A Socio-Historic Reflection on the Voices That Held a Region Together by Hanya Kotb

We are all, in our own ways, haunted by a voice.

Sometimes it’s a cigarette-worn timbre crackling through a dusty car radio on a desert road. Sometimes it’s a few notes hummed by a grandmother while slicing oranges— songs with no origin, no timestamp, only that unmistakable ache of belonging. Arab music, especially the music of the mid-20th century, did more than soundtrack a region. It offered the region a way to survive itself.

For decades, these songs held entire cities in pause; not for the beat, but for the meaning. When Abdel Halim Hafez sang of longing, people wrote down the lyrics in notebooks like scripture. When Asmahan's voice spilled out of the phonograph -elegance, sorrow, rebellion- listeners held their breath. Hers was a voice that broke barriers not just in range, but in social expectation. A Druze princess, a cinema darling, a woman who sang with the softness of silk and the precision of steel. She died young, like many legends do, her mystery sealed by the Nile and rumours of espionage.

In a Beirut kitchen, Fairouz plays low as someone stirs za’atar into dough. For many in the Arab world, these voices are not nostalgia. They are home—no matter how far you've drifted. Fairouz was the whispered prayer. In post-independence Lebanon, amid rising tensions and fragile optimism, her voice became the sound of mornings: quiet, reflective, familiar. Like the scent of Arabic coffee steeping in the next room.

Then there was Sabah— the eternal phoenix of Arab music. If Fairouz was dawn, Sabah was midnight; dazzling, unapologetic, scandalous in a time when scandal was simply being loud, blonde, and unashamed. She was married seven times, laughed at every rumour, and sang over 3,500 songs. Her voice wasn’t always perfect, but it didn’t need to be. It was hers—wild, joyful, and uncontained.

These artists, and dozens more whose names blur into melodies, were not entertainers. They were historians in falsetto, their songs carried the weight of colonisation, of lost cities, of exiled hearts and vanished lovers. Sayed Darwish -before any of the others- sang Egypt’s revolution into being. Wadih El Safi turned mountain sorrow into operatic glory. Mohamed Abdel Wahab composed the soundtracks of power and yearning in equal measure, fusing traditional maqams with Western instruments— not to imitate, but to innovate.

This was music as resistance, not always in the explicit sense, but in how it held onto language, to slowness, to depth. Lyrics spanned pages; songs stretched across sides of vinyl. There was no hurry to reach the chorus, no need to simplify emotion into digestible lines. This was music that trusted the listener—trusted them to feel, to understand, to sit with sorrow and not flinch.

And while the women of this era were often front and centre, many of the men gave us songs just as soaked in vulnerability. Abdel Halim, in particular, sang with a fragility that made even patriotism sound like a confession. He bled on stage, sometimes literally, he made crying fashionable, and across the Levant and Maghreb, listeners wept with him.

Even the songs that weren’t political ended up becoming so. Because in a region repeatedly reshaped by war, migration, and surveillance, to feel deeply and publicly was itself a radical act. The voice became the vessel, and what a vessel it was.

Today, the crackle of a cassette can still undo a person. You don’t have to know the lyrics— you only need to know the ache. In that way, Arab music did what few art forms manage: it collapsed geography. A song born in Aleppo might raise goosebumps in Casablanca. A love ballad from Cairo might feel like a prayer in Baghdad. This was a shared sonic language, spanning dialects, borders, and generations.

That language has not disappeared; it has been remixed, sampled, looped. It lives in the intros of hip-hop tracks, the backgrounds of TikToks, the heads of third-culture kids who don't speak Arabic fluently but know every word to Inta Omri (You are my life). But even with all the evolution, nothing has truly replaced those original giants. Perhaps because they weren’t chasing virality, they were chasing eternity.

And in some strange, poetic way, they caught it.