Reminds me of sitting next to the speakers on a 28 hour Indian videobus journey, all I have to do is turn the volume up full blast, close my eyes and remember
To me this could be Pakistani (which it is!) or Arabic. The singing in both countries sounds similar at times. I also used to close my eyes as the buses and taxis used to snake through the deserts in Egypt. I don't know what the differences are but the atmosphere in this track sounds magical to me. I think this is Sufi music but I'm not at all sure.
Probably the most famous Egyptian female singer "Umm Kulthum" was constantly heard on the radio in Egypt: As a younger woman:
I guessed it was urdu, but I never took one of those hideous buses in Pakistan so likened it to the hindi ones
Regarding the Egyptian and Pakistani musical similarities I was pondering, I dug a little deeper and found this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism On reflection, I should have remembered that Egypt and Pakistan are both mostly Muslim countries, so the musical connection is quite easy to understand.
I spent a month once in Cairo doing an Arabic course at the ili, from memory the music was dire, I remember getting a taxi from the airport and the taxi driver telling me about his wife's FGM and asking me about European porn
I worked in Egypt many times, Druk1, and I was also asked many strange questions too. It was such a shock to realise that there were many Egyptian men who were so parochial and unworldly. Back in the early 1970's I used to see many men holding hands as they walked in the streets and, as the years went by, I realised after many conversations that marriage was so very hard for men to achieve due to financial constraints. I haven't been back there since the "Arab Spring" so I don't know how much that affected the customs of the country. Egyptian men were certainly very curious to find out about all things sexual, as it seemed quite repressive all those years ago. Tourism must have also changed a lot of things, it would be very interesting to observe the changes now. I went diving there over twenty years ago and it still seemed to be quite old fashioned to our way of living although I went from dive boat to airport quite quickly.
Yup, didn't like Egypt at all to be honest, pyramids were OK, apart from that nothing of any great attraction. My sister used to go to sharm often but stopped when the tourists were massacred in the valley of the Kings.