs During Mubarak’s Era 140 24. The Voice During the Muslim Brotherhood Era 145 25. The Voice of the Arabs Female Stars 156 26. The Age of Radio Networks 161 27. The Voice of the Arabs Network 163 28. The Radio Syle of the Voice of the Arabs 166 29. Chiefs of the Voice of the Arabs 172 30. The Voice of the Arabs today 186 31. The Voice of the Arabs Media Battalion 190 4 Dedication To Ahmed Said my mentor, and godfather of successive generations of broadcasters 5 Cover Design Ahmed Elsheikh 6 Introduction By Ahmed Said (July, 2015) On the Sixty-Second Anniversary of The Voice of the Arabs On Saturday, the fourth of July, 1953, at exactly 6:00 p.m., before sunset, a chorus went on the air from Cairo, singing: “O Arab Glories, Honorable masters in our country” They promised a fresh beginning in the history of the Arab nations, calling for revolutions to liberate them from the 7 British and French colonization which looted their wealth and monopolized their bounties. Historians would later record—foes before friends—the enormity of the positive, enlightening, and revolutionary event that Cairo created in the 1950s and 1960s—that nascent radio station: the Voice of the Arabs. Many Arab and non-Arab politicians and analysts have questioned the reasons for the rapid rise and fame of this nascent radio station, which made the command of the French-British aggression over Egypt in 1956 decide to bomb its relay stations in Abu Zaabal, northeast of Cairo. The aim of which, as pointed out in a joint British-French committee document, was to deprive Gamal Abdel Nasser of the support of the one hundred million Arabs who were mobilized by the Voice of the Arabs against Britain and France and against their common mission to strike and liquidate Nasser and eliminate his policies. I believe that these Arab mobilizing days did not come out of mere statements sent across the air. The causes of media successes are many, including craftsmanship, dazzling performance, or exploitation of paradoxes, and the use of psychology, performing arts, and heeding to psychologists’ advice—from the methods of dealing negatively and positively with the knowledge and behavioral inventory of the recipients, to the latest legacies of preachers throughout the ages of mankind. But I—who had lived the Voice of the Arabs when it was just an idea suggested by Fathi Al-Deeb, the young captain who was charged with Arab affairs in the nascent Egyptian General Intelligence Agency in 1953— attribute the reasons for the rapid and distinctive success of the Voice of the Arabs, after God Almighty’s help, to three interconnected and almost overlapped reasons that seem one whole reason despite their multiplicity, as the cause for the success of any honest media outlet. 8 The first of these reasons is this: the specific national goals of the media—how noble, honorable, and popular—are based on the solid ground of any successful media building. There were three objectives of the Voice of the Arabs, according to the memorandum of Fathi al-Deeb. President Abdel Nasser added a fourth dimension on the day I met him. The first is to raise the awareness of the Arab citizen of all conspiracies plotted against him. The second is a call for liberating the homeland from the colonizer and clarifying the objectives of the July 23 liberation revolution in this regard. The third is to address the problems of the Arab world by analyzing and confronting all the wrong policies of the ruling Arab authorities, including the government of the revolution in Egypt, if it erred, and convincing the Arab citizen that this radio is a true embodiment and a sincere expression of his hopes, pains, and views. The fourth is a call for recovering the wealth of the Arab world—especially the oil—which should be, in Nasser’s conviction, a source of Arab strength rather than weakness, in the face of the ambitions and conspiracies of others. The second reason for the excellence and success of the voice of the Arabs was the unlimited ceiling of freedom within the framework of the great national liberation goals politically, economically, and culturally, which were successively confirmed in various positions and crises with the Egyptian political leadership. The most prominent of which was the lack of participation of the Voice of the Arabs in supporting the decision of the Revolutionary Command Council, which triggered the crisis of what is known as the March 1954 crisis against Major General Mohammed Naguib. 9 The second was the establishment of Nasser’s rule that “the Voice of the Arabs should not be questioned about what it says, and only questioned about the results of what it says.” That was when he personally criticized the Voice of the Arabs campaign against annexing Jordan to the Baghdad Pact in 1955, in the presence of the British chief of staff General Timbler. This included the broadcasting of a statement about the Fatah commando operation in the spring of 1965, despite the existence at the time of strict presidential instructions barring all the Egyptian audio- visual and readable media from referring to Fatah, as a whole. This ban was due to the suspicion that most of its leaders—when it was established that year in Damascus— belonged to the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps the most assertive of the unlimited ceiling of freedom enjoyed by the Voice of the Arabs, was a speech delivered by Abdel Nasser himself in the National Assembly during a meeting held by the parliamentary committee on February 25, 1965. In his speech, he said, “Ahmed Said, for example, spoke during Ramadan about matters I didn’t approve of. I heard things I didn’t give my OK to. I wouldn’t tell him what to say and how. This would kill the Voice of the Arabs and deprive it of its value.” The third reason for the success of the Voice of the Arabs in the 1950s and 1960s is attributed to its working young generation of men and women. The station began in 1953 with only two people, and then increased continuously, until they became sixty-five broadcasters and administrative employees when I left it in September 1967. They were charged with up to twenty-one hours of broadcast time a day, and were all competing faithfully and enthusiastically, believing in the principles of the revolutionary national liberation and the honor of belonging to the radio that called for them. They had in 10 their depths a noble and holy awareness that their words, or even the national songs they delivered over the air, may produce a martyr in the far reaches of the country. So they were careful to choose the right word and pick the right songs. As a result, their programs fulfilled what the country and the pace of its revolutions needed throughout the multiple battles of the struggle, over twenty years in the second half of the twentieth century. These are the three overlapping reasons for the success of the Voice of the Arabs in the distant past. What about the reasons for a hoped-for success for the Voice of the Arabs as it reaches the age of sixty-two amid the hustle of images and colorful broadcasts to the Arab world transmitted today by hundreds of satellite TV channels. The reasons are still the same: the goals, the ceiling of freedom, and the family of workers. I will start talking about the workers at the Voice of the Arabs today, as it is celebrating its sixty-second anniversary. They are, no doubt, more fortunate than we were in the ’50s of the last century—with their means of knowledge, which can deeply instill in them a strong faith in life with direct, common goals that connect them effortlessly to millions of audiences through the availability of today’s means of personal communication, relaying an awareness of the new patterns of colonialism. As for the ceiling of freedom, the viewer of the events of the so-called Arab spring realizes the complete dissipation of this ceiling, especially after the modern means of communication offered each citizen his own radio, screen, and newspaper. Any attempt to block an opinion— however slanderous—or ban it—however false—would be a kind of naïveté and madness.