Listening to Afaq Art Production’s new single “Bejamalen (With Beauty)” performed by Ziad Kamal feels a bit like stepping out of a chaotic, sun-baked street into the sudden, vaulted vastness of an ancient sanctuary.
Kamal is only twenty-four. He manages the rather fascinating trick of balancing his daily life as a Mechatronics engineer with a profound, academic mastery of Eastern Maqams, violin, and oud. Here, performed alongside Maestro George Kolta and the Syncop Orchestra, the award-winning Cairo Opera House vocalist taps into something undeniably massive. The track pulls from the classical Sufi poetry of Sheikh Abd Al-Ghani Al-Umari Al-Hasani, tracking an intense, spiritual search for divine knowledge and offering praise to the Prophet Muhammad.
The instrumentation moves like a beautiful, heavy tide. It opens with gentle, contemplative phrasing that coaxes you forward, eventually cracking open into sweeping, cinematic crescendos. Western orchestration and traditional Arabic classical forms bleed together flawlessly. Surrounded by this sheer dramatic intensity, Kamal’s emotive vocal delivery serves as the anchoring pulse. He vibrates with reverence and longing.
In a modern age aggressively obsessed with the superficial, how exactly are we supposed to process such an unapologetic, deeply intimate declaration of absolute cosmic devotion? We let it completely wash over us.
