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“Out Late” is Time Out’s nightlife and party column by DJ, Whorechata founder and Time Out New York Culture Editor Ian Kumamoto, and is published every other Tuesday. The previous edition was about the honky tonk bar trend taking over nightlife.
Nightlife in New York has always been political. Whether it’s a West Village bar that set off the modern gay rights movement or a hedonistic midtown club that embraced people of color before much of the rest of the country, the counterculture has a tendency to convene in the late-night hours.
Sometimes, you have to listen carefully to see where, exactly, the culture is going. For the past year, I’ve become attuned to a sonic trend across the city’s clubs, particularly Brooklyn's underground: DJs of all backgrounds have been playing remixes of music from Southwest Asia and North Africa—a region also known as SWANA. Predominantly Arab, I’ve heard of SWANA music woven into Jersey Club, Brazilian funk, and even reggaeton, creating a sound that is slowly becoming a signifier of cultural resistance.
This didn't happen out of thin air, of course. For the past decade, many club nights have been steadily pushing forward contemporary Arab music forward, which is itself influenced by Western genres like EDM. Those parties include Yalla, Haza, and Nefertitties, many of which are queer-founded and contend with a fragmented and often complicated Arab American identity.
One of the most prominent SWANA events to come out of New York nightlife in recent years is Laylit, the party collective co-founded by MNSA, Nadim Maghzal and Saphe in 2018. They began hosting their first parties at the Bushwick venue Mood Ring, and the success of their first events made it clear that they would quickly outgrow it. Now, they're throwing Laylit parties in 10 cities across the world.
MNSA's relationship to his own identity has shifted throughout time: he moved from Beirut to the U.S. shortly after 9/11, where he says he felt a pretty immediate pressure to hide his “Arabness.” As the years went by, though, he didn't want to feel so distant from his heritage. MNSA began making music with a friend, Nadim Maghzal, as a way of reconnecting to some element of his culture. Not long after, they met Saphe, a PhD student at Columbia who had extensive knowledge of SWANA music. They decided they would start an Arab-centered party, except they would not exploit stereotypical elements of their culture or play “traditional” sounds from the region—instead, their party would be in dialogue with the global music scene and showcase contemporary Arab music, which they felt very much deserved a spot on the global stage.
To become part of a larger nightlife ecosystem, they knew they had to throw parties at venues that were well-respected, such as Brooklyn's Elsewhere, and that their parties had to have a mix of straight and queer people. “It was important for us to create this positive friction and a sense that we’re all here together, and let’s figure this out together,” MNSA says. “A lot of the reason a lot of us are here is because we left the region, or were forced to leave as refugees. Then there are the second-, third- or fourth-generation Arabs, and all of us have this common thread of trying to discover this complex identity.”
There’s a sense that they are trying to figure out what a contemporary and progressive Arab identity could look like in real time, and it’s a search that is palatable at any Laylit function. “That tension is something we try to explore, mostly through the music we play, which is experimental and complex, not just what you'd typically expect,” MNSA continues.
Parties like Laylit inspired others throughout the diaspora to create their own interpretations of a SWANA party. Haus of Dahab, founded in September 2023, was created by friends Nat and Ruth*. They’re both Coptic, which is a Christian minority group from Egypt, and they also identify as queer. They wanted to create a party where queer and trans people could still interact with their Arabic heritage in an environment that wasn't so charged. “So much of our culture is really attached to religion, whether that’s Coptic people in the church, Muslim people in the mosque, and so on, but this is a space where we can participate in our culture and it not have to be attached to any religious framework or baggage,” Nat tells Time Out.
“This is a space where we can participate in our culture and it not have to be attached to any religious framework or baggage.”
They also want to introduce New Yorkers to mahraganat, a genre of Egyptian electronic music that incorporates hip-hop, techno and Egyptian folk music. The Egyptian government has tried to ban mahraganat for its politically charged and secular messages, but that hasn't stopped many of the country’s young people from continuing to create and engage with it.
It’s impossible to talk about Arab parties in New York right now without mentioning Palestine—for everyone I spoke with, it was at the forefront of their minds. Since October 2023, both collectives have grappled with how—or even if—they should throw parties, and if doing so was disregarding the immense suffering happening in the Middle East. Laylit canceled several parties when the war in Gaza began, and Haus of Dahab took a six-month hiatus while it figured out how it should move forward.
Ultimately, both parties decided that they did have a role to play in all of this, and theirs was to bring their people together into one space—to cry, to scream, and to dance. “We’re not a hospital, we’re not activists, we’re not a charity, we know how to do music and culture," MNSA says. He kept pointing out that Laylit was “just a party,” but where they could help was in prioritizing Palestinian talent, many of whom were getting blacklisted for speaking out in protest against the bombings in Gaza. “We have a very strong conviction that we are standing on the right side of history.”
“We have a very strong conviction that we are standing on the right side of history.”
If two decades ago, 9/11 decimated Arab-centered nightlife in New York, the sounds and culture of the diaspora are roaring back to life, this time with a newfound conviction. You can hear the echoes of Arabic on any given night at almost every major venue in Brooklyn, and even if it’s just for one moment, people cheer. Perhaps it’s protest, or maybe it’s just great music worthy of our adoration. “Every small act builds upon that same idea that you can’t erase our culture,” Nat says. “You can’t pretend like we don’t exist.”
How to go to Laylit or Haus of Dahab
Where: Locations vary
When: Follow Laylit and Haus of Dahab on Instagram for upcoming events. You can also follow Laylit's founders on Instagram at @the.littlemerman @saphe.shamoun and @nadim.maghzal
*Full names omitted for privacy reasons.