Egypt

Youssou N'Dour laid down the electric mbalax that made him famous and instead sang the names of Sufi saints over an Egyptian orchestra, turning private devotion into a public argument about the faith he grew up inside.

Fathy Salama's Cairo strings do the heavy lifting, swelling and sighing beneath N'Dour's voice until "Bamba the Poet" feels less like a pop song than a hymn carried on a river of bowed instruments. The subjects are real men — Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, the Niasse lineage, the pilgrimage city named in "Touba - Daru Salaam" — and N'Dour treats each as a portrait rather than a slogan, patient where a lesser record would rush to the chorus. Held back from release for years in the shadow of 9/11, it arrived in 2004 as a gentle rebuttal to those who saw only menace in Islam, and it took the Grammy for its category the following year. What lingers is the tenderness: a global star staking his reputation on the quietest thing he could say.