{"id":16606,"date":"2026-10-05T10:34:44","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T08:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=16606"},"modified":"2026-10-23T22:45:49","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T20:45:49","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 28 September 2026, the Cairo Economic Court of Criminal Appeal rejected the appeal filed by mahraganat singer Islam Magdy, known as “Islam Kabonga”, and <\/span>upheld his six-month prison sentence and EGP 100,000 fine<\/span><\/a>. The panel was presided over by Judge Mohamed Abu Ismail, with Counsellors Maged Mostafa and Ahmed Khaled El-Shayeb as members, and the session was attended by the deputy public prosecutor Mina Qadri. The case papers, according to what <\/span>the Masrawy website published<\/span><\/a>, carried two main charges: violating family values, and misusing social media.<\/span><\/p>\n

The case revolves around song lyrics and video clips. The most famous of these songs bore a title resembling a message addressed to the state itself: “I’m Not a Dealer, O Government”. The investigating authorities saw in the singer’s songs incitement to thuggery, references to drugs and indecent language, while <\/span>Kabonga said<\/span><\/a> that the clips on which the investigation relied date back to an earlier period, and that he had already been punished for them.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The earlier punishment he referred to was not issued by a court. It was issued by the <\/span>Musical Professions Syndicate<\/span><\/a>, which suspended him from work for six months after questioning him over the content he presents. Thus a single singer faced the same songs before two authorities: a union authority that has the power to grant and withdraw permission to sing, and a criminal authority that has the power of imprisonment and fines.<\/span><\/p>\n

The conflict over mahraganat began about a decade ago as a dispute over “public taste” inside the Syndicate’s offices and on evening programmes, and then gradually moved into police reports and the halls of the economic courts. Weeks after the ruling, the Egyptian Opera House opens the Arab Music Festival dedicated to the memory of Hany Shaker, the Syndicate head who led the fiercest phases of the war on this genre of song. The question these facts raise together is: who decides what Egyptians are entitled to sing, and with what legal tool?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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From the Syndicate Head’s Post to 15 May Prison<\/b><\/h1>\n

Kabonga released the song “I’m Not a Dealer, O Government” on <\/span>26 December 2024<\/span><\/a>, with lyrics by Mano El-Gahed and music by Figo El-Dakhlawy, and its plays exceeded <\/span>ten million on the Anghami platform<\/span><\/a> alone. The song moves in a space familiar in mahraganat: neighbourhood rivalries, displays of strength and challenging rivals. Its first irony is that its central line is a denial of the charge of drug dealing, in which the singer presents himself as a man preoccupied with rivalries, not trade; this very line then became the title of a case that included a charge of promoting drugs.<\/span><\/p>\n

The journalist and writer Mohamed Shmeis reads the song differently from the investigating authorities. He tells Zawia3 that it carries no moral problem, and that, like many songs, it expresses the real situation of a young man clearing himself of a conviction fabricated against him, because informers from his own neighbourhood are lying in wait for him and leaking personal information about him, even if it is not true. Shmeis rejects in principle subjecting art to moral evaluation, because it expresses its audience.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The pursuit began with the Syndicate, not the prosecution. In November 2025, the artist Mostafa Kamel, head of the Musical Professions Syndicate, wrote on his Facebook account that <\/span>there is no place for this person among us<\/span><\/a>, and announced the suspension of his quarterly permit and the consultation of the work committee on his permanent removal from the rolls, stressing that the Syndicate had warned him repeatedly. In the same post, the Syndicate head added a remark that today seems the key to the whole case: responsibility for licensing, monitoring and approving song lyrics lies with the Ministry of Culture and the General Administration for the Censorship of Artistic Works, not with the Syndicate.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kabonga appeared before the Syndicate’s investigation on 23 November 2025, apologised for what was contained in the clips, said that they were old and that he would delete them entirely, and promised the audience and the Syndicate head that it would not happen again. The investigation ended with a decision to suspend him from singing for six months. With this decision, the Syndicate had all but exhausted its harshest professional tool, but the file was not closed.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At dawn on 6 January 2026, that is, weeks after the Syndicate’s penalty began, a force from the Giza Security Directorate arrested Kabonga <\/span>inside his flat on Gameat El-Dewal El-Arabeya Street<\/span><\/a> in Mohandessin, following <\/span>reports filed by a number of lawyers<\/span><\/a> accusing him of glorifying violence, promoting drugs and threatening young people. A later <\/span>security account<\/span><\/a> related that it was the General Administration for the Protection of Morals that had monitored his clips, and that he admitted publishing them to increase views and make profits.<\/span><\/p>\n

The investigation at the Agouza Prosecution, headed by Counsellor Hossam Nassar, lasted five hours. <\/span>The prosecution charged him with two offences<\/span><\/a>: violating the principles and family values of Egyptian society, and practising the profession of singing without being registered on the Syndicate’s rolls. He admitted the first, saying that he does indeed repeat wrong words in his songs, and denied the second, explaining that his papers have been registered with the Syndicate for about two years, that he used to obtain a permit for every concert and wedding, and that the membership card was never issued. His lawyer submitted proof of registration that carried a particular irony: a copy of the Syndicate’s decision to suspend him, since the Syndicate suspends only those who belong to it.<\/span><\/p>\n

The prosecution released him on bail of EGP 1,000 ($20.70), sent his phone to the General Administration for Information Technology to examine its contents, and formally enquired with the Syndicate about the status of his registration. Then <\/span>the Economic Affairs Prosecution referred him<\/span><\/a> to trial before the Economic Court, which <\/span>ruled on 29 June 2026<\/span><\/a> to imprison him for six months and fine him EGP 100,000.<\/span><\/p>\n

On 28 September 2026, the Cairo Economic Court of Appeal rejected his appeal and <\/span>upheld the first-instance ruling as issued<\/span><\/a>, including the fine of EGP 100,000, a hundred times the bail he paid in January. On the day the first ruling was issued, <\/span>the Al-Dostour newspaper<\/span><\/a> had published that the fine was EGP 20,000, but this figure appeared in a single report only and was contradicted by all subsequent coverage, including Al-Dostour’s own account of the case when the sentence began to be enforced; it is also 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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the day after the ruling, 29 September, the security agencies arrested him again in Mohandessin and <\/span>transferred him to 15 May Prison<\/span><\/a> to carry out the enforceable sentence. Between publication and prison, about twenty-one months passed, during which the same song went through the Syndicate head’s office, then the morals police, then the district prosecution, then the economic prosecution, then two levels of litigation.<\/span><\/p>\n

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An Article Made for Privacy That Now Tries Art<\/b><\/h1>\n

The case rests on <\/span>Article 25 of Law No. 175 of 2018<\/span><\/a> on Combating Information Technology Crimes, which punishes with imprisonment for no less than six months and a fine of between EGP 50,000 ($1,035) and EGP 100,000 ($2,070), or one of these two penalties, anyone who violates any of the principles or family values of Egyptian society. The ruling thus combined the minimum prison term with the maximum fine, whereas the text allowed the court to impose only one of the two penalties.<\/span><\/p>\n

The law does not define what is meant by “family values”, nor does it specify the act that constitutes a violation of them. Notably, the article falls in the third chapter of the law, devoted to crimes relating to the inviolability of private life, alongside crimes such as sending electronic messages in bulk without the recipient’s consent and publishing personal data or images that violate the privacy of their owners. By contrast, in Article 26 of the same law, the legislator used a specific expression, “content contrary to public morals”. This observation formed the backbone of the memorandum submitted by the <\/span>Masaar Technology and Law Community<\/span><\/a> on 17 August 2020 to the Cairo Economic Misdemeanours Court of Appeal, pleading the unconstitutionality of the text.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

That memorandum came at the height of what became known as the “TikTok girls” cases. Since April 2020, the authorities have arrested about nine women and girls over entertainment content they published on the platforms and referred them to trial on the same charge, in parallel with statements issued by the Monitoring and Analysis Unit in the Public Prosecutor’s office on confronting content that offends “the values and traditions of the family”. What changed in Kabonga’s case is the targeted category: the same tool moved from women digital content creators to a singer who publishes his songs on the same platforms, that is, from digital entertainment to art itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

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

The second charge, practising singing without union registration, remained absent from the published coverage of the two rulings, which merely mentioned violating family values and misusing the platforms. Neither the text of the ruling nor its reasoning had been published as of the writing of this report, and so the central question remains open: which specific family value did a song about neighbourhood rivalries violate, and who defined it in the absence of a legislative definition?<\/span><\/p>\n

Mokhtar Mounir, a human rights lawyer at the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, believes that this vagueness is the heart of the crisis. He tells Zawia3 that the terms relied on by the judiciary in information technology crimes remain “elastic”, imprecise terms, and that any published content can easily be placed under the umbrella of criminalising violations of family values. He adds that several human rights organisations have drawn attention to this problem since the law was passed in 2018, but Article 25 still reaches creators and content makers and opens the door to malicious reports filed against anyone over a dispute with them, which end with criminal proceedings being initiated, the person being referred to trial and a ruling being issued against them. The mere existence of a text that allows such prosecution reveals, in his view, a tendency to narrow the creative space.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mounir has no explanation for the court’s combining of imprisonment and a fine, since he has not seen the grounds of the ruling, and he attributes the matter to the court’s discretion. But he opposes in principle the judicial pursuit of any creative content, as the recipient is able to watch the content and also able to avoid it and turn away from it: “It is not normal for us to have continuous pursuit of creators, whether at the level of artistic works such as singing, or of social media content creators such as on TikTok.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The lawyer separates the two charges. Practising the profession without union registration is, at its core, an administrative violation, and should not become a pretext for prosecuting people criminally or for a custodial sentence. As for the plea that the singer had been punished by the Syndicate for the same content, it does not, in his view, prevent him from being held criminally accountable, because union and administrative sanctions do not prevent the court, if it considers that the act constitutes a crime, from imposing the penalty prescribed by law. After exhausting the two ordinary levels of litigation, Kabonga still has the right to appeal to the Court of Cassation.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the fate of the “Masaar” memorandum, Mounir explains that Article 25 has not been referred to the Supreme Constitutional Court so far, and that the memorandum was a legal effort containing pleas on which lawyers rely in information technology crime cases. Mounir prefers diversity of content, in music and elsewhere, to a multiplicity of censorship bodies monitoring everything published, because listeners and viewers are able to discern and exclude what is inappropriate: “It is not right for us to impose restrictions and ban the creative space.”<\/span><\/p>\n

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A Syndicate That Holds the Permit but Not the Lyrics<\/b><\/h1>\n

The Musical Professions Syndicate does not need a court to prevent a singer from working. The Syndicate holds the very key to livelihood: membership for those who pass its tests, and the quarterly permit or the <\/span>single-concert permit<\/span><\/a> for those who have not obtained membership, which is the route through which most mahraganat singers work at weddings and public concerts. With this tool the Syndicate waged its long war on mahraganat, before the prosecution entered the scene.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fiercest wave began on 17 February 2020. Days earlier, Hassan Shakosh and Omar Kamal had sung the song “Bint El-Geran” at a Valentine’s Day concert at Cairo Stadium, a song that included a line about alcohol and hashish. <\/span>The late Syndicate head Hany Shaker issued<\/span><\/a> a decision he described as final, addressed to tourist establishments, Nile boats, nightclubs and caf\u00e9s, banning dealings with mahraganat singers. The Syndicate’s spokesperson, Tarek Mortada, confirmed that the decision also covered the actor Mohamed Ramadan. The <\/span>published list<\/span><\/a> included names such as Oka, Ortega, Hassan Shakosh, Hamo Bika, Ali Samara and Omar Kamal, alongside bands such as El-Madfa’geya, El-Dakhlaweya and Wlad Selim.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shaker explained his logic in a televised phone-in with Amr Adib on the “MBC Masr” channel: mahraganat <\/span>are not worthy of Egypt’s name<\/span><\/a>, and their singers would not succeed if they stripped alcohol and drugs from their songs, as shown by the fact that they had not changed the lyrics despite the Syndicate’s warnings. In the same phone-in, he referred the standard for permitting the songs of Oka and Ortega to the approval of the Censorship of Artistic Works. Five years later, his successor Mostafa Kamel made the same referral in the Kabonga file. The Syndicate punishes over lyrics, but says every time that approving lyrics is not within its remit.<\/span><\/p>\n

The “final” decision did not hold for long. Shakosh returned to the Syndicate, and in June 2022 a quarrel erupted during a <\/span>press conference<\/span><\/a> held by the Syndicate for him to present his apology to percussionists, after which Shaker withdrew and announced his resignation. He wrote in the text of the resignation that he had found <\/span>“a major conflict between the responsibility of this position and my keeping people’s love”<\/span><\/a>. On his first day in office, <\/span>the new Syndicate head, Mostafa Kamel, suspended<\/span><\/a> the permits of mahraganat singers temporarily while a committee of “the profession’s leading figures” studied their file, to protect what the Syndicate’s statement described as “Egypt’s artistic value”.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Syndicate head changed, but the tools remained. In the summer 2026 season, <\/span>the Syndicate warned<\/span><\/a> against any singer going on stage without an accompanying band, in a rule targeting mahraganat singers who sing over recorded music, that is, targeting the very form of production of this genre, which was born from a home computer and a loudspeaker at a popular wedding. Immediately after the Kabonga ruling, it <\/span>sent warning messages<\/span><\/a> to mahraganat singers demanding that they review the lyrics of their songs before releasing them, and threatened penalties not limited to suspension.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shmeis believes that this rule is illogical and unobjective, because many singers have been singing “playback” at numerous concerts for years. He goes further when he says that the head of the musicians’ syndicate, Mostafa Kamel, himself sings in the same venues where Kabonga sings, receives the same fee, and sits with mahraganat singers in those venues, and that his songs do not differ in their genre from the genre he criticises.<\/span><\/p>\n

The pattern revealed by the facts has been repeating for six years: a comprehensive ban, then exceptions, then partial absorption of those who comply, then a new ban. What is new in Kabonga’s case is that the union penalty is no longer the end of the road, but has become a first stop followed by the prosecution. And one question remains that no official body has publicly answered so far: if approving lyrics is the responsibility of the Censorship of Artistic Works, as the two Syndicate heads said, was “I’m Not a Dealer, O Government” submitted to the censorship authority before it was released on the platforms, and what was its decision?<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Night of Hany Shaker and the Night of Sayed Darwish<\/b><\/h1>\n

On 20 October, the Egyptian Opera House opens the thirty-fourth edition of the Arab Music Festival and Conference, under the patronage of the acting Minister of Culture, Abdel Aziz Konsowa. The head of the Opera House, Reda El-Wakil, announced <\/span>a programme spanning eleven days<\/span><\/a>, comprising 22 concerts with the participation of about 70 Egyptian and Arab artists and 35 research papers at the scientific conference. The edition is dedicated to the memory of Hany Shaker, who <\/span>died on 3 May 2026<\/span><\/a> after a long illness, and its opening ceremony begins with a documentary film about his career directed by Samer Madi, followed by “The Night of Hany Shaker” with the participation of the singer Nadia Mostafa, a member of the council of the Musical Professions Syndicate, and Mohamed Tharwat.<\/span><\/p>\n

A singer whose career spanned more than five decades deserves to have a festival edition dedicated to him, and the irony does not detract from this right. But the festival does not honour the singer alone; every year it draws the map of what the official establishment 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 tarab and classical singing, and the nights of the Main Hall bear the names of Baligh Hamdi, Mohamed Abdel Wahab, Mohamed El-Mougy, Sayed Darwish and Riad El-Sonbati. In the same weeks, a mahraganat singer is serving his sentence in 15 May Prison.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

The evaluation that Shmeis sees as premature has always come late in the history of Egyptian song, and the night named after Sayed Darwish alone bears witness to that. In 1919, the year of the revolution, Sayed Darwish set to music the lyrics of Badie Khairy in the play “Rinn” for Naguib El-Rihani’s troupe, and among its tunes were <\/span>“Al-Tahafgiya”, known as “Al-Hashashin”<\/span><\/a>, and the tune <\/span>“Al-Cocaine”<\/span><\/a>, which speaks in the voice of users defending their high. Some of his contemporaries accused those songs of vulgarity because of their boldness, and then their author became a name after which official Opera House nights are named. The distance between “Al-Hashashin” and “I’m Not a Dealer, O Government” is not a distance in subject, but in time, medium and the singer’s position in relation to the establishment.<\/span><\/p>\n

The closest precedent is Ahmed Adaweya. In the seventies, <\/span>the radio banned<\/span><\/a> his songs after “Al-Seh El-Dah Embo” because some officials considered them vulgar, the censorship authority refused to license some of them, and the radio released songs such as “Om Abdo Fein” only in 2014, through the “Shaabiyat FM” station, after forty years of prohibition. A <\/span>biography published by Al Jazeera Net<\/span><\/a> related that the morals police prepared in the late seventies to arrest him at one of the nightclubs on Pyramids Street because of the lyrics of his songs, at a time when officials described him as a danger to society. When Adaweya died on 29 December 2024, the artistic community and the official media mourned him as a popular icon, and many recalled Naguib Mahfouz’s description of him as <\/span>“the giver of happiness”<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This chain sums up a rule that has recurred in the history of Egyptian song: what the establishment bans in the name of taste in one generation, it reclaims in the name of heritage in a later generation. The only difference is that the tools of prohibition have changed. In Sayed Darwish’s time it was the charge of vulgarity, in the seventies it was the closed radio microphone, and in 2026 it is a cell in a public prison.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Reports Without Names<\/b><\/h1>\n

All the Egyptian coverage agrees that the case began with reports from <\/span>“a number of lawyers”<\/span><\/a>, but none of it mentioned the name of a single lawyer. We do not know who they are, when they filed their reports, or whether they have links to any body. The only certainty is the content of what they demanded: an examination of songs they said glorify thuggery, refer to drugs and pose a danger to young people. This pattern is known in Egypt from hisba cases and from lawsuits that targeted films and books, in which the lawyer turns from a defender of a client into an agent for “society” as a whole.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Besides the reports, the security account offers a second driver: the General Administration for the Protection of Morals in the Specialised Police Sector, which said that it had monitored the clips itself. Before both of them, the <\/span>“follow-up committees” in the Musical Professions Syndicate<\/span><\/a> had monitored the content and recommended suspension, and the Syndicate council, headed by Mostafa Kamel, rejected the grievance submitted by the singer. Three separate censoring bodies examined the same material, and each examination ended with an independent penalty.<\/span><\/p>\n

Press coverage contributed to raising the ceiling of the accusation. In January, <\/span>the Sada El-Balad website<\/span><\/a> published that the singer faced five years in prison, citing Article 174 of the Penal Code, an article dealing with incitement to overthrow the system of government. <\/span>The RT Arabic website<\/span><\/a> presented the arrest as a step in a wider campaign targeting mahraganat singers and content creators on TikTok and YouTube on the grounds of “protecting public taste”. The phrase “singer of vulgar songs” spread in newspaper headlines before any judge had pronounced a ruling.<\/span><\/p>\n

Behind these layers is a young man. <\/span>Local newspapers<\/span><\/a> indicate that Kabonga was born in 2006, meaning that 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, apologised, and pledged to delete the clips. The apology changed nothing in the course of the case, because the three bodies do not exchange penalties, nor do they exchange apologies.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Wedding Music Accused of Violating the Family<\/b><\/h1>\n

Mahraganat were born at the start of the millennium at popular weddings in poor neighbourhoods, when DJs began mixing the shaabi rhythm with electronic music and voice-modification techniques. The <\/span>documented history of this genre<\/span><\/a> links its beginnings to names such as Ahmed Figo, El-Sadat, Filo and Alaa Fifty from 2004 onwards, and traces its wide spread with the January 2011 revolution. This singing did not pass through radio or the major production companies; it rose from loudspeakers in the street directly to the platforms.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shmeis explains the spread of mahraganat by their language, which in his view is the language understood by popular areas and densely populated informal settlements, representing their inhabitants and conveying their reality. He therefore sees in the persistence of this genre an importance that goes beyond entertainment, because it reveals real problems and shifts in the behaviour of Egyptian society, especially among young people, and connects the state with this reality when sociologists read and analyse it, instead of art being merely a tool for numbing society.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet the singer accused of violating “family values” told the prosecution that he used to obtain a permit from the Syndicate for every concert and wedding at which he sang. The songs that the state is trying in the name of the family are, in social reality, the music to which new families are wed in the neighbourhoods of Cairo and Giza and the villages of the Delta. And the ban decision issued by Hany Shaker in 2020 was addressed to tourist establishments, boats, nightclubs and caf\u00e9s, while popular weddings, where this genre actually lives, remained harder to censor than any licensed establishment.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On 17 February 2020, the same day the ban decision was issued, “Bint El-Geran” had <\/span>passed 102 million views<\/span><\/a> on YouTube and topped the global weekly chart of the SoundCloud platform. The following day, lawyers filed <\/span>report No. 10066, Public Prosecutor’s petitions<\/span><\/a>, against Hassan Shakosh, citing articles of the Penal Code, the Anti-Prostitution Law and the Alcohol Prohibition Law. Shakosh’s crisis ended in practice with a second version of the song from which the line about alcohol and hashish was deleted, and which garnered more than a million views within a single day. Kabonga’s crisis, however, ended with a cell.<\/span><\/p>\n

The difference between the two paths is not due to an essential difference between the two songs. It is due, first, to the text that became available: in February 2020, Article 25 had not yet been tried on a wide scale, and the wave of TikTok cases began two months later. It is due, second, to the distance between the two singers and the establishment: Shakosh later obtained Syndicate membership, while Kabonga, by his own testimony before the prosecution, remained waiting for a membership card that was never issued. The singer who has a door into the establishment is asked to amend the line, and the singer standing outside it has other doors opened for him.<\/span><\/p>\n

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

Shmeis points to the same meaning when he says that the audience is the one that determines public taste through numbers, so the wider the listening to a particular artist, the more he expresses his audience, and he cites the mahraganat singer Essam Sasa, who achieved, according to him, views exceeding those of Amr Diab over a year. Shmeis has no precise information on whether singers have amended their lyrics after the ruling, but he does not see that the output of any of them has been affected by it: “They are all continuing their production, Hamo Bika and Enaba.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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What the Court Did Not Answer<\/b><\/h1>\n

If the sentence is served in full from his arrest on 29 September, Islam Kabonga will leave 15 May Prison towards the end of March 2027. But his release will not close the questions his case has opened, questions that no official body has answered so far.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first question concerns the ruling itself: the reasoning of the two rulings has not been published, and the public does not know which specific phrase the court considered a violation of family values, nor why the court chose to combine imprisonment with the maximum fine instead of imposing only one of the two penalties. The second concerns censorship: the head of the Musical Professions Syndicate, Mostafa Kamel, said that approving song lyrics is the responsibility of the General Administration for the Censorship of Artistic Works, but the censorship authority, which belongs to a Ministry of Culture run since July 2026 by an <\/span>acting minister<\/span><\/a>, has not issued any clarification regarding the song: was it submitted to it, and did it approve or reject it?<\/span><\/p>\n

The third concerns the reports: who are the lawyers who set the case in motion, and why are their names absent from everything published while the defendant’s photo dominates the headlines? The fourth concerns the law: Article 25 is still in force in the same wording whose unconstitutionality the Masaar organisation pleaded six years ago, and parliament has not moved to define what “family values” means, so the definition has remained in the hands of whoever writes the report and whoever investigates it.<\/span><\/p>\n

As for the song, it did not go to prison with its owner. Its page on the Anghami platform still shows more than ten million plays, a figure that the Economic Court has no power to imprison. And in the weeks when the Opera House lights up a night in the name of Sayed Darwish, the author of “Al-Hashashin” and “Al-Cocaine”, a twenty-year-old singer is serving his sentence over a song about neighbourhood rivalries. If Sayed Darwish released the tune of “Al-Hashashin” on TikTok today, which night would await him: a night at the Main Hall, or a night at the Agouza police station?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A twenty-year-old mahraganat singer entered 15 May Prison after a sentence of six months and a fine of EGP 100,000 under Article 25 of the Information Technology Law, which does not define “family values”, after passing before three separate censoring bodies, each of which issued an independent penalty, in the weeks in which the Opera House dedicates its festival to the memory of Hany Shaker, the Syndicate head who led the war on mahraganat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":16602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[17975,17978,17979,17981,17977,17980,17973,17982,17974,17976],"kateb":[688,15846],"class_list":["post-16606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-article-25-egypt-cybercrime-law","tag-economic-court-egypt-singer","tag-egypt-content-creators-prosecution","tag-egypt-cybercrime-law-art-prosecution","tag-family-values-charge-egypt-music","tag-hani-shaker-mahraganat-ban","tag-islam-kabonga-egypt","tag-mahraganat-banned-egypt-2026","tag-mahraganat-singer-jailed-egypt","tag-musicians-syndicate-egypt-mahraganat-ban","kateb-ahmed-gamal-ziada","kateb-marwa-mohey-eldin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/\u0625\u0633\u0644\u0627\u0645-\u0643\u0627\u0628\u0648\u0646\u062c\u0627-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16606"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23579,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16606\/revisions\/23579"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16606"},{"taxonomy":"kateb","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kateb?post=16606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}