{"id":16606,"date":"2026-10-05T10:34:44","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T08:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=16606"},"modified":"2026-10-05T10:40:51","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T08:40:51","slug":"a-song-before-the-economic-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/a-song-before-the-economic-court\/","title":{"rendered":"Egypt Jailed a Mahraganat Singer for a Song About Neighborhood Rivalries"},"content":{"rendered":"

On September 28, 2026, the Cairo Economic Court of Appeals rejected the appeal filed by mahraganat singer Islam Magdy, known as “Islam Kabonga,” and upheld his sentence of six months in prison and a fine of 100,000 Egyptian pounds<\/a>. The chamber was presided over by Judge Mohamed Abu Ismail, with Counselors Maged Mostafa and Ahmed Khaled Al-Shayeb as members, and Deputy Attorney General Mina Qadri attended the session. The case papers contained, according to what Masrawy published<\/a>, two primary charges: violating family values, and misuse of social media platforms.<\/p>\n

The case did not revolve around an incident of violence, trade, or assault, but around song lyrics and video clips. The most famous of these songs bore a title resembling a message directed at the state itself: “I’m Not a Dealer, Government.” Investigating authorities saw in the singer’s songs an incitement to thuggery, references to drugs, and language offensive to public decency, while Kabonga said<\/a> that the clips cited by the investigation dated to an earlier period and that he had already been punished for them.<\/p>\n

The previous punishment he referred to was not issued by a court. It was issued by the Musicians Syndicate<\/a>, which suspended him from work for six months after investigating the content he presents. Thus a single singer faced the same songs before two authorities: a syndicate authority holding the power to grant and withdraw singing permits, and a criminal authority holding the power of imprisonment and fines.<\/p>\n

The case reveals a trajectory longer than any individual ruling. The conflict over mahraganat began approximately a decade ago as a dispute over “public taste” inside syndicate offices and evening television programs, then gradually moved to police reports and economic court chambers. Weeks after the ruling, the Egyptian Opera House inaugurates the Arab Music Festival dedicated to the memory of Hani Shaker, the syndicate chairman who led the most intense phase of the war on this musical genre. The question these events together raise: who decides what Egyptians may sing, and through what legal instrument?<\/p>\n

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From the Syndicate Chairman’s Post to May 15 Prison<\/h3>\n

Kabonga released the song “I’m Not a Dealer, Government” on December 26, 2024<\/a>, written by Mano Al-Jahed and composed by Figo Al-Dakhlawy, and it surpassed ten million streams on Anghami<\/a> alone. The song moves through a familiar mahraganat space: neighborhood rivalries, displays of power, and challenges to rivals. Its first paradox is that its central line is a denial of a drug trafficking charge, in which the singer presents himself as a man occupied with rivalries rather than commerce, and this very line then became the title of a case that included a charge of promoting drug use.<\/p>\n

Journalist Mohamed Shmeis reads the song differently from how the investigating authorities did. He tells Zawia3 it carries no moral problem, and that it, like many songs, expresses the real experience of a young man clearing his name of a fabricated accusation, because informants from his own neighborhood track him and leak personal information about him, even if untrue. Shmeis rejects in principle subjecting art to moral evaluation, because it expresses its audience.<\/p>\n

The prosecution began at the syndicate, not the public prosecutor’s office. In November 2025, artist Mostafa Kamel, chairman of the Musicians Syndicate, wrote on his Facebook account that there is no place for this person among us<\/a>, announced the suspension of his quarterly permit and a poll of the work committee regarding his permanent removal, affirming the syndicate had repeatedly warned him. The chairman added in the same post what appears today as the key to the entire case: responsibility for licensing, monitoring, and approving song lyrics rests with the Ministry of Culture and the General Administration for Censorship of Artistic Works, not the syndicate.<\/p>\n

Kabonga appeared before the syndicate’s investigation on November 23, 2025, apologized for what appeared in the clips, said they were old and that he would delete them entirely, and promised the public and the chairman it would not recur. The investigation ended with a decision to suspend him from singing for six months. With this decision the syndicate had effectively exhausted its most severe professional tool, but the file did not close.<\/p>\n

In the early morning of January 6, 2026, a force from the Giza Security Directorate arrested Kabonga inside his apartment on Arab League Street<\/a> in Mohandessin, following complaints filed by a number of lawyers<\/a> who accused him of glorifying violence, promoting drug use, and threatening youth. A subsequent security account<\/a> reported that the General Administration for the Protection of Public Morals had monitored his clips itself, and that he admitted to publishing them to increase views and generate profits.<\/p>\n

The investigation at the Al-Agouza prosecution, headed by Counselor Hossam Nassar, lasted five hours. The prosecution charged him with two offenses<\/a>: violating the principles and family values of Egyptian society, and practicing the singing profession without registration in syndicate rolls. He admitted to the first, saying he did indeed repeat wrong words in his songs, and denied the second, clarifying that his papers had been registered with the syndicate for approximately two years, that he had been obtaining a permit for each concert and wedding, and that the membership card had never been issued. His lawyer presented evidence of registration carrying a particular irony: a photograph of the syndicate’s decision to suspend him, since the syndicate only suspends those who belong to it.<\/p>\n

The prosecution released him on a bail of one thousand Egyptian pounds and sent his phone to the General Administration for Information Technology for examination of its contents, and officially inquired from the syndicate about his registration status. Then the Economic Affairs Prosecution referred him<\/a> to trial before the Economic Court, which ruled on June 29, 2026<\/a> to imprison him for six months and fine him 100,000 Egyptian pounds.<\/p>\n

On September 28, 2026, the Cairo Economic Court of Appeals rejected his challenge and upheld the first-degree ruling as issued<\/a>, including the fine of 100,000 Egyptian pounds, one hundred times the bail he paid in January. Al-Dustour newspaper<\/a> had published on the day the first ruling was issued that the fine was 20,000 Egyptian pounds, but that figure appeared in a single report and was contradicted by all subsequent coverage, including Al-Dustour’s own account of the case when the sentence began to be served, and it also falls below the minimum fine required by Article 25. The text of the ruling and its reasoning had not been published as of the writing of this report.<\/p>\n

The day after the ruling, September 29, security forces arrested him again in Mohandessin and transferred him to May 15 Prison<\/a> to serve the enforceable sentence. Between publication and prison, approximately twenty-one months passed, during which the same song passed through the syndicate chairman’s desk, then the morality police, then the partial prosecution, then the economic prosecution, then two degrees of litigation.<\/p>\n

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An Article Written for Privacy That Came to Prosecute Art<\/h3>\n

The case rests on Article 25 of Law No. 175 of 2018<\/a> on combating information technology crimes, which punishes with imprisonment of no less than six months and a fine between 50,000 and 100,000 Egyptian pounds, or either of these two penalties, any person who violates any of the principles or family values of Egyptian society. The ruling thus combined the minimum prison sentence with the maximum fine, whereas the text permitted the court to limit itself to one of the two penalties.<\/p>\n

The law does not define what “family values” means, nor does it specify the act considered a violation of them. Notably, the article falls in the third chapter of the law, devoted to crimes related to the sanctity of private life, alongside offenses such as sending electronic messages repeatedly without the recipient’s consent, and publishing personal data or photographs that violate their subjects’ privacy. In contrast, the legislator used in Article 26 of the same law the specific phrase “content contrary to public decency.” This observation formed the core of the memorandum submitted by Masaar Technology and Law Community<\/a> on August 17, 2020, to the Cairo Economic Misdemeanor Court of Appeals, challenging the constitutionality of the text.<\/p>\n

The memorandum relied on Article 95 of the 2014 Constitution, which requires that no crime and no penalty exist except by law, and on Article 96 which protects the presumption of innocence. It recalled that the joint parliamentary committee report that paved the way for the law’s passage in May 2018 pledged precision in defining punishable acts and avoidance of vague expressions. It also invoked an opposing legislative precedent: Law No. 147 of 2006, which removed from the Penal Code phrases such as “social peace” and “glorification” because they were broad enough to criminalize acts the legislator did not intend. Since then the text has remained as is, and the scope of its application has widened.<\/p>\n

That memorandum came at the height of what became known as the “TikTok girls” cases. Since April 2020, authorities had arrested approximately nine women and girls for entertainment content they published on platforms, and referred them to trial on the same charge, simultaneously with statements issued by the monitoring and analysis unit at the Attorney General’s office about confronting content violating “family values and traditions.” What changed in Kabonga’s case is the targeted category: the same instrument moved from digital content creators to a singer publishing his songs on the same platforms, meaning from digital entertainment to art itself.<\/p>\n

The judicial path adds another layer of paradox. Economic courts are specialized courts created to handle cases involving markets, companies, intellectual property, and telecommunications, then became, by virtue of their jurisdiction over information technology crimes, the place where mahraganat songs and TikTok clips are examined. Thus Kabonga appeared before the court that handles stock market manipulation, not because he committed an economic crime, but because his song reached its audience through the internet.<\/p>\n

The second charge, practicing singing without syndicate registration, was absent from the published coverage of both rulings, which limited mention to the violation of family values and misuse of platforms. The ruling’s text and reasoning were not published as of the writing of this report, so the central question remains suspended: which specific family value did a song about neighborhood rivalries violate, and who defined it in the absence of a legislative definition?<\/p>\n

Mokhtar Mounir, human rights lawyer at the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, considers this ambiguity to be the heart of the crisis. He tells Zawia3 that the language relied upon by the judiciary in information technology crimes remains “elastic” and undisciplined language, and that any published content can easily be placed under the umbrella of criminalization for violating family values. He adds that several rights organizations have flagged this problem since the law was approved in 2018, but Article 25 continues to reach creators and content producers, and opens the door to malicious complaints filed against anyone on the basis of a dispute with them, ending in a criminal case being filed, a referral to trial, and a conviction. The mere existence of a text permitting such prosecution reveals, in his view, a tendency to narrow the creative space.<\/p>\n

Mounir has no explanation for the court’s combination of imprisonment and fine, as he has not reviewed the reasoning of the ruling, and attributes the matter to the court’s discretion. But he opposes in principle the criminal prosecution of any creative content, since the recipient is capable of watching the content and equally capable of avoiding it and turning away from it: “It is not right that we should have a continuous prosecution of creators, whether in artistic works like singing, or social media content producers like TikTok.”<\/p>\n

The lawyer distinguishes between the two charges. Practicing a profession without syndicate registration is essentially an administrative violation, and should not become a pretext for criminal prosecution or a custodial penalty. As for the argument that the singer was punished by the syndicate for the same content, this does not in his view prevent criminal accountability, because syndicate and administrative sanctions do not prevent the court, if it finds the act constitutes a crime, from imposing the legally prescribed penalty. Kabonga still has the right to file a cassation appeal after exhausting the two ordinary degrees of litigation.<\/p>\n

On the fate of Masaar’s memorandum, Mounir explains that Article 25 has not been referred to the Supreme Constitutional Court to date, and that the memorandum was a legal initiative containing arguments that lawyers rely on in information technology crime cases. Mounir prefers diversity of content, in music and otherwise, over a multiplicity of oversight bodies monitoring everything published, because the listener and viewer are capable of distinguishing and excluding what is inappropriate: “It is not right to impose restrictions and ban the creative space.”<\/p>\n

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A Syndicate That Holds the Permit but Not the Words<\/h3>\n

The Musicians Syndicate needs no court to prevent a singer from working. The syndicate holds the key to livelihood itself: membership for those who pass its tests, and the quarterly permit or single-concert permit<\/a> for those who have not obtained membership, which is the path through which most mahraganat singers work at weddings and public concerts. With this instrument, the syndicate waged its long war against mahraganat, before the prosecution entered the picture.<\/p>\n

The most intense wave began on February 17, 2020. Days earlier, Hassan Shakoush and Omar Kamal had sung “Bint El-Geiran” at a Valentine’s Day concert at Cairo Stadium, a song containing a line about alcohol and hashish. Late syndicate chairman Hani Shaker issued<\/a> a decision he described as final, directed at tourist establishments, Nile cruise boats, nightclubs, and caf\u00e9s, banning any dealings with mahraganat singers. Syndicate spokesperson Tarek Mortada confirmed the decision included actor Mohamed Ramadan as well. The published list<\/a> included names such as Oka and Ortega, Hassan Shakoush, Hamou Bika, Ali Samara, and Omar Kamal, alongside groups such as Al-Madfa3giya, Al-Dakhlaweya, and Welad Suleiman.<\/p>\n

Shaker explained his reasoning in a television interview with Amr Adeeb on MBC Masr: mahraganat do not befit Egypt’s name<\/a>, and their singers would not succeed if they stripped alcohol and drugs from their songs, evidenced by their failure to change the words despite the syndicate’s warnings. In the same interview he referred the standard for permitting Oka and Ortega’s songs to the Censorship of Artistic Works’ approval. Five years later his successor Mostafa Kamel repeated the same referral in the Kabonga file. The syndicate punishes for words, but says each time that approving words is not its jurisdiction.<\/p>\n

The “final” decision did not hold long. Shakoush returned to the syndicate, and in June 2022 a confrontation erupted during a press conference<\/a> the syndicate held to receive his apology to percussionists; Shaker walked out and announced his resignation. He wrote in his resignation text that he had found “a great conflict between the responsibility of this position and my preserving people’s affection.” On his first day in the position, new chairman Mostafa Kamel temporarily suspended<\/a> mahraganat singers’ permits pending a committee of “profession luminaries” studying their file, to protect what the syndicate’s statement described as “Egypt’s artistic value.”<\/p>\n

The chairman changed but the instruments remained. In the summer 2026 season, the syndicate warned<\/a> against any singer ascending a stage without an accompanying musical band, a rule targeting mahraganat singers who sing to recorded music, meaning targeting the production format of the genre itself, which was born from a home computer and a loudspeaker at a popular wedding. Immediately after the Kabonga ruling, it sent warning letters<\/a> to mahraganat singers demanding they review their lyrics before releasing them, and hinted at penalties not limited to suspension.<\/p>\n

Shmeis considers this rule illogical and unobjective, because many singers have performed to playback at numerous concerts for years. He goes further in saying that Musicians Syndicate chairman Mostafa Kamel himself sings in the same venues where Kabonga sings, earns the same fee, and sits with mahraganat singers at those venues, and that his songs do not differ in genre from the genre he criticizes.<\/p>\n

The pattern the events reveal has repeated itself for six years: a comprehensive ban, then exceptions, then partial accommodation of those who comply, then a new ban. What is new in Kabonga’s case is that the syndicate penalty is no longer the end of the line, but has become a first stop followed by the prosecution. A question no official body has publicly answered to date remains: if approving lyrics is the Censorship of Artistic Works’ responsibility, as both syndicate chairmen said, was “I’m Not a Dealer, Government” submitted to the Censorship before its release on platforms, and what was its decision?<\/p>\n

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Hani Shaker’s Night and Sayed Darwish’s Night<\/h3>\n

On October 20, the Egyptian Opera House inaugurates the thirty-fourth session of the Arab Music Festival and Conference, under the patronage of Acting Minister of Culture Abd El-Aziz Qonsowa. Opera House president Reda Al-Wakeel announced an eleven-day program<\/a>, featuring 22 concerts with the participation of approximately 70 Egyptian and Arab artists and 35 research papers in the academic conference. The session is dedicated to the memory of Hani Shaker, who died on May 3, 2026<\/a> after a long health crisis, and its opening concert begins with a documentary film about his career directed by Samer Madi, followed by “A Night of Hani Shaker” with the participation of singer Nadia Mustafa, a member of the Musicians Syndicate council, and Mohamed Tharwat.<\/p>\n

A singer whose career spanned more than five decades deserves to have a festival session dedicated to him, and the paradox does not diminish that right. But the festival does not celebrate the singer alone; it draws each year a map of what the official institution considers “Arab music.” The names announced at the press conference, from Amal Maher and Ali El-Haggar to Medhat Saleh and Omar Khairat, belong to classical and traditional singing, and the Grand Theatre nights bear the names of Baligh Hamdi, Mohamed Abd El-Wahhab, Mohamed Al-Mougi, Sayed Darwish, and Riad Al-Sunbati. In the same weeks, a mahraganat singer serves his sentence in May 15 Prison.<\/p>\n

Shmeis does not see in this absence a class position. The Arab Music Festival, as he says, is concerned with songs connected to Arab music, while mahraganat is a modern contemporary genre still at the peak of its emergence, and cannot be evaluated now.<\/p>\n

The evaluation Shmeis considers premature has always come late in the history of Egyptian singing, and the night named after Sayed Darwish alone testifies to that. In 1919, the year of the revolution, Sayed Darwish set to music words by Badi’ Khayri in the play “Rin” for Nagib Al-Rihani’s troupe, and among his compositions were “Al-Tahafjiya” known as “The Hashish Smokers”<\/a>, and “The Cocaine”<\/a> which speaks in the voice of users defending their habit. Some of his contemporaries accused those songs of being vulgar because of their boldness, then their composer became a name given to official Opera House nights. The distance between “The Hashish Smokers” and “I’m Not a Dealer, Government” is not a distance in subject matter, but in time, medium, and the singer’s position relative to the institution.<\/p>\n

The closer precedent is Ahmed Adawiya. In the 1970s, radio banned<\/a> his songs after “Al-Sah Al-Dah Imbo” because some officials considered them vulgar, and the Censorship refused permits for some of them, while the radio did not release songs such as “Om Abdo Fein” until 2014 on “Sha’biyet FM” station, after forty years of banning. A biography published by Al Jazeera Net<\/a> recounted that the morality police prepared in the late 1970s to arrest him from one of the clubs on the Pyramids road because of his song lyrics, at the same time officials were describing him as a danger to society. When Adawiya died on December 29, 2024, the artistic community and official media mourned him as a popular icon, and many recalled Naguib Mahfouz’s description of him as “the giver of joy.”<\/a><\/p>\n

This sequence encapsulates a rule that has repeated itself in the history of Egyptian singing: what the institution bans in the name of taste in one generation, it reclaims in the name of heritage in the next. The only difference is that the instruments of banning have changed. In Sayed Darwish’s time it was the charge of vulgarity, in the seventies it was the closed radio microphone, but in 2026 it is a cell in a public prison.<\/p>\n

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Complaints Without Names<\/h3>\n

All Egyptian coverage agrees that the case began with complaints from “a number of lawyers”<\/a>, but none of them named a single lawyer. We do not know who they are, when they filed their complaints, or whether they have connections to any party. The only certainty is the content of what they demanded: an examination of songs they said glorified thuggery, referenced drugs, and constituted a danger to youth. This pattern is familiar in Egypt from hisba cases and from lawsuits that targeted films and books, in which a lawyer transforms from a client’s defender into an agent for “society” as a whole.<\/p>\n

Alongside the complaints, the security account presents a second driver: the General Administration for the Protection of Public Morals within the Specialized Police Sector, which said it had monitored the clips itself. Before both, “monitoring committees” in the Musicians Syndicate<\/a> had monitored the content and recommended suspension, and the syndicate council headed by Mostafa Kamel had rejected the singer’s grievance appeal. Three separate oversight bodies examined the same material, and each examination ended in an independent penalty.<\/p>\n

Press coverage contributed to raising the ceiling of accusation. In January, Sada Al-Balad website<\/a> published that the singer faced five years in prison, citing Article 174 of the Penal Code, which addresses incitement to overthrow the system of government. RT Arabic website<\/a> presented the arrest as a step within a broader campaign targeting mahraganat singers and TikTok and YouTube content creators under the pretext of “protecting public taste.” Newspapers’ headlines featured the phrase “lowbrow songs singer” before any judge had pronounced any verdict.<\/p>\n

Behind these layers is a young man. Local newspapers<\/a> indicate that Kabonga was born in 2006, meaning he was eighteen when the song was released, and twenty when he entered prison. He admitted before the syndicate and the prosecution that some of what he said in his songs was wrong, apologized, and pledged to delete the clips. The apology changed nothing in the case’s trajectory, because the three bodies do not exchange penalties or exchange apologies.<\/p>\n

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The Music of Weddings Charged With Assaulting the Family<\/h3>\n

Mahraganat was born in the early years of the millennium at popular weddings in poor neighborhoods, when music coordinators began mixing folk rhythm with electronic music and voice-modulation techniques. The documented history of this genre<\/a> links its beginnings to names such as Ahmed Figo, Al-Sadat, Filo, and Alaa Fifty since 2004, and tracks its wide spread with the January 2011 revolution. This music did not pass through radio or major production companies, but rose from street loudspeakers directly to platforms.<\/p>\n

Shmeis explains the spread of mahraganat through its language, which in his view is the language that popular and informal settlement areas of high population density understand, representing their residents and conveying their reality. He therefore sees in the continuation of this genre an importance that goes beyond entertainment, because it reveals real problems and changes in Egyptian society’s behavior, especially among youth, and connects the state to this reality when sociologists read and analyze it, rather than art being merely a tool to anesthetize society.<\/p>\n

Here lies the paradox of the Kabonga file. The singer charged with violating “family values” said before the prosecution that he was obtaining a permit from the syndicate for every concert and wedding he sang at. The songs the state prosecutes in the name of the family are, in social reality, the music to which new families are celebrated at weddings in Cairo, Giza, and Delta villages. The ban decision issued by Hani Shaker in 2020 was directed at tourist establishments, cruise boats, nightclubs, and caf\u00e9s, while popular weddings, where this genre actually lives, remained harder for oversight to reach than any licensed establishment.<\/p>\n

The numbers reveal the scale of the gap between the institution and the public. On February 17, 2020, the same day the ban decision was issued, “Bint El-Geiran” had surpassed 102 million views<\/a> on YouTube and topped the global weekly chart of the SoundCloud platform. The following day, lawyers filed Complaint No. 10066 with the Attorney General’s petitions office<\/a> against Hassan Shakoush, relying on articles in the Penal Code, the anti-prostitution law, and the alcohol prohibition law. The Shakoush crisis effectively ended with a second version of the song from which the alcohol and hashish line was removed, garnering more than a million views in a single day. Kabonga’s crisis ended in a cell.<\/p>\n

The difference between the two paths does not stem from a fundamental difference between the two songs. It stems first from the text that had by then become available: in February 2020, Article 25 had not yet been tested on a wide scale, and the wave of TikTok cases began two months later. It stems second from the distance between the singers and the institution: Shakoush subsequently obtained syndicate membership, while Kabonga, by his own testimony before the prosecution, was still waiting for a membership card that had never been issued. The singer who has a door to the institution is asked to modify the line, and the singer standing outside it finds other doors opened for him.<\/p>\n

“Public taste” remains the common justification for all these decisions. But what the numbers say is that actual public taste, measured by millions of listeners and wedding requests, stands on the opposite side of the official definition. When the gap between the two tastes widens to this extent, the ambiguous law becomes an instrument for imposing a minority’s definition on a majority, not an instrument for protecting the family from a specific assault.<\/p>\n

Shmeis reaches the same meaning when he says the public is what determines public taste by the numbers, that the wider the listening to any given singer, the more that singer expresses their audience, citing mahraganat singer Essam Sasa, who achieved, according to him, views surpassing Amr Diab’s during one year. Shmeis does not have precise information about singers modifying their lyrics after the ruling, but sees no evidence that any of their output was affected by it: “All of them are continuing their output, Hamou Bika and Anba.”<\/p>\n

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What the Court Did Not Answer<\/h3>\n

If the sentence is served in full from the date of his arrest on September 29, Islam Kabonga leaves May 15 Prison near the end of March 2027. But his exit will not close the questions his case opened, questions no official body has yet answered.<\/p>\n

The first question concerns the ruling itself: the reasoning of neither ruling has been published, and the public does not know which specific phrase the court considered a violation of family values, or why the court chose to combine imprisonment with the maximum fine rather than limiting itself to one of the two penalties. The second concerns censorship: Musicians Syndicate Chairman Mostafa Kamel said that approving song lyrics is the responsibility of the General Administration for Censorship of Artistic Works, but the Censorship, which falls under a Ministry of Culture run since July 2026 by an acting minister<\/a>, has issued no clarification regarding the song: was it submitted for review, and was it approved or rejected?<\/p>\n

The third concerns the complaints: who are the lawyers who triggered the case, and why do their names disappear from everything published while the defendant’s image tops the headlines? The fourth concerns the law: Article 25 remains in effect with the same wording that Masaar challenged as unconstitutional six years ago, and parliament has not moved to define what “family values” means, leaving the definition in the hands of whoever writes the complaint and whoever investigates it.<\/p>\n

As for the song, it did not enter prison with its singer. Its page on Anghami continues to display more than ten million streams, a number the Economic Court has no power to imprison. In the weeks when the Opera House illuminates a night in the name of Sayed Darwish, the composer of “The Hashish Smokers” and “The Cocaine,” a twenty-year-old singer serves his sentence because of a song about neighborhood rivalries. If Sayed Darwish had posted the melody of “The Hashish Smokers” on TikTok today, which night would have awaited him: a night on the Grand Theatre stage, or a night at the Al-Agouza police station?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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