Thinkers Timeline

Umm Kulthum was an Egyptian singer. She was probably the most famous Arab cultural figure of the 20th century. She was born around 1898 in a small village called Tamay az-Zahayra, in the Egyptian Nile Delta. Her exact date of birth is uncertain, partly because village births were not always carefully recorded. Her father was a village imam, a Muslim religious leader. He led prayers and sometimes sang religious songs at weddings to earn extra money. He noticed that his young daughter had an extraordinary voice. He taught her to sing religious songs and then took her with him to perform. To make this socially acceptable in conservative villages, she dressed as a boy when she sang in public. She was known as 'the boy with the strong voice'. In the 1920s she moved to Cairo, the capital and cultural centre of Egypt. She took singing lessons, dropped the boy disguise, and quickly became a star. Egyptian radio began broadcasting her concerts in the 1930s. By the 1940s she was the most famous singer in the Arab world. She gave a concert on the first Thursday of every month for decades. Across the Arab world, streets emptied as people gathered around radios to listen. She sang for kings, presidents, and ordinary villagers. She supported Egyptian independence and President Gamal Abdel Nasser. After Egypt lost the 1967 war with Israel, she gave concerts across the Arab world to raise money for the country. She died in 1975. Around four million people attended her funeral in Cairo, one of the largest in human history.

Eric Hobsbawm was a British historian and one of the most influential historians of the 20th century. He wrote about the rise of capitalism, the development of the modern world, and the major political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was a lifelong Marxist and Communist Party member. His writing was clear, ambitious, and read by both academics and general audiences. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917. He died in London in 2012, aged 95. He came from a Jewish family. His father was British. His mother was Austrian. He was born in Alexandria where his father worked. The family moved to Vienna, then to Berlin. Both his parents died young. He was orphaned by 14. An aunt brought him to England in 1933, the year Hitler came to power in Germany. His timing was lucky. The move to England saved his life. Most of his Central European Jewish family who stayed behind were eventually killed in the Holocaust. He studied history at Cambridge from 1936. He joined the Communist Party as a young man and remained a member for the rest of his life, despite the party's decline and the revelations of Stalin's crimes. He served in the British army during the Second World War. After the war, he became a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he taught for over 50 years. He wrote many books. His most famous are the four-volume series on the modern world: The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987), and The Age of Extremes (1994). Together these books cover European and world history from 1789 to 1991. He also wrote on bandits, on jazz, on nationalism, and on many other subjects. His autobiography Interesting Times came out in 2002. He continued writing into his nineties.