Performances at the world’s biggest festivals, triumph at prestigious award shows, and hundreds of millions of streams; there is no denying that Arab and Arab diaspora artists are picking up international traction.
So, perhaps it was only a matter of time before a music festival in Europe featuring some of Arab pop music’s heavy-hitters and rising stars would come to fruition.
Cue the Nawafiz festival, the second edition of which will take place at the TivoliVredenburg venue in the Dutch city of Utrecht on Saturday, 24 May.
On its line-up: Palestinian singer-songwriters Lina Makoul and Lana Lubany, rap stalwarts DAM and Narcy, and Syrian-Lebanese electronic duo Bedouin Burger, to name but a few of its more than a dozen acts.
Moroccan rapper Stormy, whose songs and videos have racked up tens of millions of views and streams, was also recently added.
Also among the artists performing is Ziad Zaza, an Egyptian rapper hailing from Fayoum whose music blends drill, trap and funk sounds.
“It means connecting with my people abroad and sharing our culture and language with the world. That’s what music is to me," he told The New Arab about his upcoming performance at the festival.
“I just want everyone to leave after my performance without negative energy.”
Utrecht is not Europe’s biggest cultural hub, and so might not seem the most likely setting for an Arab music festival with so rich a line-up. But a slightly longer look at the city and its biggest venue makes it make sense.
Like other Dutch cities, Utrecht is home to a large Middle Eastern and North African population, particularly Moroccans, but also Syrians, Egyptians, and Palestinians, and TivoliVredenburg is often a stop for artists from the MENA region on their European tours, from across genres.
In recent months, renowned Kurdish singers Sivan Perwer and Hozan Dino, Egyptian artists Tul8te and Marwan Moussa, and Palestinian-Jordanian electronic group 47SOUL have all played at the venue.
This is thanks in major part to Loubna El Boujoufi, a Dutch-Moroccan programmer at TivoliVredenburg since 2019.
She has racked up a decade of experience in music event programming, organising local shows and festivals before starting to programme “world music” events at the Utrecht venue.
Wanting to focus specifically on music from the MENA region, she began in September to work part-time in her existing role, and part-time dedicated to programming music events by artists from that part of the world, including for Nawafiz.
The festival, whose name translates in English to “windows”, first took place last year and featured electronic music duo Shkoon, rapper Marwan Moussa, and mahraganat duo El Sawareekh.
“Music from the SWANA region or the MENA region is seen as a genre – but music from a region is not a genre,” Loubna told The New Arab.
“We have rock, we have pop, we have slower music, we have electronic music. We have all these different types. This music festival focuses on pop music, and the genres within pop – but even then, you can still experience music that is so different from what you already know," she adds.
"The idea with the festival is, even if you’re Arab or you love Arab music, you always have at least one person on the lineup that you don’t know. Everyone is welcome at the festival, but it’s for the Arab audience, for the bicultural audience.”
Arab music nights are now often a major part of multidisciplinary Arab cultural festivals, and club nights that focus entirely on music from the region have become commonplace in major European cities. And now festivals like Nawafiz are starting to appear as standalone events, with people of Middle Eastern and North African descent making the decisions behind the scenes.
Solidarity and community have formed between these decision-makers, and collaboration between them has ensured more thoughtful and particular programming catered to Arab and/or MENA diaspora audiences.
“When I started five years ago, I felt like I was the only one that did this, especially in the Netherlands, and I didn't have any contacts outside of the Netherlands,” she said.
“It feels like in those five years, it has grown to a point where there are so many people you can talk to and so many people you can reach out to that experience the same things, still experience the ‘how are we going to do this?’ I'm very happy that we're getting there, that we have more decision-making roles.”
Holding these positions means being able to program thoughtfully and tackle some of the misconceptions and prejudices that those working at predominantly white, predominantly middle-class cultural institutions have about Arab audiences.
“It’s changing, but for a lot of people, Arab equals Muslim, and Muslim equals ‘doesn’t go to concerts’,” she said. “But the problem wasn’t that people weren’t coming – your programming simply wasn’t good enough for people to come.
“I remember five years ago, I had this conversation with someone. They said, ‘We try to do concerts for people with a bicultural heritage, but they don’t come to theatres, even though we try to make the ticket prices as low as possible’. The money is the least of your problems! You just need to book something that they’re interested in.”
Planning a festival with artists based all over the world has other challenges too, not least thanks to slow and often inconsistent visa processes.
It is a common occurrence for artists from the MENA region and other parts of the non-Western world performing in the Netherlands to have their performance visas granted too late or not granted at all, to the public frustration of festival organisers.
To avoid last-minute cancellations and fan disappointment as best as possible, programmers like Loubna need to be strategic and prepared, with planning for the festival beginning many months in advance.
“Last year was so stressful with the visas and everything that I thought ‘ok – lesson learned’, we’re starting early this year. We started in November this year, and yet still, you don't know,” she said. “But this year, everything is going well. So far, so good.”
In what looks to be part of a general shift in self-perception and pride among diaspora Arabs, Arab cultural heritage is no longer just an undercurrent that appears through beat and riff samples or scattered lyrical references to “back home”.
In recent years, we’ve seen Arab and Arab diaspora musicians (think Elyanna, Saint Levant, and Mohamed Ramadan) play at some of the world’s biggest festivals like Coachella or Glastonbury, their cultural identities on full show.
“Being Arab is not seen as a bad thing anymore,” Loubna said.
“When I was growing up, even if you wanted to be famous or you wanted to make music, people would distance themselves from their heritage, and that's not happening anymore. You see that nowadays, people are proud of where they're from.”
She says of events like Nawafiz, purpose-built for musicians and audience from, or with origins in, the MENA region: “We're way too late with this. This should have been happening years ago, and I think the more stages we have for the artists coming from the region, the better," Loubna adds.
“We're going the right way in acknowledging the wealth of culture we have, and the wealth of music we have from the region.”
Shahla Omar is a freelance journalist based in London. She was previously a staff journalist and news editor at The New Arab. Follow her on X: @shahlasomar