Cairo, Egypt

The train rattling down the track as you lay awake in a sleeper car; the call to prayer sounding from a mosque as tropical birds outside your window also welcome the dawn; your name, so uneventfully and mono-syllabically said back home, suddenly turned into a two-syllable masterpiece by a cheerful lady at Lake Toba — “Good morning, Jo-el!” she would sing. Sound, perhaps more than we realize, gives contour to a place, and sometimes to ourselves.

At the end of April I had another memorable experience in sound, one in which musical themes and rhythms I was accustomed to back home greeted me again. But because I was in Egypt — i.e., far from home — I was inclined to listen even more closely.

The concert featured a country singer named Kareem Salama, a Muslim American born and raised in Oklahoma and now in the Middle East as part of a tour sponsored by the US State Department. Around 350 of us gathered at Al Azhar Park to hear him perform, and the small group lent a sense of intimacy to the gathering as we heard songs about love, family, and our common humanity. CNN covered the concert and called Salama a “Country Eastern” singer, referring to how in person, sound, and lyric he blends his American and Middle Eastern roots.

He sang songs such as “Get Busy Living,” “Baby I’m a Soldier,” and “Generous Peace” (the latter is the meaning of his name in Arabic). Some of his other songs include “Prayers at Night,” about the life and death of a girl in the 2006 Lebanon War, and “When I Fall,” which will take you to the States, Cairo, and elsewhere.

Later that night, as I hitched a ride back to the center of town with a Cario-based reporter from Wyoming and his Egyptian co-worker (his co-worker not only gave us a lift but she also put in a Keith Urban CD to accompany the drive), I felt reconnected to my home in Tennessee. Even more, I felt reconnected (and re-inspired to commit to) certain values I heard in Kareem’s music. His voice and thoughts had given my ears a gift, a gift all the more potent as I took them in while alone on the road.