Modern touch to Islamic chanting

An Egyptian singer has earned global renown as an artistic pioneer who fuses inshad with other styles

Cairo: Egypt’s Mahmoud al-Tohamy is a master of Islamic chanting, a 1,400-year-old art form known as ‘inshad’ — but that hasn’t stopped him from performing the Game of Thrones theme song.

At age 41, Tohamy has earned global renown as an artistic pioneer who fuses inshad with other styles to create experimental and mesmerising works of music.

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While the strictest interpretations of the art of chanting bans the use of accompanying musical instruments, Tohamy has worked with Western-style rock bands and classical music orchestras.

His latest projects, he said in Cairo, are all about mixing “classic Arabic with popular music,” including genres from rock and pop to house. “I have mixed the art of traditional religious singing with touches of other Western and Eastern music,” said the master.

“Western and foreign audiences have an ear for inshad, more than local audiences. They may not understand the words, but they certainly feel the music.”

Tohamy was born to a family of religious chanters in the southern governorate of Asyut. His father was the singer Yassin al-Tohamy, one of Egypt’s most beloved religious artists. Tohamy has since 2014 run a music school in Cairo to pass the religious artform on to a new generation.

Over the years, he has performed at international music festivals with the aim of “reintegrating religious chanting in humanist art”. In 2017, he collaborated on three songs for the US album Origin which won a prize at the Global Music Awards.

Tohamy has recently collaborated with Egyptian musician Fathy Salama, a Grammy Award winner, for the joint project “Sufism vs modernity”, earning wide global attention.