Wasla

A word for a join, used as a name

Wasla is an Arabic word for a connection or a link, and the festival that took it was built around an absence. When the first edition ran in Dubai in November 2016, independent Arabic music had almost no footing on the region's mainstream live circuit, which ran on Western pop tours and established Arab pop stars playing hotel ballrooms and arenas.

That opening bill set the pattern for everything after it: Mashrou' Leila from Beirut, the Algerian singer-songwriter Souad Massi, and the Jordanian rock band Jadal. All three carried large followings across the Arab world and almost no presence on the calendar of the city they were playing in. The festival's pitch from the start was that the audience already existed and the stages did not.

The Dubai editions

The second edition landed on 2 February 2018 at Dubai Design District, with doors at 2pm and tickets at Dh245. Seven acts played: the Egyptian rock band Cairokee, Jordan's Autostrad, the Egyptian project Lekhfa, Hayajan with Alaa Wardi, the Lebanese singer Tania Saleh, the French-Algerian group Gnawa Diffusion and the Emirates-based band Majaz. It was a full-day format rather than an evening one, built to be wandered through.

On 1 March 2019 the festival moved to Burj Park, in the shadow of the Burj Khalifa, and was co-produced with Live Nation. Mashrou' Leila returned for a second Wasla appearance, premiering material from a forthcoming album, and were joined by the Alexandrian rock band Massar Egbari, the Jordanian-Palestinian five-piece 47Soul, whose shamstep fuses dabke rhythms with electronics, and the Jordanian indie band Ayloul. Six UAE-based acts filled out the bill. Early-bird tickets were Dh145, rising to Dh195.

Riyadh, and the gap

The most ambitious version of Wasla was not in Dubai at all. On 4 and 5 March 2022 the festival staged its first Saudi edition at The Hidden Valley, a farm in a grass valley outside Riyadh, after what contemporary coverage called three successful runs in Dubai. Wasla Entertainment moved its headquarters from Dubai to Riyadh to do it, with backing from the Saudi General Entertainment Authority.

The scale was different in kind: 32 bands from eight countries, more than fifteen playing each day from 3pm, fourteen of them female artists, and a large contingent of Saudi acts drawn from the country's underground scene, including Al Farabi, Hajaj, Statues of Sinking Men and Fulana. Cairokee and Souad Massi headlined the Friday, Hamza Namira and Aziz Maraka the Saturday. Around the music sat a barbecue brunch, workshops, children's activities and art and fashion installations. Organisers talked then about taking the format to Jeddah, Dubai and Egypt.

What followed was quiet. Coverage of the 2026 announcement frames it squarely as a return rather than a continuation, and the festival comes back in a shape closer to a concert than to the Riyadh sprawl.

The 2026 edition: a benefit, not a bill

Wasla returns on Saturday 28 November 2026 at Jubilee Park, Expo City Dubai, organised by BRAG in partnership with UNHCR. Four acts play one stage across a single evening, and all proceeds from the edition go to UNHCR to support displaced families in the region. Tickets start at Dh350 and are sold through Platinumlist and TicketsMarche UAE. It is the only Wasla date currently on sale.

The reduction from 32 bands to four is the story of the edition. Rather than a survey of a scene, the 2026 bill is four oud- and voice-led acts whose repertoires overlap heavily in subject matter: exile, homeland, loss of place. The programme language around it is about music crossing borders, and the charitable framing is not incidental decoration but the organising principle of the night.

The headliner's own anniversary

Marcel Khalife arrives in Dubai in the middle of a year built around a fiftieth anniversary. The Lebanese oud player, singer and composer released Promesses de la Tempête — Promises of the Storm — in 1976, drawing on Arab-Andalusian musical traditions and setting the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Izzidine Al Munassrah in colloquial Arabic. The record made him a figure of genuine popular weight across the Arab world, and his work with Darwish's texts turned into a friendship that lasted until the poet's death.

On 30 October 2026 he released a re-recording of it on Balcoon Records: four of the original five pieces — Rita, Promesses de la Tempête, Oummi and Passeport — stripped back to oud and voice alone, produced with his son Bachar Mar-Khalife. He made it after Israeli bombardment in Lebanon pushed him back into exile in Paris in late 2024, and the sleeve notes frame the reissue as a statement that the texts have only hardened with time.

The touring version of that record is a solo one. Khalife opened Oslo World on 27 October 2026 at Chateau Neuf, voice and oud with nothing else on stage, doors at 8pm and music at 8.30pm; the show sold out. His Dubai billing leads with Oummi, the song about his mother that has followed him for half a century.

The rest of the bill

Le Trio Joubran are three Palestinian brothers who play three ouds, a configuration they have spent two decades developing into something closer to chamber writing than accompaniment; their piece Masâr is listed for Dubai. TootArd, a Syrian duo, work a desert-blues line that sits further from the oud tradition than anyone else on the bill and are billed with Moonlight. The Abu Dhabi-based singer Fatima, who previously recorded as FAFA and whom The National describes as Emirati-Honduran, carries the contemporary soul end of the evening.

Between them the four cover Arabic folk, oud composition, desert blues and soul in one sitting — a narrower band than Wasla's festival years, and a deliberately legible one.