Ahmed Fouad Negm (1929-2013) and and his collaborator, the blind folk-singer Sheikh Imam Isa, were the most important performing artists working within the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist Arab social movements of the 1960s and 70s. Unlike most establishment poets who work in modern standard Arabic, Negm composed in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, the mother tongue of the Arab world’s most populous country.