From Lennie Clark's Web Site:

Amriika
(America)

This page contains a translation into English of the lyrics to the Egyptian shaabi song "Amriika", which was sung by Shaa’baan Abdul Riheem.

The singer's name is sometimes spelled as "Shaban Abdel Raheem", "Sha3ban Abd El Rehim", or "Shabaan Abd El Rahim".

Shaban Abdel Rahim comes from shaabi culture himself, formerly working as a makwagi (man who irons clothes). His music is immensely popular with the lower classes of Egyptian society, such as the people who drive the mini-buses. He is notorious for his outrageous lyrics, having sung about Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, his hatred for Israel, the gap between classes in society, pollution of the Nile, the crash of the EgyptAir flight several years ago, and other provocative topics. He has appeared in a number of movies, some of which were banned by the censors.

According to Adel Abdallah (the translator), "This song is not an anti-American song. This song is a call for peace and an invitation to the U.S.A. to help to achieve peace as a super power."

Lyrics

People need peace, not war and pains
The President of Egypt cannot sleep
He is trying to make peace work and he told that to Israel
War brought tears and hunger to children
People want to live and enjoy stability and security.
Israel wants peace
Israel should learn from former wars a good lesson
American, American
Please understand that everybody wants peace
Everybody wants peace

Acknowledgements

About the Translator

Adel Abdallah is an Egyptian who resides in New Orleans, Louisiana. If you are traveling to that great city, he invites you to stop by the Cafe Picasso, located at 3401 Chartres (on the corner of Chartres and Desire, in the Bywater). The cafe serves delicious Middle Eastern food, and offers shiisha smoking. They are open daily except for Sundays, from 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. (Deliveries until 10 P.M.) The phone number is 504-948-6881.

The translation summary was done by Adel at Lennie Clark's request. Muchisimas gracias to Kruz, (whose Morocco to India ethnic boutique, located in the historic French Quarter, is not-to-be-missed) for suggesting Adel as a translator.

About the Source

This article originally appeared on Lennie Clark's web site, "Arabic Song Translations." Lennie created this web site in 2002 as a response to discussion on the Internet regarding incidents of dancers who performed inappropriate sensual dances to religious music. Lennie's web site resided on a free web hosting service known as Geocities. When the planned October 2009 closure of the Geocities web hosting service was announced, Lennie and Shira agreed to move the contents of Lennie's site to Shira.net. To explore all the articles and song translations that once appeared on Lennie's Geocities site, visit Lennie's portal page here on Shira.net.