Last May, I attended a special concert by the duo Bedouin Burger at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, titled “A Nomad Ballad.” The celestial voice of Syrian singer Lynn Adib filled the air at the exhibition, which was dedicated to Arab artists. By her side was her musical partner Zeid Hamdan, a famous Lebanese producer best known for his role as a pioneer of Beirut’s alternative music scene.
The riffs from his guitar carried this electro-folk ballad through the gallery, bouncing off artworks by 20th-century painters, such as Algeria’s Baya Mahieddine or Lebanon’s Etel Adnan, who lived through troubled times. Their trajectories echo that of Hamdan, who also found refuge in Paris, a city that has long been — and still is — a hub for Arab artists, mainly from countries once colonized by France.
Relocating to France was not a choice for Hamdan, who campaigned for human rights in Lebanon, but a necessity for his children. “Had I been alone, I would’ve stayed,” he said. Having lost his apartment in the deadly Beirut port explosion of August 2020, he found solidarity among other Arab artists in the French capital. “I was educated in the French school system back in Lebanon, and I wanted the same for my children,” he explained.
In recent years, a new generation of artists from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been reshaping Parisian nightlife. Many arrived after facing instability or loss of freedom back home. Teaming up with local diasporas, they create vibrant events where music meets activism, addressing topics from Palestine to personal liberation. As the far right continues to sweep across France, this scene has become a vital space for these artists as they struggle to forge new identities.
Hamdan has joined one such alternative scene that has been taking form in Paris over the past few years. It includes groups like Beirut Electro Parade, Al Beyt collective, Mahalla, Kalam Aflam and Radio Flouka. Collectives and online radio stations have mushroomed, along with club parties thrown by North African and Middle Eastern artists who have left their countries en masse — often in the wake of the disenchantment that followed the Arab Spring — and who are joining an important historical diaspora.
Many grew up listening to Hamdan’s projects, along with those of other artists who shaped the future of alternative Arabic music from Beirut, when the city was still a regional hub for the underground scene. Amid the French far right’s rise, they form a microcosm, operating within spaces that feel both celebratory and political, a spirit that Hamdan embodies. Since his early days with the duo Soapkills, alongside Yasmine Hamdan, he’s been considered a bold voice, pushing boundaries.
On a recent sunny day, Hamdan, 49, wearing a keffiyeh and large sunglasses and sporting a retro ’70s look — his trademark outfit — reflected on his journey and his new life in France, where he currently lives with his family on a residency permit that must be renewed every year. “When I first arrived, I was hosted by DJ Ines, a Tunisian DJ,” he said, speaking from the courtyard of a small studio in Montreuil. In this suburb, long home to working-class families, artists and immigrant communities, he found space to continue working and helping young talent emerge.
His new venture is with Azadi, a young Tunisian singer with whom he shares the studio and for whom he is producing a debut album set to be released in September. “We connected very spontaneously,” recalled the 24-year-old, sitting in the dark studio in front of a computer and some keyboards. “Because we shared that quiet bond forged in exile, and it’s rare to meet someone who understands all those really complex feelings and can talk about it openly, showing that vulnerable sensitivity.” Like many Tunisians, she settled in Paris to study, seeing no viable future in her home country, which is plagued by multiple crises and the return of authoritarianism.
A journalism and sociology student, Azadi met Hamdan while interviewing him for research on the Arab alternative scene. She was amazed to meet him in Paris, after having been immersed in his music during her childhood in the coastal Tunisian city of Sousse. “I’ve been a fan for a long time,” she said. She identified more with Hamdan’s futurist indie style and evocative lyrics, which often revolve around the power of love, than with the Tunisian scene that blossomed after the revolution in 2011, where “the expression of resistance took mostly the form of a powerful rap with very directly political lyrics.”
Azadi evokes the sensuality of Yasmine Hamdan while forging her own musical blend: experimenting with mezoued, a popular traditional Tunisian genre based on local bagpipes that often speaks about the daily lives of the working class, alongside indie rock and blues.
By collaborating with her, Hamdan continues along the same path he always has: mentoring emerging young artists who combine innovation with Arab musical traditions. In Lebanon, these were mostly artists from Levantine countries or Egypt, but in Paris, Hamdan has connected with the sizable North African diaspora. “I feel a deep affinity with artists from Tunisia, Turkey or Jordan. We share the same moral, progressive universal values. Europe — and France — used to stand for those values. Not anymore,” he said.
Hamdan has sought to use music as a space for communion — to build up a community of like-minded artists and speak out against injustice. In December 2024, he helped organize a fundraising party for Lebanon and Gaza. The concert venue, the Alhambra theater, was packed that night, mostly with Lebanese and other Arabs who had come to support and listen.
On stage, Hamdan played alongside other Lebanese artists and Tunisian singer Emel Mathlouthi, who became an icon thanks to her songs calling for freedom during the Tunisian revolution. She and others spoke out against the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon and Gaza, leaving the crowd visibly emotional. For Hamdan, this community offers solace in a world plagued by racism and a country where Gaza is a divisive topic. “This past year, I have been withdrawing into my community of artists, musicians, thinkers,” he said. “What you hear on TV or the radio here is often absurd. So social media is crucial to follow what’s really happening — whether it’s in Gaza or Lebanon.”
Some French TV channels owned by far-right billionaires have sought to stoke fears of Arabs and Muslims, often equating them with Hamas and terrorism while seeking to pit minorities against each other. Since Oct. 7, 2023, French authorities have tried to curb public expressions of support for the Palestinian cause, including by banning some demonstrations, conferences and film screenings. Ordinary citizens, activists and even leftist politicians like Rima Hassan, a French-Palestinian member of the European Parliament, have also been questioned by the judicial police for “advocacy of terrorism” over statements related to the war between Israel and Hamas. In an op-ed, prominent figures like French Nobel Prize-winning writer Annie Ernaux and the American activist Angela Davis accused France of engaging in the “criminalization of solidarity with Gaza.”
For Azadi, too, going out to concerts or parties led by Arab collectives feels like a safe space. “Because outside this community in Paris, you feel a bit like an alien. The world seems upside down. Defending the right for Palestinians to have a state — a colonized people for so many years — feels completely logical to me, especially after all the horrors of the war. But when you speak out here, you’re seen as radical. I was even accused of being an Islamist on social media.”
It’s a feeling that Tunisian Haroun Ben Hmida shares. An engineer by trade, he moonlights as a DJ and is a pioneer of the Arab underground scene in Paris. In 2018, he launched an online music radio station, Radio Flouka, as a platform and event promoter for DJs and musicians from the MENA region.
“One of the reasons I created this radio was because I met so many people here in Paris from other Arab countries, people I would’ve never met if I had stayed in Tunisia,” recalled the 35-year-old, who also grew up in Sousse before moving to the French capital for his studies. Like many others, he stayed, drawn not just by better job opportunities but also by the city’s rich multicultural fabric.
Inspired by the Tunisian music radio shows Ben Hmida used to listen to as a teenager, Radio Flouka took off during the pandemic. It soon became part of a network of MENA-based underground stations, including Palestinian Radio Alhara, Micro.radio in Jordan, and Radiokarantina in Lebanon — all set up during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We created a real community. Listeners who tuned into Alhara also tuned in to us,” he said. “DJs played across our stations.”
During the lockdown, the internet and social media helped connect diasporas and cities across the Arab world — and opened spaces for ideas to circulate. Even without overtly political content, Radio Flouka offers an alternative to dominant narratives. “We don’t broadcast debates or podcasts, but the ideas still circulate. We share each other’s content on social media.”
The radio residents play diverse genres, from underground hard techno to all subgenres of electronic music, with some of the DJs mixing percussive North African or Middle Eastern traditional sounds and rap. This diversity encompasses all the rage, despair and joy that the young generations from the region are experiencing. The ideas they promulgate challenge stereotypes about Arab communities that are deeply entrenched in French media and politics, in a society where Islam’s place has become an obsession of the far right and the traditional right alike, and whose politicians have often accused Muslims of fostering antisemitism since Oct. 7.
The parties these artists throw across the city have become sanctuaries where themes like anti-racism, queer liberation, feminism and inclusivity are celebrated. Paris has long been a hub for such struggles — from the fight for same-sex marriage and the recent enshrinement of abortion rights in the constitution, to ongoing protests against racism. As a result, diaspora communities can continue in the French capital the battles they began in their home countries during times of revolution — as in Tunisia, where many nongovernmental organizations advocating for queer rights were established after 2011.
That’s the case at Kalam Aflam events. This collective was founded in May 2023 by young Egyptian filmmaker Hayat Aljowaily, who grew up between Egypt, the United States and Switzerland and studied in New York and Paris. “At our events, I sometimes tear up when someone shouts ‘Free Palestine’ between two sets — something you can’t say in your office or day-to-day life in Paris,” said Aljowaily, who switches seamlessly between French, English and Arabic.
Aljowaily recently decided to move back to Cairo but still makes frequent trips to Paris. “I never imagined I’d move back to Egypt. But Gaza was a turning point for me,” she said, speaking from her home in Cairo. She found the anti-Palestinian rhetoric in France increasingly intolerable.
In Paris, Kalam Aflam events spotlight musicians and artists from the diaspora and the region at multidisciplinary parties, often with screenings of movies by young talents as well as concerts, workshops and art exhibitions. Among those who have performed at Kalam Aflam events are the Egyptian Shobra El General, a figure of “mahraganat” — electro mixed with rap and the working-class genre called “chaabi” (also transliterated as “shaabi”) — and French-Moroccan pop singer Rita L’Oujdia, whose lyrics mixing French, Moroccan Arabic, Spanish and English often evoke feminism and nostalgia for her childhood in Morocco. “Organizing events in Paris as an Arab isn’t like doing the same in Cairo as an Egyptian,” Aljowaily said. “In Paris, we’re a minority. We’re offering something new, something people come to because they don’t have another space.”
But that sense of belonging to a minority when she moved to Paris has also shaped her work in Cairo. “Now … we highlight communities who are also marginalized in Egypt, like Gazan refugees or the large Yemeni community, which is often invisible.”
So Kalam Aflam became more committed. “I’m a strong believer that all art is political and our presence is political, especially in France, obviously, like taking up space is already a political act. And so veering toward more or less political topics has been a result of circumstances,” she said.
Last year, while planning an event focused on love, “the war in Gaza became a genocide, and so we shifted it to ‘Love is Revolutionary,’ exploring the power of love when it comes to revolution and specifically to Palestinian liberation.” Palestinian short films such as “Condom Lead” — a story about the yearning for intimacy between a married couple amid the sounds of war, directed by the renowned brothers Arab and Tarzan Nasser — were screened. The event also included a writing workshop and a reading session with Palestinian activists and artists.
For others, their involvement is less direct. For Ben Hmida from Radio Flouka, it’s about allowing Arab artists to be as free as Europeans to play the kind of music that they want to play, “because people in France sometimes expect us to play a very specific kind of music, sometimes a bit cliched like Acid Arab,” a famous French white duo that mixes electro with oriental sounds. He wanted to fight these identity injunctions. “The DJs-in-residence at Radio Flouka are almost all linked to the region, but they all play very different styles, not necessarily Arabic electro,” he explains. Ben Hmida primarily plays jungle or bass, subgenres of electronic dance music, under the stage name D3MOR.
It’s a vision shared by other collectives that he sometimes collaborates with — like when he was invited to mix at a party thrown by Syrian collective Al Beyt to celebrate the fall of Bashar al-Assad in one of the trendiest underground venues in Paris, La Station, or at the Mahalla collective, founded by Aura Anahita, a 33-year-old French curator and concert producer of Iranian and Polish descent.
Inspired by Radio Flouka during COVID-19, after returning from two years in Cairo where she worked as a cultural attache at the French Institute, Anahita wanted to create bridges between Arab capitals and multiple diasporas in France. She launched a platform to showcase artists from the entire MENA region. The concept of grouping cultural heritage from the region is much more popular in the U.S. and the rest of the Anglophone world but not so much in France, even though Paris and its suburbs also host important immigrant populations hailing from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Iran.
On March 22, Anahita was preparing a party to celebrate Nowruz, the Persian New Year, at FGO-Barbara, a venue in the heart of the Arab district of Paris, Barbes — one of the last working-class neighborhoods that hasn’t been fully gentrified. Their party illustrates this ambition to break boundaries and barriers: The venue was packed, and the crowd was as diverse as the performances, from the Azeri duo Seddy & Dogan, to the gentle folk of Indonesian band Ali and a vibrant set by DJs Netam and Eliyo mixing Kurdish, Persian, Arabic and Turkish sounds. All of it was streamed live on Radio Alhara, broadcasting from Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, where Mahalla has a residency. “I think what has changed now is that spaces like ours are also seeking to go beyond their own community. In our case, we drew a lot of inspiration from what was happening in England,” Anahita said. “While in France, it is very frowned upon to use the term ‘community.’”
Mahalla tries as much as possible to throw parties including artists born in Europe with immigrant backgrounds and those who have recently moved to Paris. But they also invite artists still based in MENA countries, which has become more difficult as France increasingly restricts visas for citizens coming from those countries. “The issue of visas and crossing borders constantly comes up, so we really act as intermediaries because we also know that if structures like ours didn’t exist, these artists would have no chance of being booked or programmed at venues in Europe, since they first have to get through the immigration border,” she explained.
For Ben Hmida, Radio Flouka is also a way to create opportunities for newcomers in the capital who don’t have the network and contacts to perform at major stations like Rinse FM.
“Before, in France, and especially for the children of immigrants, there was a tendency to hide one’s identity a bit. But I think today, people have truly reclaimed their identity and have started uniting together, seeing each other, working on projects together. … I think it’s somewhat similar to what you see in LGBT communities. It’s not really about being ‘communitarian,’ in an insular sense, but more about being proud together,” Ben Hmida said.
They all feel like they share progressive values that have become marginalized everywhere. Ben Hmida drew a parallel between repression in France and Tunisia. “France is no paradise, given the rise of Islamophobia, but in Tunisia, it’s the same. The revolution was confiscated, and President Kais Saied has unleashed a racist oppression against sub-Saharan migrants,” with the financial help of the European Union.
Because the revolutionary momentum was largely met by repression, “a dispossession of sovereignty” followed, said another Mahalla collective member, Samy Jaber, who is French with Lebanese and Algerian roots. “And that loss inevitably generated a need for spaces for gathering and expression, because political expression was no longer possible. And I believe we are clearly part of that movement.”
Music itself is indeed the only place where Azadi feels like she can fully express her identity. She showed me her tracks and a music video that she shot with Hamdan at Kissproof, a Lebanese-owned bar in Paris that existed in Beirut and was one of the emblems of the city’s nightlife destroyed by the port explosion.
Dancing sensually to a cover of PJ Harvey in Tunisian dialect, she assumes a very assertive musical persona. Her decision to focus on music a year ago came from the feeling that journalism “couldn’t contain the rawness of my expression” in this more violent world. Art is also a coping mechanism against social pressures. As Hamdan puts it, “producing music as we do is truly a form of resistance in this world: Because the more diverse we are, the better it is.”
Caught between not being fully understood by the French, for whom she remains a foreigner, or by her family back home, for whom she has become too French, Azadi sees music as a space where she can affirm her plurality.
“I am blending my French cultural heritage — that is still present through the language in Tunisia, such as Baudelaire, Gainsbourg — with the power of lyrics inspired by the intimacy and social commentary of mezoued and my rock influences.” The feeling of not fitting into a single box is common to the artists within her microcosm.
“The art we create is very different and deeply personal, yet it shares this common desire to ease the weight of this feeling — a feeling we ourselves are still trying to understand. So even in our exchanges, we’re really just sharing our confusion: We’re living through an experience that’s both utterly fascinating and very painful.”
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