Crooner

Best box-office attraction in the Near East is tall, sleepy-eyed, sickly Mohammed Abdul-Wahab, Egypt's premier crooner and actor. Once an unlettered tailor's assistant in Cairo, Crooner Abdul-Wahab has since amassed a fortune by composing tunes which were a hybrid of Oriental and Western music. He put the songs in screen romances and, with himself in the leading role, soon became the matinee idol of Cairo, Bagdad, Damascus, Jerusalem and outposts.

Typical Abdul-Wahab screen plot: a poor fellah (peasant), desperately in love with a rich man's daughter, realizes the futility of his situation, sings a few tragic songs, commits suicide.

Sample Abdul-Wahab lyric:

We all love the moon

And we wonder--the moon loves whom?

Actor Abdul-Wahab's trilly tenor voice has long been heard on Italian Arabic propaganda broadcasts. The programs were recorded. But so popular was Abdul-Wahab's crooning even in that form that Arabs were more than willing to listen to a few words of anti-British oratory while waiting for the next torch song--often fairly anatomical.

British Arabic broadcasts, begun a year ago to counteract Italian influence, found little favor at first because they specialized in American swing and European folk songs, both unintelligible to Arab ears. Last week Britain gave a special broadcast for the first anniversary of the Arabic program, which showed not only that Britain had learned a few broadcasting tricks, but demonstrated the advantages of a full purse in the radio propaganda game.

Crooner Abdul-Wahab will take no less than $400 for singing in the flesh--a fee the Italians never saw their way to giving him. On the British program, besides a coterie of other Arabic talent, broadminded Crooner Abdul-Wahab in person cleared his voice, began his popular warbling, sang in Arabic an "ode to Shakespeare." His fee for helping British imperialism along: $625 an appearance.

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