If you ever lived through Egyptian summer holidays in the 90s, chances are the first thing that popped into your head was cruising down the road with your cousins or siblings, windows down, blasting the most iconic Egyptian summer anthem of all time: Amarain (1998) by Amr Diab, one of Egypt’s most well-known modern singers. Just picturing that moment now feels like stepping into a different era: a time when life was simpler, when summer did not need much more than a packed car and Amr Diab’s beats filling the summer air. That song was, according to some sources, a love letter to his children, a theory seemingly confirmed at the end of the music video when the camera lingers on two twin babies. As he sings Amarain, which means “two moons” in Arabic, he describes their eyes as two moons in the sky, which is a poetic metaphor widely used in Arab culture. More than 20 years later, Amr Diab is circling back to that same simplicity, but this time, he is not just singing to his children, he is singing with them. His latest album, Ebtadena (We’ve…
