Voices from the Brink: The Afro-Arab Sound of Al Multaqa

I’d known my friend AlBara Hussein (Biro for short) was working with an orchestra for a while. He’d mentioned it in passing a few times, always vaguely, like it was another one of his million projects. Then one random afternoon, he texted: “Come by.” I didn’t ask questions. I just went. 

When I stepped through the red archway at AlMultaqa’s new space in Dubai’s Goshi Warehouse City, I felt it immediately, a pulse that’s both ancient and new. The terracotta walls seemed to hum, like something reborn rather than built. It didn’t feel like a cultural centre; it felt like a portal. 

Inside, Biro was moving between cables, musicians, and instruments, the quiet force keeping everything in motion. As the Events and Digital Manager at Tribe Group and AlMultaqa, he’s the underdog holding this machine of dreams together. “In this team, we do a bit of everything,” he says. “We’re all storytellers. From the orchestra to the crew to the barista, everyone and everything carries a story.”

Founded by the DAL Group and led creatively by Chief Creative Officer Khalda Ibrahim, the initiative is part cultural laboratory, part sanctuary. The space is also home to the largest and only Afro-Arab Harmonic Orchestra, led by renowned Iraqi composer Ahmad Shamma. The result is nothing short of a sonic revolution, thirty musicians weaving Sudanese pentatonic scales with African rhythms and Arab melodies.

Meeting the team and the orchestra that day gave me a rush of inspiration that was grounding and deeply human. At a time I felt I had forgotten, it reminded me of why I fell in love with creative work in the first place. 

Khalda’s creativity thrives across mediums, leaving those around her in quiet awe. She imagines it all — the space, the wardrobe, the hair, the lights, the team. Biro grins when he talks about her. “Every year I learn something new about Khalda,” he says. “It’s hard to ask her what she does because she does everything. Sometimes she’ll call me in the morning and say, ‘I had a dream, here’s how I want this show to go.’ And somehow we make it happen.”

One of those dreams became “On the Brink!” a performance that fused Arabian, African, and Sudanese sounds into one body of work. “Before our last show,” Khalda recalls, “I dreamt I was in a jungle filled with sound and color. There was a huge red peacock and dancers around me. When I woke up, I told the team this is our theme. They said, ‘But how? We can’t have a peacock onstage.’ So we researched everything, how it looks, how it sounds, and we made it happen.”

Her process is pure instinct, part dreamwork, part manifestation. “Ninety-nine percent of my ideas come from dreams,” she says. “I think we’re so connected to the universe — to parallel lives. What I dream feels real, as if I go there, live it, and come back. And when I return, I create from that other dimension.”

The orchestra’s sound is a genreless language, weaving together the oud, kora, tanbour, and adungu, instruments that span the African continent. Rooted in a five-note pentatonic scale drawn from Nubian and Nilotic traditions, Sudanese melodies are fluid, improvisational, and deeply spiritual — echoing centuries of storytelling and resilience.

On 15 April 2023, the orchestra was standing on the largest open-air stage ever built in Sudan. “We began humbly with just twenty-five musicians and grew through heartfelt performances in Egypt and later in Dubai,” Khalda says. “By that final performance, our orchestra had reached a historic milestone: one hundred musicians sharing the same stage. The youngest was eight years old, the eldest seventy-eight.”

They didn’t know that eight hours later, Sudan would be engulfed in war. “It was not just a concert,” Khalda says. “It was an act of devotion.”

Since that night, atrocities have multiplied, plunging the country into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Over 13 million people have been displaced inside Sudan, with millions more fleeing as refugees. In Darfur, reports of ethnic cleansing, mass displacement, and targeted attacks have become tragically routine.

“When the Sudanese musicians take a break,” Biro says, “they start playing their own melodies. Sudan is always with them. You can hear it even when they’re silent.”

Biro remembers seeing one of the orchestra’s first shows in Sharjah and feeling immediately pulled in. “Sudanese people have this loyalty to their culture,” he says. “They’ve been through so much, yet they never stop creating, never stop sharing. It’s something the rest of us should learn from — to stay loyal to what’s ours.”

That loyalty lives in every corner of AlMultaqa — in the revival of ancient instruments; in their reinterpretation of traditional dances; and in their decision to build the space by hand.

“We all rolled up our sleeves,” says Noha Ibrahim from Tribe Group’s spatial team. “For months, we painted, primed, and built. It was messy, chaotic, but full of so much love.” The space breathes with the colors of the earth — terracotta, ochre, clay. Orange acoustic circles float above as both sound buffers and design statements, while crocodile motifs guard the walls. Every texture pays homage to old Nubian homes.

While Sudan represents the bridge and the meeting point within the orchestra and the space, another strong influence comes from Mali. “The music in Mali is one of the oldest and carries the DNA of Africa’s sound. Blues, Jazz, and much of the world’s music were born from its roots,” explains Khalda. 

This spirit resonates not only through the instruments but through Moussa and Oussa, whom I instantly gravitated towards the first time I saw the orchestra in rehearsal. 

Moussa, with his kora, plays as if he’s somewhere in between humanity and spirit. He’s light in his body, and each of the 21 strings flows between his hands with such delicate ease. 

Beside him stands Oussa, a radiant musician from Mali whose presence says more than words ever could. “She plays the balafon, sings and chants like she’s channeling the freedom of ancient griots,” says Khalda. According to the team, sometimes Oussa turns knives, spoons, or even cups into instruments.

The orchestra was born out of incredible spirit and a series of remarkable, almost fateful encounters. Khalda tells me about the day she discovered one of the orchestra’s trumpet players under a bridge in Business Bay. 

“We were stuck in traffic when my sister said she heard a trumpet. I thought she was imagining things because you don’t just stumble on street musicians in Dubai, especially not when it’s 50 degrees out. But sure enough, there he was. A young African man playing under a bridge. I asked who he was, and he said, ‘I’m a musician.’ I told him I’m Sudanese, and he started playing the Sudanese anthem right there.”

They even stopped traffic. “The police were coming, people were honking, but I couldn’t just leave,” she laughs. “We took a U-turn, found him again, and brought him to AlMultaqa. Three days later, he was performing with our orchestra.” That’s how things happen here, through instinct, faith, and a refusal to wait for permission.

Watching the orchestra play, I see a unique rhythm that moves through their bodies, one that belongs only to those who have lived between creation and survival. The youngest member, Omnia, just eleven years old, tells me simply: “This is all I’ve ever known, music.”

AlMultaqa’s Africa Music Program provides young musicians like Omnia from conflict-affected regions a two-year residency where they can join the orchestra and rebuild through art. The 2024 cohort is entirely Sudanese and is currently in the UAE, where audiences can see them perform live. 

“Everything we do,” Biro says, “is about presence. We want people to know we’re here, that Afro-Arab culture is alive, changing, and proud. AlMultaqa stands to remind us that music is not taught, but inherited, lived, and passed on. I hope this space not only adds to the diversity of culture around us but reminds people of what we lose when the world is silent and war persists.”

At AlMultaqa, heritage is not nostalgia. Every sound, every dance, every shade of red declares the same truth: we are still here, and we’re not done speaking.