Twenty-nine years ago, when Nai Barghouti was born and her parents named her after the nay, the famous Middle Eastern flute, neither of them could know that their daughter would one day become one of the most distinguished voices in modern classical Arabic music in the world – and an excellent nay player too.
The Palestinian singer, composer and musician, who doesn’t often give interviews, is about to embark on her biggest UK tour yet, kicking off on Saturday 8 February 2025 in Glasgow. And she’s excited.
“I love performing in the UK and I think there’s so many different audiences that we always attract,” she tells The New Arab.
“I’m just really excited about our new programme and setlist. It will include things we have been doing for the past couple of years, but we also have some new things that we are trying out. Also, joining the orchestras in Glasgow and London is going to be such a beautiful experience.”
Born in Jerusalem, Nai lived in Ramallah until the age of 17. She has two music degrees from America and the Netherlands, but her beginnings in music go back to her childhood in Palestine.
Nai started singing at the age of four and attributes her love for music and varied taste in different genres to her parents and violin-playing sister Janna.
“I always saw my sister playing the violin and I saw how much that meant to her,” Nai says.
“I also wanted to have that kind of connection with an instrument or with music in general. So, I went to the National Conservatory of Music in Ramallah and decided to play the flute. I have no idea why at the time; I was six years old,” she continues.
“In parallel to that, I always loved singing. My mother used to sing in a choir and was my first singing teacher. I would go with her and listen to all the classical Arabic music they were learning in the choir lessons and I would be eager to sing with them.”
“I want to develop my own musical style, my own musical identity and my own musical journey. We have to keep adding to our heritage to develop it and continue”
It is uncanny that one of Nai’s most recent songs, Li Fairuz, is an ode to the iconic 90-year-old Lebanese superstar.
Singing the track on the music platform A Colors Show in October last year, Nai dedicated the performance to the “resilient people” (of Gaza) and to “the iconic Fairuz, with a twist on her beloved song Li Beirut.”
The music in many of Nai’s other songs, which she has composed herself, has striking similarities to that of Fairuz’s. Nai divulges that she discovered Fairuz as a teenager and fell in love with everything that she, her ex-husband songwriter Assi Rahbani and his brother Mansour, the famous Lebanese composer, did.
I asked Nai, could she be the Fairuz of our generation?
“Wow. It’s a huge compliment of course,” she responds. “Fairuz is almost a dream-like figure. Her voice really changed the history of Arabic music and how we sing in Arabic. So, for me, of course, that’s a huge honour, but I think that nobody can be Fairuz and nobody can be Umm Kulthum, and nobody can be anybody.”
Nai continues, “Why would people listen to me if they can listen to Fairuz — she does herself better! I love singing Fairuz and I think I always will, but I also want to develop my own musical style which creates my own musical identity and my own musical journey. We have to keep adding to our heritage to develop it and to continue.”
Of Nai’s many musical talents is a little something she calls Nai-Strumentation, a term she came up with in her Master’s thesis while studying at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam.
Put simply, Nai uses her voice as a musical instrument through a layered technique. It’s a musical technique similar to 1920s scat singing in American jazz and South Asian konnakol.
In Mandira Hijaz, a Turkish folk tune, Nai uses this technique, with two orchestras performing in the background. There is no way anyone can listen to Mandira Hijaz without being left with goosebumps.
“It actually came out by coincidence,” Nai shares about the song recorded with the Metropole Orkest.
“I was just having fun in a video that I recorded, and I posted it on social media. It then it became viral. I had millions of streams, even though I almost did not even upload it. It got a lot of attention and made me think okay, well, maybe I should look into this and see what this really is and where it’s inspired from,” she explains.
“I really wanted to develop a technique that would help me use my voice as an instrument in a very ornamental approach, using different music elements from the different genres that I really love. And it makes Arabic music seamlessly connect with other genres of music vocally speaking.”
Nai is also able to sing in a range of different Arabic dialects, including Egyptian, Lebanese and classical Arabic.
But it’s her own dialect – Palestinian – that she’s really interested in singing in. Nai shares that there aren’t actually that many famous Palestinian singers or musicians that the world is aware of, and not because they lack in number, but because during the 1948 Nakba, the Israeli occupation ransacked the Palestinian Folklore Archive, destroying an integral part of Palestinian cultural heritage.
“We only have a few people who really know a lot about that [musical] heritage. It’s so deep and full and rich and I’m really into it at the moment,” she adds.
There was one unexpected way in which Nai helped Palestinian folklore music make a comeback and that is in the lyrics of a traditional Palestinian wedding chant she sang on her song Ghandara Medley, which Grammy Award-winning American DJ Skrillex remixed into his 2023 dubstep track XENA.
“There’s always this hope and this strength that no matter how paralysed we get and how sad we get, we always move on. Palestinians never give up”
In Badri ‘Alay’na, released last year, we hear Nai sing once more in the Palestinian dialect. But the tone of this song is very different.
When the genocide in Gaza began in October 2023, Nai says, like many Palestinians, she felt completely paralysed. She had no idea if she could make more music and if she could, what it would be. Then came the idea for Badri ‘Alayna’.
“It was written and composed by my friend Jalal Nader from Palestine. He had just become a father a year prior, so he had a newborn. He was getting extra emotional as a new father and as a Palestinian father seeing all these images of children in Gaza suffering,” Nai says.
“That inspired him to write the song but from the perspective of a Palestinian girl who was martyred. I still cry every time I sing it and when we sing it on stage, I also see people crying — it’s just this collective trauma, this collective grief. That’s what we’re going through,” Nai adds.
“But there’s always this hope and this strength that no matter how paralysed we get and how sad we get, we always move on. Palestinians never give up.
“No matter what I do, even if I’m singing a love song, Palestine is always in the roots of anything I do and that’s just the way it is.”
To purchase tickets to Nai Barghouti’s 2025 UK tour, visit the MARSM website
Yousra Samir Imran is a British Egyptian writer and author based in Yorkshire. She is the author of Hijab and Red Lipstick, published by Hashtag Press
Follow her on X: @UNDERYOURABAYA
