The art of ataba emerged in rural and Bedouin settings, circulating in intimate evening gatherings or in times of grief and loss, and within various forms ranging from satire and lamentation to love poetry. It was often performed with the accompaniment of the rababa.` For those unfamiliar with the genre, it is a quatrain of colloquial verse composed in the wafir meter. It consists of four hemistiches: the first three share the same rhyme, while the fourth ends differently. Historically, ataba, like many other forms of shaabi singing, was associated with men, to the extent that the most famous origin story attributes this genre to a man who fell in love with a woman named Ataba and began to sing to her. From this assumption, which time and repetition have turned into a ‘truth,’ curiosity led me to dig into the Syrian Cassette Archives in search of female voices in this world. A journey of this kind inevitably goes hand in hand with exploring the social contexts surrounding shaabi music in Syria. Popular celebrations and weddings are directly tied to Syrian regional shaabi identity or more precisely, to those marginalized environments that are often looked down upon with a mix of classist disdain and cultural exclusion. In the imagination of the urban conservative, these settings are associated with an “underworld” of nightlife, the world of cabarets and casinos. Yet this very space imposes its presence, reach, and expansion in ways that demand rediscovery and reinterpretation. Since art in general is never purely aesthetic nor does it exist in isolation, the study of artistic phenomena must be read in relation to what came before, after, and alongside them. Many women shone within this sphere and became icons of Syrian shaabi music, such as Fariha Al Abdullah, the 1990s star who reigned over the world of popular song, and a dazzling performer of ataba. Over the years of her career, she managed to transcend the stereotypical image of the “hajiyat” into which conservative society had boxed female shaabi performers, earning instead the far broader and fairer title of Singer of the Badiya. She was followed by Saria Al Sawas, who broke through those margins to become a star of shaabi dance music, whether in small-scale festivities or in the world of wealth and luxury alike. Artists like Fariha and Saria opened the door for many other women who sang ataba, mawliya, and shaabi pop, spreading across Syrian geography from coastal celebrations in Wadi Al Ghab through Aleppo and Homs, and all the way to the Jazira region. These women carried the ataba form into diverse social occasions, embedding their voices into the fabric of popular memory. This distribution reveals how women’s ataba created a wide musical map, marked by the imprint of place and granting each region of Syria its distinctive flavor in both style and subject. In this selection, we explore four Syrian female voices in ataba, across their geographical spread and stylistic variety. Lama Al Furatia Tape: Ataba – Sweihli – Lkahi Little is known about the beginnings of Lama Al Furatia and her recordings. She chose for herself a surname that explicitly and proudly points to her place of origin, a gesture of affirmation of cultural identity, its rootedness, and its distinctiveness. Her first recording spread in the late 1990s and early 2000s through rare live performances, yet her career has remained shrouded in mystery despite the striking impact of her tremulous voice, saturated with longing and lament. Her singing stretches outward at times, and at others it breaks down, as if it were a suppressed wail. Lama sang a mix of shaabi genres that often appeared side by side on a single tape, such as ataba and sweihli, to which she added the local flavor of the Euphrates region, choubi. In her only cassette preserved in our archive, her voice emerges as a female cry striving to assert its presence within the realm of ataba. She sings of her strong lover, “the dark-skinned one” and “the one with a mole,” who usually carries a pistol at his waist. When he sets down his weapon, Lama seizes the moment to ask, slipping her question between two lines of desire and supplication: “Yol ya dada, where is the pistol?” She opens the tape with the mawwal “Allamak Ya Asmar”, where her clear Jazrawi dialect meets an ataba expression oscillating between invocation, weeping, and mourning the ruins. The piece runs nearly nineteen minutes, taking up three-quarters of the first side of the tape, accompanied by keyboards and electric violin. Together, they create a fusion between the traditional character of Euphrates ataba and the rising shaabi pop sound of that era. Lama reconfigures her affection for the strong man from another angle in the song “Al Laila Baka Al Helou (Tonight the Handsome Cried)”, documenting that exceptional day when the powerful beloved broke down and wept. Throughout the song, she repeats the refrain: “Al laila, al laila, al laila baka al helou, ya wayla (Tonight, tonight, tonight! The handsome wept, Oh Lord!)” Hanaa Salloum Tapes: Safita Party / Jannet W Jnouni (I Went Crazy) / Sheely “My lover, from my ribs He betrayed, and I had no say in his eye And we parted, O time And if he was bound to another I’ll extinguish his eye’s light with dust.” With this dramatic ataba, which opens her tape “Safita Party” released in 2000, Salloum, known for her performances at weddings across the Syrian coast and the countryside of Hama, reveals a distinctive approach to ataba. She leans into the highest registers of her voice, at times reaching the edge of a scream, so that the forceful weight of the words matches her mountainous vocal range. Hanaa hails from the Ghab Plain in the western countryside of Hama. She began her career in the early 1990s singing mawwal, and though her presence remained confined to the realm of weddings in the coastal region and Hama, she continued performing into recent years, preserving her charged, boisterous style that set her apart from other shaabi singers. Hanaa became known especially for her renditions of ataba and dabke, making them the backbone of her career. In one of her more recent recordings, at Casino Bahr Al Noujoum alongside the singer Ali Dayoub, he introduces her with a bold, flirtatious ataba mawwal that at times borders on the erotic, before passing her the mic. Yet Hanaa does not merely respond; instead, she answers with her own mawwal, opening with a resounding cry: “La sayyih sayhat al-bedu… ah ya qalbi”, showing that her voice can pierce through the performances of her male counterparts in ataba, and that her presence carries a quality of dominance and might. Sanaa Al Hussein and Kawthar Mansour Tape: Afrah Wady Khaled (Wady Khaled Weddings) On the Syrian–Lebanese border, Wadi Khaled appears as a geographically forgotten and economically marginalized space. In the 1990s, it became a stage for raucous weddings recorded onto cassette tapes. There, female voices such as Kawthar Mansour and Sanaa Al Hussein met, accompanied by keyboards and mijwiz, lending the evenings a feverish atmosphere. While the urban centers were preoccupied with state-approved music or elitist tarab, the margins were inventing a shaabi space that reflected the people’s real mood, where joy stood side by side with sorrow, and ataba with dabke. Notably, the inhabitants of Wadi Khaled themselves lived a double identity: Syrian and Lebanese at once, bound by blood and kinship ties across the border, with many living without legal papers, ignored by one state and treated as foreigners by the other. This ambiguous identity seeped into their singing as well. The music here was neither purely Lebanese nor entirely Syrian, but a blend of dialects and rhythms, with female voices rising above borders. Kawthar Mansour Tapes: Ala Jesser Almaseab (On Almaseab Bridge) / Arab Al Sharkya (Arabs of the East Side) / Afrah Wady Khaled (Wady Khaled Weddings) Kawthar Mansour is considered one of the leading stars of Syrian shaabi music. She possesses a Bedouin voice that leans toward sharpness and elevation, born to pierce the open desert and the communal guesthouses without amplifiers. This is why her singing is dominated by a quality of calling out and shouting. In songs like “Nawh Al Hmam (The Mourning of the Dove)” and “Ala Jesser Almaseab (On Almaseab Bridge)” some passages of which are drawn from Iraqi tradition, she evokes mourning and grief, while her solo recordings preserved in our archive document her notable presence in mawwal and ataba. Kawthar lived through the golden age of the Syrian shaabi song and collaborated with its great singers. For a time, her name stood alongside those of Fariha Al Abdullah and Saria Al Sawas, thanks to the sheer power of these voices and their domination of the female shaabi music world. Together, these singers ruled the world of shaabi cabarets that stretched between Homs and the Damascus countryside, always open to visitors of diverse nationalities. Sanaa Al Hussein Tapes: Raks Al Hajiyat / Afrah Wady Khaled (Wady Khaled Weddings) Sanaa Al Hussein is still relevant today. In mid-2025, she released a song titled “Ana Entahayt (I Am Finished)”, and this time she did not begin with an ataba or a mawwal, but chose instead to sing in the Bedouin dialect, aligning with the song’s tragic theme.Her concerts never stopped. Her social media pages are filled with announcements for cabarets and casinos where she performs her songs, some dating back to the early 2000s, others more recent. On her Facebook page she also posts many variations of her most famous track, “Am Hussein (Uncle Hussein)”. Sanaa has made ataba her primary arena, her field of voice and expression. She uses ataba to sing about everything: love, despair, and that classical flirtation known to Bedouin life and poetry. Most of her musical output lies in this form, alongside mawwal and dance songs she continues to perform in cabarets and at special events such as Valentine’s parties. In the archive, her tape “Raks Al Hajiyat” (2007) includes two Ataba pieces, revealing her artistic identity as one drawn toward festive, danceable music. On their joint tape “Afrah Wady Khaled (Wady Khaled Weddings)”, Kawthar and Sanaa performed with keyboardist Abdel Hamid Kajak to animate a wedding celebration. The tape reaches its dance climax on the second side with the song “Khattaba (The Matchmaker)”, one of the classics of Syrian dabke. Here, the singing alternates with fast-paced instrumentals in feverish succession, showing a deep rapport between the two singers’ voices and the electronic accompaniment. At times, it becomes difficult to distinguish between Sanaa and Kawthar, their voices merging into a single sonic frenzy.