Egyptian radio: a guide to the oldest dial in the Arab world

Egypt did not just join radio early. It got there before almost everyone else in the region, and that head start shaped the sound of Arabic broadcasting for the next hundred years. The first services went on air in the mid-1920s as small private short-wave outfits scattered between Cairo and Alexandria, broadcasting in Arabic with some hours in English, French and Italian for the foreign communities living there. The state took over in 1934, and from that point the Egyptian dial became something closer to a national instrument.

The station that talked to a whole continent

On 4 July 1953, a year after the revolution, a half-hour programme on Cairo Radio was given its own name: Sawt al-Arab, the Voice of the Arabs. Within a few years it had become a station in its own right and arguably the most consequential piece of broadcasting the Arab world has produced. Its tagline said exactly what it intended — calling to the Arab nation from the heart of Cairo — and Nasser used it as the main channel for his message of Arab unity and anti-colonial struggle.

It was not only politics. Sawt al-Arab is also the station that carried Umm Kulthum to listeners who had no other way of hearing her. For a listener in Rabat or Baghdad in 1960, a shortwave set and that frequency were the entire culture industry. The station's influence faded in later decades, and its reputation was badly damaged by its coverage of the 1967 war, but it is still broadcasting and still worth hearing for what it represents.

The public network today

Egyptian state radio runs an unusually large number of channels, and the names tell you most of what you need to know.

• General Programme (al-Barnamag al-Amm) — the 1934 original and still the backbone: news, drama, religious programming and the kind of long-form talk that has mostly disappeared elsewhere.

• Voice of the Arabs — the pan-Arab channel described above, on 621 AM and 106.3 FM in Cairo.

• Middle East Radio — launched 30 May 1964 as the lighter, more commercial answer to Sawt al-Arab, and it won that argument: it is still one of the most listened-to channels in Greater Cairo on 89.5 FM.

• Songs Radio (Izaat al-Aghani) — created in 2000, and exactly what the name promises: Arabic song, continuously, with minimal talk.

• Holy Quran Radio — one of the most widely streamed Arabic channels anywhere, and the default background in a large share of Egyptian homes and taxis.

Private radio arrived late, then moved fast

Egypt's airwaves stayed closed to private operators far longer than its press did. That changed on 10 May 2003, when Nogoum FM went on air from the Egyptian Media Production City as the country's first private station. It broadcasts in Egyptian Arabic on 100.6 in Cairo, and its arrival did something the state channels never had to attempt: it competed for a young audience.

Nile FM, run by the same operator, took the English-language slot and became the station of choice for expatriates and for a certain slice of Cairo that grew up on international pop. Radio Masr followed in 2009 with Egyptian songs and news. The trio between them defines what most Egyptians under forty actually have on in the car.

What to listen to, and when

The thing Egyptian radio still does better than anyone

Radio drama. The Egyptian radio play never died the way it died in Europe and America, and the state channels still produce and rebroadcast serials with full casts, scored music and sound design. During Ramadan the schedules fill with them. If you have never heard an Arabic radio drama, it is a genuinely strange experience the first time — closer to cinema than to podcasting — and there is no streaming service that will recommend it to you.

Egypt built the vocabulary that Arabic radio still speaks in. Every other dial in the region is, in some way, answering it.

Listening from outside Egypt

Cairo is on UTC+2 and the schedule is built around it: morning shows from around 08:00, the heaviest music blocks in the afternoon, and talk after 22:00. None of the major Egyptian channels are geo-blocked. The usual caveat applies — some state streams are still published on insecure http addresses, which browsers refuse to play inside a secure site, and only the broadcaster can change that.