5 Pounds Om Kalthoum

Issued to commemorate Umm Kulthum, who had died the previous year, this piece belongs to a short run of Egyptian commemorative gold struck in the mid-1970s under Sadat's government. Umm Kulthum's funeral in February 1975 drew an estimated four million people into the streets of Cairo — more, by most accounts, than had turned out for Nasser himself four years earlier. The Egyptian state's decision to honor her on a gold coin was less a cultural gesture than a political calculation: she had spent the last years of her life fundraising concerts for the Egyptian military following the 1967 defeat.