Interviews

Ibrahim Maalouf on Lebanon, Identity, and the Limits of Art in a Violent World

BYYassine Hariss

May 6, 2026

Approaching midday, Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf checks in from his Paris apartment, fresh off a quick stint in New York. “I had quite a bit of promo and a number of meetings,” he says, before mentioning two back-to-back releases: one alongside Jason Derulo and Kevin Gates, another commissioned by FIFA.

Splitting his time across the Atlantic between rest and work, the 45-year-old instrumentalist—born in Beirut but exiled to France as a child during the Lebanese Civil War—explained that he was recently invited to contribute to the forthcoming World Cup soundtrack, signing a track featuring Puerto Rican rapper Daddy Yankee and Jamaican singer Shenseea. Reworking one of his already existing compositions to align with the scale and cadence of football’s most prestigious gathering, Maalouf admitted that being an artist today feels somewhat tricky, especially with so much upheaval happening across the globe; starting with the growing political tensions and contested influence surrounding the United States, co-host of the tournament’s next edition.

Over the past two decades, Maalouf has become one of the most globally recognized Arab instrumentalists working today. The Beirut-born, Paris-raised musician, known for blending jazz, classical composition, Arabic maqam traditions, and contemporary pop, has built a career that rarely fits neatly within one genre, or, geography. Trained by his father Nassim Maalouf—inventor of the quarter-tone trumpet that made it possible to perform Arabic scales on a Western instrument—he went on to sell out arenas across Europe, compose for cinema, earn multiple Victoires de la Musique awards, and collaborate with artists ranging from Sting and Quincy Jones to Wynton Marsalis and now Daddy Yankee. In France, he occupies a singular cultural position: at once virtuoso, crossover figure, and one of the few Arab musicians to achieve genuine mainstream visibility without flattening the complexities of where he comes from. Which is perhaps why the contradictions of contemporary artistic life feel especially difficult for him to ignore.

It is, as he puts it, “always a delicate position,” referring to the expectation to keep performing and celebrating, set against the sense that perhaps one ought instead to “be in mourning for the tragedies unfolding.” He describes himself as divided, unsure whether to carry on or step back, while acknowledging the impossibility of total withdrawal. With conflicts spanning from Sudan and Ukraine to Lebanon and Gaza, and beyond, the disasters, he notes, are constant. To stop each time would mean, quite simply, to stop altogether. “I can’t have selective outrage,” he says, arriving at a conclusion that feels driven less by conviction than by inevitability: the only viable position is to continue, but to do so consciously, always aware of the world as it is, and intent, however modestly, on shifting it.

At a certain point he added that the outcome becomes inescapable: “you realize that, philosophically, you have no choice but to continue —just as we all do—but to do so consciously, aware of the world we’re living in, trying to raise awareness, to help where possible, to do whatever we can so that things might, even slightly, improve.” In the same breath, he admits that the burden might sit differently were his work not so exposed. It would, he suggests, be easier to navigate these contradictions if his daily life did not unfold in public, if his profession did not require him, almost by essence, to keep showing up, performing, celebrating, even as the world around him keeps crumbling.

Probing the question of responsibility a little further, he insisted that the role of the artist is not to condemn people wholesale, but to remain specific about where blame is placed. One can, he noted, “condemn politicians, condemn political decisions, condemn crimes,” but not collapse entire populations because of the actions of a few. To do so, in his view, is to reproduce the very conditions that make conflict possible in the first place: an act of othering that turns individuals into stand-ins for systems they do not necessarily always control nor have a direct hand in. He reached for a simple, yet effective, analogy: if a neighbor’s child were to throw a stone through a window, it would be absurd to hold the entire family accountable for it. The same principle, he argued, should apply at scale to nations worldwide.

Speaking about his relationship with his motherland—which is still caught in a cycle of recurring instability—Maalouf framed it as something firmly rooted rather than nostalgically reconstructed. “It’s my country of origin; I’m very, very attached to it,” he said. “I spend a great deal of time there. A large part of my family is there, as is the vast majority of my wife’s. It’s where our family roots are. I’m only second-generation, so the connection is still very strong. A significant part of my story is based there.”

Though he admitted that age, work, and the rhythm of life on the road have thinned out the frequency of his returns to a certain extent, he explains that his connection to his homeland is not contingent on presence but on origin. His life remains “intimately connected” to the country, a fact anchored as much in memory as in geography. “I was born in Beirut,” he adds, almost as a closing argument, “and that changes everything.”

What has shifted more decisively, however, is the emotional texture of that attachment. Over the past two decades—“really since the 2006 war,” when Israel struck Lebanon for 31 consecutive days, collapsing infrastructure and killing around 1,700 civilians—the relationship has been reframed by a persistent sense of unease. Since then, he described a sense of constant anxiety: an anticipation of what might come next, and when. In practice, this translates into “calling (relatives) ten times a day” to confirm that they are safe, that they have made it home though even that, he notes, no longer guarantees anything.

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And yet, paradoxically, that same instability has sharpened rather than diluted his sense of belonging. The uncertainty, the exposure, the sense of a place perpetually at risk have, in his words, “simplified” the relationship. He has, he says, always assumed that this part of who he is comes with a certain responsibility—“you have to live up to it”—while insisting, in the same breath, that he is “one hundred percent French” as well. Drawing, implicitly, on the thinking of his uncle Amin Maalouf, he situated himself comfortably within a layered, plural identity; one that allows him to be fully French, fully Arab, and fully Lebanese at once, without hierarchy. That equilibrium, however, shifts when one part of it comes under threat.

Today, as he explained, his French identity is not under existential pressure so it can be lived with a certain ease. “I’m not in a state of vital concern when it comes to my Frenchness,” he plainly said, stressing that “no country has come and wiped out Orléans, for example—no part of my French identity is under threat.” His Lebanese identity, by contrast, feels far more exposed, shaped by forces that far exceed individual agency. In a more extreme scenario, he concedes, it could even be rendered obsolete, “if global geopolitics decides (Lebanon) is not essential to the balance of the world.”

It is not an abstract concern, but one grounded in precedent—“we’ve seen it happen,” — referencing what has been happening in Gaza and elsewhere, where wars and genocides have redrawn the contours of identity and belonging without consent. “These are things that go far beyond us,” he continued, acknowledging the near-impossibility of meaningfully confronting forces of that scale through art alone. “I can’t fight that with my trumpet,” he says. “And I’m not going to wake up one day and swap it for a Kalashnikov;” a remark that gestures, almost in a Frantz Fanon-esque register, towards the limits of symbolic resistance when confronted with structures that operate almost solely with violence.

Expected, in turn, to weigh in precisely because of the platform and reach he has. But with that visibility comes a form of responsibility; one he admits he might well have avoided, were it not so inextricably tied to the very nature of his practice. “I’ve never really sought out fame,” he says, almost as a preface. “I just love what I do, but within a certain limit. I don’t want to provoke things that are unpleasant.” If anything, his experience of visibility has been less a reward than a sequence of projections imposed onto him, each replacing the last as his career grew bigger.

“When I was younger, it was racism,” he recalls. As recognition followed, the accusations shifted rather than disappeared. “I became a fraud in music because I wasn’t playing the jazz people expected from me.” When his classical training and technical background became harder to dismiss, the narrative adapted. “I stopped being a fraud, and suddenly I was a businessman instead of an artist.” That, too, fell apart under scrutiny, explaining how he built his career “almost by accident,” with no real commercial ambition. “They had to find something else to take me down,” before going on to reveal how he was, at one point, framed as a terrorist.

The label, sadly enough, was not metaphorical. A bureaucratic mishap — linked to a lost passport years prior —led to a police check at Gare du Nord that quickly spiraled. “They told me I was flagged by Interpol,” and within hours, the rumor metastasized. “People were saying, ‘just because he plays the trumpet well doesn’t mean he can’t plant bombs.’” The episode eventually dissolved, but not without residue. “Even today, for some, there’s still suspicion.”

Other accusations followed in similar fashion that were as public as they were reductive. A legal dispute in which he was ultimately cleared left behind its own afterimage; later, a comment on the lack of diversity at Vienna’s New Year’s concert triggered a backlash that reframed him, once again, in the harshest possible terms. “I was suddenly the racist,” he said, with a note of disbelief. The pattern, as he sees it, is structural rather than incidental. “We live in a time where people want to reduce you to one thing,” a return, in his own words, to that logic of essentialization he had been describing earlier.

For all of this, his practice has remained largely unchanged. And his track record over his two decades and a bit only plays in his favor. “I’ve already worked with the people I dreamed of,” he confessed, without affectation. The absence of fixation, of long-term strategic desire, appears central to how he understands both his trajectory and his place within it. Even now, as he prepares for increasingly large-scale performances, he positions himself at a remove from the logic that typically governs such milestones. He has never been “in fashion,” as he puts it—never heavily rotated on mainstream radio, never fully absorbed into the industry’s dominant circuits—and yet, the scale of his output suggests otherwise.

And perhaps that is precisely the point. For all the projections imposed onto him over the years—fraud, opportunist, extremist, provocateur—Maalouf has continued to move through them with some sort of detachment, less interested in stabilizing his image than in preserving the conditions that allow him to keep creating. The trumpet, in that sense, remains both refuge and contradiction: insufficient against the scale of the world’s violence, yet still the only language through which he knows how to respond to it. And it’s for that specific reason, perhaps, that his music continues to resonate beyond the confines of genre or geography: not because it claims to resolve the chaos surrounding it, but because it refuses to look away from it altogether.

Ibrahim Maalouf on Lebanon, Identity, and the Limits of Art in a Violent World

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Ibrahim Maalouf on Lebanon, Identity, and the Limits of Art in a Violent World

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