Voice of the Arabs

Voice of the Arabs or Sawt al-Arab (Arabic: صوت العرب‎‎)‎ (621 kHz on Mediumwave to Egypt, 9800 kHz, and many other frequencies on Shortwave to the Middle East, the rest of Europe and North America) was one of the first and most prominent Egyptian transnational Arabic-language radio services. Based in Cairo, the service became known to many Arabs & non-alike, as the main medium through which former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser spread his messages on Arab unity and revolutions across the Arab world. Despite its unmatched popularity in most of the 1950s and 1960s, the service no longer commands a large audience and does not play a significant role in domestic Egyptian or regional politics.

Although disagreement exists about who initiated the service, most media observers recognize that Gamal Abdel Nasser, one of the coup leaders at the time and later President of Egypt, was the main driving force behind the project. According to Douglas Boyd, the idea of the service came from Mohammaed Abdel-Kader Hatem, who would become Minister of Information. Until 1967, director and chief announcer Ahmed Said headed and managed the service.

Unlike the press, which the new government did not control until 1960, the radio fell under the monopoly of the government, who used this to their advantage. Recognizing the immense potential of radio, Nasser devoted "considerable financial resources to the expansion of public broadcasting." Voice of the Arabs first aired on 4 July 1953, one year after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 as a half-hour radio program on Cairo Radio. Quickly, the show developed into its own radio station broadcasting across the Arab world. A year after its initial broadcast, the service's transmission time tripled. By 1962, the service expanded to broadcasting 15 hours a day. This expansion made Egypt the "dominant broadcaster in the Middle East and a major international broadcaster" during the 1950s and 1960s. The following decade, the service had expanded to 24-hour-a-day broadcasting.

Under Nasser's presidency and the leadership of Said, the revolutionary fervor of the coup leaders' ideology, the promotion of pan-Arabism, an anti-imperialist tone and the legendary voice of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum characterized the service. Voice of the Arabs also called for the liberation of Palestine and galvanized Arabs in North Africa, Iraq and Yemen to rise up against colonial and monarchical rule.

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