A journey down Egypt's Red Sea coast to find Sufi saints and a mystical lyre

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A journey down Egypt's Red Sea coast to find Sufi saints and a mystical lyre Submitted by Sean Mathews on Mon, 11/09/2026 - 10:44 El-Quseir once welcomed explorers, warriors and…

El-Quseir is pitch black at night. The only light inside this decaying labyrinth of a port comes when a battered Bajaj motorcycle purrs down the odd alley, casting a headlight on one of the town’s many stray dogs, or a passerby flashes a phone, lighting up a decaying wooden balcony.

The old mayor’s house is easy to find in the darkness. It emits a warm, golden light. When I arrive, a crowd is already gathered on the colonnaded veranda; some men in djellabas, others in the uniform skinny jeans of the Middle East.

I spot the odd Cairo hipster among them. The women attendees are especially radiant in make-up. Why shouldn’t they be.

Tonight is a Hazz night, the name, which in Arabic means luck, given to soirees down Egypt’s Red Sea coast, where the simsimiyya, a triangular lyre, is played to ballads about old ports, friendships and legendary seafarers.

“The men here would be at sea for four months at a time. They would save a spot on their dhow just for a simsimiyya player to entertain them,” Aly El-Sayed, the founder of Bahar, a community organisation working to preserve the city's heritage and marine ecosystem, told me.

Aly is the host of tonight’s gathering. The old mayor’s house, a butter-yellow bungalow built in 1888, has been repurposed as Bahar’s home.

“We tried not to change much. We were even careful not to paint too much,” El-Sayed said.

I knew that music was central to life aboard dhows, traditional wooden sailing boats, that plied goods, including slaves, between East Africa and Arabia up until the mid-20th century.

Australian explorer Alan Villiers noted in his 1940 travel classic, Sons of Sinbad, the pride his dhow’s nokhada (captain) took in having a musician aboard ship .

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