Celebrating his 76th birthday on 10 June, Marcel Khalife and his audiences across the Arab world also marked the 50th anniversary of the release of his first album, Waʿūd min al-ʿĀṣifa (Promises of the Storm).
Most of the songs on that album were based on verses by the famous Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, which is why Khalife’s voice and music have become emblematic of Arab resistance. For 50 years, the Lebanese singer, composer, and oud player has remained a towering presence in Arab cultural and political life through his prolific work that fuses love, patriotism, revolution, and resistance. Khalife, who was born in Amsheet in Mount Lebanon, spoke at length of his village childhood, his family, and the influences of natural sounds and human voices around him.
Do you date the start of your career to the release of Promises of the Storm, or were there earlier works?
I wrote my first compositions and played them for my parents and grandparents in our small house in Amsheet. Armed with a pencil and eraser, I filled pages I lined with musical staves with notes expressing the sounds of my family, visitors, and the world around me. My childhood still permeates my work, reviving a lost world. Though I’m aware that reminiscence imbues distant times with a beauty that may never have existed, my longing for Amsheet has accompanied me whenever I’ve left it. In all my compositions, I revisited the happiest days of my life, which were those early years. The songs I wrote about triumph and defeat, glory and despair echoed the sounds of sailors, farmers and church choirs I’ve always carried with me.
Before my first album, I composed the music for the operetta Marra’ al-Sayf (Summer Has Passed), which was performed at the Byblos Festivals in 1971, as well as music for the oriental ballet performances of the Caracalla Dance Theatre. Alone in Amsheet, I found no better companion than Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, so I entertained myself by setting his poems to music. In August 1976, in a small Paris studio with just my oud, I recorded the songs. They had an enthusiastic reception and people began to attend my concerts wherever I performed. More works followed, including scores for Maroun Baghdadi’s films and music at the Hakawati Theatre.
You suggested that composing the music for Promises of the Storm was spontaneous, that you were just playing around in your solitude in Amsheet in the early days of Civil War. How did you picture your musical career at the time? Did your vision differ from the course it actually took after your first album made you an icon of resistance music, and your voice lent such force to resistance poetry?
If you’re asking whether I was truly a revolutionary – yes, I was. But I cannot be reduced to just that. I rebel, but I also calm down. I love, but I also hate. I might scream like a madman in my work, but I also whisper. I don’t think artists should be pigeonholed as revolutionary musicians, love-song writers, patriotic artists, composer of heroic anthems. I refuse to let others define my character and identity in advance and expect me to produce a certain type of music. I believe very deeply in freedom and hate nothing more than attempts to limit my freedom – even if they are motivated by admiration or affection.
What value does an artist have when he is what people expect him to be rather than what he wants to be? To what extent can an artist satisfy such expectations without compromising his intellectual integrity, linguistic originality, and freedom? How far should he go to satisfy the public’s desires?
I recall being a passionate, awkward youth who wanted to change the world and, in the end, did not even change himself. I remember seeing the tents and makeshift shacks on the outskirts of Beirut on my way back to the village and discovering that they belonged to refugees. That was when I began to learn about the Palestinian cause from a human perspective. In the evening, my mother would recount stories of Palestine and the painful experiences of displacement. She was the only one I believed at a time that distorted every story. Horrific images multiplied like stars in the night, then vanished, leaving me bristling with sorrow for the stolen land. As fear thundered through the winter skies, my heart broke for the people of the tents. I was enthralled by the Palestinian keffiyeh. I wore it wrapped around my neck in demonstrations during school strikes in solidarity with Palestine. In the crowd, I punched my fist into the air and shouted, “With our soul, our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Palestine!”
But no one has ever changed the world through slogans alone. I dreamed a lot. I took refuge in music; songs have rituals like worship. My oud beside me healed me and made sleep unnecessary. I would continue to work with the poem and the melody till dawn. We had no miracles; we had imagination and dreams. Palestine came to inhabit me in the form of a poem, a demonstration, a political meeting, or a song. The question was always how I could contribute to the cause more than just preaching about Palestine.
Does your artistic project intersect with those of socially and politically engaged songwriters like Sayyed Darwish, Sheikh Imam, and the Rahbani brothers?
Of course, I was deeply influenced by the Artist of the People, Sayed Darwish, and his extraordinary talent. I even visited his house in Kom Al-Dikka in Alexandria and sat in the café where he composed many of his works. Sayyed Darwish sang for ordinary people, and his songs remain alive, vibrant and sincere. I should also add Mohamed Al-Qasabji to the list. He is another creative composer close to my heart. I have always taken great pleasure in listening to his work. He was also a master oud player. Sheikh Imam and Ahmed Fouad Negm came later. I developed a close friendship with Sheikh Imam when we took part in major concerts in Beirut and Baalbek together.
As for Assi and Mansour Rahbani, they spearheaded another major transformation in songwriting after Sayyed Darwish. With the Rahbani brothers, the art shifted from setting lyrics to melody to full musical composition. The musical composition reinterpreted the poetic text while liberating vocal performance as a vehicle of expression from within the work itself. They managed to coax the music of the east out of hiding by returning it to its sources: the Byzantine and Syriac church traditions, hymns, chants, the call to prayer, and folk heritage. They drew on that reservoir and re-crafted it in a rich and elegant orchestral language. They were also committed to the causes of Lebanon and Arab nationalism, with Palestine at its heart, as well as to justice for the poor, the disadvantaged, and the dispossessed. They raised their voices against occupation and exploitation.
My relationship with Egypt and its musical artists remains strong. I continue to collaborate frequently with many Egyptian musicians, including conductor Nader Abbassi, who performed my work The Litanies of the East with the Leipzig City Choir and a philharmonic orchestra at opera houses in Austria, Doha, and Damascus. Hisham Gabr conducted my Andalusia Concerto in Macedonia and at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The exceptionally talented Egyptian cellist Hassan Moataz performed my Rababa Concerto with the Cairo Symphony Orchestra at the Cairo Opera House under the baton of Nayer Nagui.
Did you expect your popularity to go past intellectual circles to a broad, general audience across the Arab world and beyond?
I believe that music is for the many, not the few. When someone doesn’t listen to my music, I feel I walk up to them and apologise. Perhaps the fault is mine. Perhaps my musical language could not reach him, so I try to find a different formula. I do not understand music that confines itself to a room, fearing contact with people. People are both the beginning and the end of music. They are my compass. A musician without an audience is a musician who has lost his way. A musician who cannot write a piece that communicates with audiences has a problem. I have absolute faith in the taste of the public. The litmus test of a work of art is when public taste either embraces or snubs it. Audience intuition resembles how birds sense the arrival of winter without knowing meteorological laws.
Why did some people – especially on the left – see your shift to instrumental composition as abandoning the cause? Is there a connection between musical innovation and an artist’s political commitments? Is there something wrong with the idea of art for art’s sake?
When I released Andalusia of Love, someone said, “Really? This is coming from you, the militant who defended Palestine, Southern Lebanon, and the resistance? You have nothing left but love to write and sing about? Shame on you! Isn’t this an invitation to decadence?” I replied without hesitation, “I cannot understand any cause unless I understand myself. How can you ask me to be free while you enslave me?”
They want us to die before we are born. Everything I’ve sung is founded on love. I stand before the entire universe and interact with it, speak to it, become angry with it, then reconcile myself to it again. I am constantly guided by a simple philosophy: to remain at peace with the universe and to overcome weakness, setbacks, tragedy, and death while holding fast to a glimmer of hope. Our wounds are deep and refuse to heal. They cry out with oppression and rebellion, almost to the point of defiance of both humanity and God. Since my first work, I have sought to unify thought and feeling in my work in a contemporary and profound way. Yet deep engagement with one’s times doesn’t necessarily mean standing in the spotlight, claiming political insight, or melding into prevailing currents.
Before leaving the subject of the left, do you agree that the left has sometimes ruined artistic talent?
As a symbol of the Arab left, how do you assess the role of the left in promoting or hindering creativity? Even though the political influence of the left has declined, its leaders still – and probably rightfully – boast that the artistic, intellectual, and literary output of the left is unmatched.
Politics has overwhelmed our lives. It has taken possession of every path we walk, saturated our homes and streets, and every nook and cranny of our existence. Everything we see is through that prism. We desperately need clarity of thought and critical awareness. These are hard times for the artist today. All kinds of forces resent and attack his past, pry into his private life, assail him with ubiquitous poverty, hunger, oppression, and even violence. If the artist does not rebel and defend his individual existence, he will become featureless. The artist has his own magic. Left to the devices of sectarians, ideologues, and politicians, everything that distinguishes him – his vision of life, his understanding of history, his creative sympathy for humanity – will be effaced. Such rebellion becomes critical when political conflicts intensify, and enmities harden. It seems we are living through just such a moment.
What led you to create a song based on Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “I Am Joseph, O Father”? Did you not worry about the religious reactions it would trigger? You were prosecuted for it because its references to the Prophet Yusuf offended religious sensibilities. Are there still any residual effects from that ordeal?
I believe, to remain centred, one must refuse to submit to theoretical programmes. Anxiety contains an element of that refusal, which lies at the heart of creativity. It is important not to evade reality. It is important to expose the truth of the human condition, reveal the twists and turns of the human conscience, and then rebel against injustice and violence in pursuit of a humanitarian goal that affirms individual dignity. Rebellion does not arise from externally imposed duties that erase individuality; it comes from within the individual and aims to preserve the values of personal dignity. The rebel insists on justice while rejecting authoritarian coercion outside the self. It is imperative that artists should turn to their inner anxiety, to confront their conscience. Art concerns itself with human beings in all their complexity – their behaviour, thoughts, feelings, motives, goals, and relationships.
Speaking of vocal colour, your performance of Darwish’s “I Am Joseph, O Father” has a beautiful, liturgical quality, while your performance of “Amur bi ismik” (I Traverse Your Name) has an unmistakable flirtatiousness to it. Did you worry about the reaction?
Composed music is like water: it carves its own course and flows; nothing can stop it. I let the musical text emerge spontaneously. I don’t weigh it down with rules and conventions. If I did, I’d lose it. I write without wavering, without dividing people into ascetics and lovers. I do not try to restrain something over which I have no control. I am neither a critic nor a researcher, nor a musicologist. I compose music; I do not police the creative act.
You introduced gifted female voices such as Oumaima Al-Khalil, the singer of your iconic song “Asfūr Ṭale’ min al-Shubbāk” (A Bird Peeped Through the Window), and she acknowledges the central role you played in her career. Some have suggested that you used her to advance your own artistic project, while others affirm your unwavering support for her recent independent work, such as the album Sawt. How do you see the role of women in your long journey – women as creative partners, as audience members engaging with your work, and as a broader social question in a world, especially an Arab World, that remains deeply conflicted about the status of women, either putting them on a pedestal or vilifying them.
I never found my way forward without a woman guiding me. From childhood, I learned to trust my grandmother, my mother, and many other women I loved “to the point of exhaustion”, as the poem puts it. How I long to hold the hem of my mother’s dress on the way to church to listen to the hymns. I would retreat to a distant corner of that small sanctuary and contemplate how a child descends from the throne of childhood. “O Lord!” I would call out, yet no answer ever came. Still, I wanted to train my voice to invoke Him. The white bird that built its nest in my grandfather’s tree cooed with its mate. In my imagination, I flew with that couple over the breeze through the space that was open to them – until I fell on the rocks below and smashed my head. I can still hear the voice of my aunt, famed for her needlework, as she tied stitches while I squirmed. I survived that day because the hand of Saint Michael saved me. Afterwards, my grandfather began to teach me something like singing. I sang to escape the isolation caused by wars, both large and small.
I used to be afraid of the dark. My mother’s stories, her graceful fingers on my forehead, and a love-filled hymn she recited over and over kept me company until I fell asleep. I grew up on my mother’s hymns. They had such a deep effect carried by her warm voice, which had a beauty that mingled with the sound of the wind coming from the sea. My mother dreamed that I would become a famous musician and that my music would be heard everywhere. But she died before the song, before the music, before my music became part of people’s memories. She left us in the prime of her youth, and my grief was immense. At first, I couldn’t believe she would never return. I refused to accept that I would never see or hear her laughter again. During her illness, she was a source of wonder and admiration because of her amazing spiritual qualities: her energy, her enlightened heart, her constant concern for everyone around her. She filled us with enthusiasm, joy, and love despite her suffering, and she kept smiling through her last breath.
Your orchestral works are performed by European orchestras. Why should we “move” the West with our music when it remains unmoved by our destruction?
As I said, art is concerned with human beings in all the complexity of their behaviour, thought, emotions, motives, goals, and relationships. Political turmoil has produced a terrifying crisis of values and a deep fragmentation of the human spirit. We must remain vigilant. Amid the flood of abstract programmes endlessly proclaimed by every faction without being implemented on the ground, the corruption of absolute power and hypocrisy have spread to a degree we cannot ignore. In my work, I have tried to re-examine methods of composition for the oud, performance techniques, and possible ways to develop coupling composition with extemporaneous performance – whether by preserving the traditional form of the instrument or by altering it in ways that could give birth to an entire family of ouds, just as other musical instruments have families.
My work is not disconnected from the musical history of the oud. Innovation has always accompanied every stage in the instrument’s evolution. Ziryab was innovative in his time, as were Muhyiddin Haydar, Mohamed Al-Qasabji, Jamil Bashir, Farid Ghosn, and many other oud masters. What is new is the ability to express oneself through new tools, which is how humanity has developed in every age. But the present development, in my view, does not come from outside the oud but from within its own history. The oud is born of the first magical improvisation. I have tried to contribute to its development and perhaps helped create a balance between two extremes: excessive traditionalism that denies historical development, and chaotic experimentation that imagines modernity can only be achieved through a rupture with the instrument’s history. I also reject sticking with a single form or a single genre. In Anthology of Studying the Oud, I brought together the threads that had been dispersed over time. A oud without borders: I tame its timbre so it can soar as my fingers crawl over its strings. How desperately we need the splendour of the oud’s voice in these desolate times.
Have you listened to music tracks generated by artificial intelligence? Are you interested in or concerned about the effects AI might have on Arab music, and music in general, whether in terms of production, how it reaches audiences, or taste?
Social media alone has come to dominate our lives. It has flooded our homes, our streets, and every corner of our existence. We desperately need clarity of thought and critical awareness. Art must remain vigilant, capable of understanding this complex human condition and probing humanity’s destiny. We must enrich the soil of creativity outside this overwhelming current. In the presence corruption, absolute power, pandemics, wars, social media, and artificial intelligence, it becomes all the more crucial to restore life to the human self. Art must hold fast to its heroic creativity. Through deep reflection and creativity, we reaffirm that art is, in essence, profoundly human.
Lastly, what new projects are you working on, and what dream do you still hope to achieve?
I have yet to write the music I dream of. I can hear it in dreams, and when I awake, it echoes in my ears in a never-ending, silent scream. Isn’t there something endlessly absurd about music? Even after all these years, I am still searching for a place in a jam-packed world and in history. The most difficult thing to achieve today is to realise oneself uniquely. When I was young, I dared to write without fully understanding everything I was saying through sound and rhythm. Even after my long journey, I still oscillate between amateur and professional. I remain both. However, I pay more attention to time than ever before. Every day that passes without work fills me with frustration. Age has taught me to measure time carefully in my quest for pure music – music freed of the burden of its history and the burden of reality. I seek the essence. I seek depth. I am searching for impossible music.
*The writer is the Arab American Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Arab History and Director of the AAEF Center of Arab Studies, University of Houston.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 June, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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