Sayed Darwish, born in Kom Al-Dikka on 17 March 1892, Was an Egyptian singer and composer who was considered the father of Egyptian popular music, one of the pioneers of Arabic music, a leader of the “cultural renaissance” that swept Egypt at the turn of the century, and the bard of the 1919 Revolution. His love of music and the material hardships he faced, writes Pascale Ghazaleh, are the two main themes that inform most of his hagiography, intertwining to make up the phenomenon that is Sayed Darwish. He worked as a bricklayer, among other things, after his father’s death, when he became his family’s sole breadwinner, and it is this direct experience of working-class life that makes his songs so powerful. “In the modern Arab historiography of music,” writes Frederic Lagrange, “Sayed Darwish”  has become an icon symbolizing Progress, Modernity, and the shift from ‘Oriental music’, an elitist music made for Pashas and still bathing in the original Ottoman matrix, to ‘Egyptian music’, the first figuralist expression of a people’s soul and their nationalist demands.

He put music to the Egyptian national anthem, Bilady, Bilady, Bilady, the words of which were adapted from a famous speech by Mustafa Kamil.

He composed several master pieces like “Shed el hezam” (”Pull the Belt”), “Malo’ouna,” “Ana Haweit,” “Kom Ya Masry,” and “Salma Ya Salama.”, And Wrote 26 immensely successful operettas.

Sayed Darwish made deep changes with his music not only in the Arabic and Egyptian music history but in the Egyptian community as well.