Saint Levant and what qualifies as ‘good’ Arabic musichttps://en.majalla.com/node/333010/culture-social-affairs/saint-levant-and-what-qualifies-good-arabic-musicCulture & Social Affairs
Saint Levant and what qualifies as ‘good’ Arabic music
The Palestinian singer-songwriter’s turn to folk music exposes the class, status, and cultural prejudices that shape what we choose to listen to
FETHI BELAID / AFP
Palestinian singer Saint Levant during the Carthage International Festival at the Roman Theatre of Carthage, Tunisia, 5 August, 2025.
Tareq Habjouqa
last update on
11 Sep 2026
In most Levantine cities, a version of ‘high society’ occupies the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum: wealthy, westernised, English-speaking and often French-speaking, with enough familiarity with the West to treat it as a shared reference point rather than a foreign import.
The musical taste of this ‘westernised’ group follows the same logic: glossy, English-language pop; R&B and hip-hop with global production values; Arabic pop only when smoothed into something radio-friendly and cosmopolitan. In other words, Arabic à la Western. Closer to polished mainstream than to anything you might hear at a village wedding. This is not a matter of nationality, race, or even wealth alone—it is a distinct pop culture, liberal in its social habits, shaped by international education and Western media alike, and quietly confident in the superiority of its musical taste.
The Palestinian singer-songwriter Saint Levant’s early music fits this pop culture almost perfectly. Multilingual, melodic, and effortlessly code-switching between English, French, and Arabic, it sounded like it belonged on the same playlists as the Western and Westernised Arabic pop this audience already loved. Saint Levant did not ask this crowd to accept something new or alien; instead, he spoke in a language—literally and musically—they already spoke fluently, doing so with more charm and craft than most.
On the other side of the city sits a different group, more conservative in its social norms, more attached to tradition, and largely untouched by the nightlife and cosmopolitan fluency of the first group described above. Its music is folk at heart—dabke rhythms, wedding songs, the exuberant, unpolished, deeply local sound of mahrajanat (festivals) and shaabi (street or pop) and their derivatives. By most measures, it is wildly popular, but strictly confined to this second group, and rarely popular with the westernised group.
Same city, two mutually exclusive pop cultures. It is a divide the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would have recognised immediately: in his classic account of taste and distinction, what a class calls ‘good taste’ is rarely just an aesthetic preference—it is one of the main tools a class uses to mark and defend its own boundaries, dressing up class judgment as artistic judgment.
Intruiging turn
Which is what makes Saint Levant’s more recent turn so intriguing. In the last couple of years, his sound pivoted hard toward the very folk and traditional forms his original audience had never taken to enthusiastically—shaabi rhythms, mahrajanat energy, the vocal textures of tarab (an Arabic word that has no English equivalent, but translates loosely to “musical ecstasy” or “enchantment,” describing a profound emotional state where a listener becomes completely absorbed and moved by music or poetry), the whole sonic vocabulary of wedding music the crowd would once have found faintly embarrassing. Surprisingly, his audience did not just tolerate the shift; they embraced it, enthusiastically, publicly, at volume.
A recent concert in Amman, Jordan, made the point almost too neatly: Saint Levant performed to a not-so-thrifty crowd (six tickets cost more than the minimum monthly wage), filling a vacant lot with exactly the first group described, the stage dressed like a folk wedding—clichéd flower arrangements, deliberately cheesy staging, and an aesthetic this crowd would once have found comic.
The audience sang along and danced passionately to his folk songs. Later that same night, the artist turned up at a nightclub known for a strict, socially selective door policy—the kind of place that would not, on an ordinary night, let in the very folk-music scene it was now celebrating. He brought with him a guest performer from that world, and the crowd sang along to an artist they otherwise would not have been caught listening to at any other time or place.
Saint Levant is not the only artist whose folk-infused music is gaining popularity with the ‘westernised’ group. The Egyptian singer and rapper Tul8te is on a similar trajectory: unapologetically folk-inflected, festival-and-wedding-coded pop that, if it came from an unknown act, would likely have been dismissed as unsophisticated. Instead, Tul8te has found real affection from that audience. In June, the two artists released a song together, Nano, which is telling in itself: music once dismissed or ridiculed by the ‘westernised’ group has become something they actively embrace.
That begs a few questions: Why did the ‘westernised’ group suddenly open its door to this genre? Is it open to any and all folk singers? Will we start seeing international-school prom parties playing songs by Shaaban Abdel Rahim and Hamo Bika?
‘Passport effect’
The simplest explanation is what might be called the ‘passport effect’. This resembles what the sociologist Michèle Lamont calls symbolic boundary work: the way social groups draw and defend the cultural lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Saint Levant’s early work established him, in the eyes of his original audience, as fluent in their language and therefore fundamentally ‘one of them’. Once that trust exists, a later move into unfamiliar territory tends to be read as an artistic choice rather than an identity change.
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Saint Levant’s aura plausibly extends goodwill and a kind of license to break a taste norm that a less charismatic performer might not receive
There is also a broader shift in what counts as sophisticated taste—one the sociologist Richard Peterson described as a move ‘from snob to omnivore’. For a long time, refined taste in groups like this ‘westernised’ one meant narrowing what you would admit to liking. More recently, the marker of comfortable status has flipped: being able to move easily between the polished and the raw, the imported and the local, has become its own kind of flex.
Framing matters too. What anthropologists sometimes call ‘folklorisation’ describes this shift precisely: a group’s folk culture is revalued as ‘heritage’ or ‘roots’ once the people doing the revaluing are distant enough from it that it no longer threatens their status. That revaluing is more often than not led by educated, diaspora, or otherwise privileged members of the same broader community, because they have enough cultural capital to make the reframing land.
Sung by Saint Levant, dabke-adjacent or folk material can be received as heritage, resistance, and roots—something noble and dignified to embrace. Sung by someone from the community it actually belongs to, with no such narrative built around it, it is just wedding music sung by riffraff, by the first group’s standards. Same notes, different frame; because the frame is supplied by whoever is allowed to supply it.
Tul8te’s anonymity adds another dimension. By performing behind a mask and stage name, he withholds some of the personal cues an audience might otherwise use to categorise him before hearing the music, leaving the sound itself—and the cultural associations built around it—to do more of the work.
And then there is the halo effect. Saint Levant’s aura plausibly extends goodwill and a kind of license to break a taste norm that a less charismatic performer might not receive. Psychologists use the term to describe our tendency to let one positive impression of a person shape our judgement of everything else about them. In Saint Levant’s case, charisma, image, and celebrity may help explain why the reception has felt less like tolerance and more like adoration.
It cannot be the whole explanation: Tul8te has achieved a similar reception without showing his face. But as an amplifier, it is hard to discount.
Heritage, authenticity, and the purity test
Why Saint Levant made the shift is its own question and probably has more than one honest answer. There is the plausible identity dimension: having grown up across several cultures and languages, he may have felt obliged to prove rootedness rather than simply claim it. A deliberate turn toward traditional sounds is an obvious answer. From a career strategy standpoint, however, sounding like everyone else is unlikely to be enough, while a distinct, heritage-forward sound is a genuine competitive advantage. Sincerity and strategy rarely separate as cleanly as we would like.
And then there is the political dimension: a Palestinian artist promoting Palestinian heritage, at a time when asserting that heritage is becoming a pressing necessity, is not unexpected. None of these explanations cancels the other out, and there is no reason to assume that the least generous explanation is not the correct one. The political dimension, however, is the one stirring controversy.
In early August, the Palestinian rapper Shabjdeed, whose lyrics capture the reality of life under occupation in the West Bank, released a diss track aimed squarely at Saint Levant. Timed to a scheduling clash between the two artists’ concerts in Amman, the track questioned whether Saint Levant’s internationally polished catalogue, his fashion partnerships, and his collaborations far outside the Palestinian cause square with the political role he is expected to play as one of the world’s most visible Palestinian artists. In effect, it accused him of treating Palestinian identity as an aesthetic rather than a commitment—or worse, of using it for personal gain.
It is a serious accusation, and not an unreasonable one. Yet it risks introducing a purity test that demands any Palestinian artist with global reach perform a certain kind of suffering and resistance in order to be believed, while dismissing a more cosmopolitan, diaspora-shaped relationship to that identity.
But the dispute is worth considering as the immediate backdrop to Saint Levant’s shift towards folk music because it raises a broader question: is there only one legitimate way to represent heritage? And who gets to decide whether an artist’s embrace of that heritage is genuine, rather than opportunistic or aesthetic?
Is there only one legitimate way to represent heritage? And who gets to decide whether an artist’s embrace of that heritage is genuine or opportunistic?
Whatever the mix of motives, and irrespective of the sociology of who is applauding it, bringing an overlooked, unfashionable, and deeply local musical tradition to an audience that had spent years dismissing it is a real achievement. More ‘westernised’ people now listen to shaabi and mahraganat music with real enthusiasm than they did five years ago, and that cannot be overlooked.
An uncomfortable truth
One uncomfortable truth remains: a concert staged in the aesthetic of a folk wedding, yet priced well beyond what most people from that world can afford, is a strange kind of tribute—closer to visiting a culture than joining it. It is a modern example of what writer Tom Wolfe called ‘radical chic’: how the comfortable elite can turn proximity to a cause, culture, or class they do not belong to into a kind of fashion statement, performed as much for each other as for anyone else.
A crowd singing along to ‘the people’s music’ at a concert that ‘the people’ cannot afford has not necessarily changed its mind about that music; it may simply have found a curated, safely bounded way to enjoy it and perform it for each other.
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