Haykal: Beyond Survival

Back in the 1970s, in his tailor shop on the outskirts of Nablus, Haykal’s late grandfather wove sumud into his stitching, tripling the thread of each shirt button so it could withstand torture and neglect in Zionist prisons. He found enduring resistance in the thinnest string.

The lesson was passed to Haykal’s father, and from his father to him.

Half a century later, the rapper known as Haykal is stitching together a run in Arabic hip-hop that is gathering momentum. With video freestyles, anti-imperialist lyrics, and live performances from Amman to New York, Haykal spent years building up to his third album, Kam Min Janneh | كم من جنّة (or, in English, How Many Heavens) — and it might be his best work yet.

Haykal is considered one of the most talented lyricists of his generation, a rapper’s rapper. Originally from Ramallah, he came up in the contemporary Palestinian hip-hop scene, where his razor-sharp politics, wit, and honesty quickly established him as one of its pillars. Then he developed a critical lung condition; unable to receive treatment in Palestine, he began the next chapter of his life in New York.

“We’re forbidden from having certain medical equipment,” he told me, “even in the West Bank.” At one point, he thought he might never perform again, and the new album addresses the operation he had to save his lungs. On “A’saab”, he raps: 

هيكل
قصّوا رئته
بطّل توباكو
ساتيفا وانديكو 

Haykal
They cut his lung
No more tobacco,
sativa,
no indica.

In the two years since arriving Haykal has been building his reputation all over again as part of the city’s underground scene. I caught up with him in Tompkins Square Park, and we spent an afternoon walking the Lower East Side.

Our conversation pinballed from topic to topic: from Edward Said's one-state orchestra to admiration for NYC’s Cash Cobain and MIKE; from recalling Yasser Arafat’s attempts to smuggle weapons into Palestine during the Second Intifada to speculating over the best pizza slices in the city. There was vitriol, too, for complicit Arab regimes and their photo ops of air-dropped aid — attempts at public absolution staged over the ruins of Gaza.

In Palestine, Haykal spent much of his youth rapping circles around MCs three times his age, crossing swords with local mainstays at freestyle sessions before becoming one himself.

“Back home, years ago, for my events, I would print the tickets and the posters,” he said. “I would hang them up around the city. I would pay the artist who made the artwork. I would pay the bouncers. I would pay the person who brings the equipment because the bars didn’t have professional gear.”

Across dozens of densely crafted records and countless self-produced and self-promoted shows, he refined his craft and built his name.

But the grind of military occupation took its toll. “Events would get canceled when people were martyred. Now there have hardly been any concerts at all for two and a half years.”

On How Many Heavens, he unites with fellow Palestinian titans Julmud and Acamol for a 16-track master class in how to use a microphone and drum pads to challenge an empire.

“When I speak of a state of denial on How Many Heavens, I think not just about where I’m from but of the Arab world in general — and here, too, of course,” Haykal said, gesturing at the Manhattan skyline. “What are we doing? Do we see how we’re contradicting ourselves?”

After 900 days of genocide in Gaza, after the marches and screenings and iftars, his question is: What comes next?

“What is our culture if you’re not actually fighting for it? Your land, your people, the extended ‘you’ are being killed. If the dabke will only be performed as mere entertainment and indifference, then it should be shut down.”

Haykal smiled as he lamented his “less lyrical” writing on How Many Heavens, the increasingly political turn of his work. More urgent. More direct. To my ears, he’s not pulling punches or undermining his poetry; he’s delivering blunt takedowns of state actors, lobbing barbs at the region’s sellouts before pivoting to prophecies of dancing along the Jordan River.

Like many kids in the early 2000s, Haykal initially gravitated toward technical rappers capable of complex wordplay like Eminem, as well as pop music, from Egyptian hits to the Backstreet Boys. As his influences expanded, grittier rap and Arab rhythms came into focus: the New York sound of Heltah Skeltah, the Palestinian singer-songwriter Kamilya Jubran, the late prisoner and novelist Walid Daqqa, and the raw beats of Muqata’a and Ramallah Underground, artists he first heard while passing through a military checkpoint outside Nablus 20 years ago.

Hearing performers rap in his own accent, in his own neighborhood, was what first inspired him. If they could do it, so could he. “When I heard it in my accent it became more … imaginable to do the same,” he said. Soon he was trading verses with rapper and producer Dakn, who became a mentor. Wave after wave of genre-defying Palestinian music began emerging from the crucible of the West Bank.

In 2012, he switched from recording as Amr to Haykal on SoundCloud. The new name — which means blueprint, structure, skeleton in Arabic — offered a north star for his writing and some distance from his legal name. He also set his location to “Ramallah, Syria.” Later, magazines started calling him “Palestinian-Syrian.” He didn’t mind.

“Gaza, Ramallah, Palestine — all of it is Syria. The borders installed across Bilad al-Sham [Greater Syria] are violent, and all these regimes cling to them.”

عرقي نازل كماه النيل
عاميتي هاي سرياني

My sweat pours
like Nile water
My dialec-t
is Syriac

“Of course this album is Palestinian, but it’s also Arab,” he said. “If someone wanted to imprison melodies to specific borders, many of these sounds and melodies are not Palestinian. I play with dialects in part because it multiplies rhymes by thousands.”

الزين بدقق عالكلمات
الزين بتنقل باللهجات

The chosen one's choices
Choose the right one
The chosen one's switching
Between the right tongues

Western gazes, censorship, and the appetite for self-orientalization inevitably follow anyone rapping outside the mainstream. The Euro-American music industry often presents artists from the colonized world with a false choice: Exploit your identity or erase it.

Haykal knows this intimately. As he tries to make rent in New York, he does his best to sidestep exploitative PR narratives and navigate the discourse with integrity.

On “‘isht,” he raps:

مش بس بصمد…
عِشت…
من جوّا بطن الممنوع
عم بشق طريقي للقلب
لازم اشمطه كوع

Not just survive
Thrive
In the belly of the forbidden
Carving my own path
I head towards its heart
I have to knock it down

Hip-hop has a hold on him, but he knows it’s complicated. As we walk and talk, his face lights up when he spots New York hip-hop legend Wiki. In the subway, buskers and the rhythm of the trains have Haykal rapping under his breath, rearranging old lyrics to match the city’s tempo. Hip-hop can embody resistance, but it is imperial power that transmits that message across the world.

“The real universal language propping up [English-language] music,” Haykal said, “is force.”

That’s why his recent On the Radar performance cut through. The freestyle show has become a coveted stop for emerging rappers, and his episode was performed entirely in Arabic.

You can honor hip-hop’s lineage without being confined by it, he said. The same colonial infrastructure that spreads language and culture can also carry something else: the possibility of solidarity.

“One way or another, I’m influenced by American teenagers,” he said. “Whether it’s DD Osama or Nas on Illmatic, my rap draws from different subgenres of hip-hop.” But he added he’s been trying to import less into his sound. “The music has always been Arab. My last EP with Acamol is distinctly Arab.” He paused. “I think the rhythms on this album are the best I’ve ever written. After 20 years, I’m fired up.”

Haykal thinks about his flow through the lens of Arabic poetry, pulling from a vast range of homegrown styles. On Kam Min Janneh, Haykal and his collaborators take inspiration in part from the Bedouin dahiyya and hidaya — freestyle call-and-response exchanges performed at pre-wedding festivities; they’re sometimes ridiculing, sometimes praising. In classical prosody, bahr — literally “sea” — is the rhythmic system; multiple styles together make up buhur al-shi'r, the “seas of poetry.” The album pulls from Yemeni rhythms and Iraqi melodies, blending rural traditions and internet-era research, a reflection of Haykal’s broader approach to life.

For him, music is a blueprint for strengthening ties. His desire to unite lineages within and beyond the Levant is grounded in material kinship and shared struggle. His favorite lines from Kam Min Janneh come from the chorus of “Ta’aali”:

تعالي
ياما ياما مات
بس رجعت وجيت
بأناناشيد

Ascending
He died 
Many times
But I’m back
And I came with songs

His anthems are calls for defiance — and invitations to join him.

“In everything I do, there’s a certain ideology I aim for,” he said. “We’ve faced such an overexposure of footage focused only on one angle of our struggle, the image of death. This album [is about] our living spirit.”