Abdel Halim Hafez
The smiling face of Abdel Halim, at the head of a squad of young girls with
flowing hair and fashionable young men, speeding along the Avenue des Pyramides
on his motorcycle: this scene, typical of musical films, sums up the memory
attached to the Brown Nightingale (as he was nicknamed by the press) and to his
era, that of the carefree dreams of Arab modernity, which were shattered in the
defeat of 1967. An oriental blend of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, this
artist, whose real life seems to have come out of a novel for young girls,
remains, twenty years after his death in a L...
