An “Artist of the People”: The Life and Legacy of Shaykh Imam

On June 9, 1995, several stories surfaced in al-Ahram , Egypt’s leading newspaper. A conversation with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, a scientific study on the feeling of love and its chemical connections to the brain, and a meeting in Cairo between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to discuss the prospects for peace in the Middle East were among the day’s headlines. Buried at the very back of the periodical, obituaries filled an entire page. If readers managed to reach this point in the issue, the black-and-white photographs of four compatriots likely would have caught their eye, including one image of a man wearing a cap and sunglasses. Opening with a verse of poetry, this entry’s authors, the Egyptian National Forces (al-Quwwa al-Wataniyya al-Misriyya), announced the passing of Shaykh Imam ʿIsa, “the artist of the people” ( fanān al-shaʿb ). 1