In the spring of 2030, on a warm evening in Beirut, the first edition of Menavision will light up screens from Casablanca to Yerevan. The Lebanese capital, long celebrated as the meeting point of Levantine cosmopolitanism, the city of Fairuz and Feyrouz, of jazz clubs and Sufi nights, of cathedrals, synagogues and mosques sharing the same skyline, will host the first edition of a new song contest at its reconstructed Forum de Beyrouth, with the sea behind it and Mount Sannine glowing on the horizon, welcoming twenty-two delegations under a single banner:
One Region, A Thousand Voices.
Menavision is conceived as the joyful cousin of Eurovision but not as its rival nor its poor imitation. Where Europe has long invited its neighbors to sing of love and glitter, the abrahamic region, stretching from the Atlantic coast of Morocco through the Maghreb, the Nile valley, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Israel and on to Armenia, proposes its own polyphony. The premise will be simple and audacious: for one week each year, politics will rest, microphones will rise, and the region will listen to itself.
An independent foundation seated in Dubaï will gather three official delegates for each participating countries. They will form 2 boards, one dedicated to the organisation of the event, one to manage the governance and the voting process designed to be both modern and deeply democratic. Two channels will determine each country’s score.
The first is the popular vote, cast entirely online, without any premium phone numbers nor costly SMS. Each citizen, identified once through a national digital ID will vote via a single and official mobile application on a public blockchain ledger that will guarantee absolute anonymity of the voter, and a strict one-vote-per-person rule, auditable by any independent observer. Gone will be the suspicions of stuffed ballots and Russian-style mass-dialing. A teenager in Tunis and a grandmother in Tabriz will weigh exactly the same.
The second channel will be the College of five Hundred, a jury of distinguished citizens drawn from each participating country: one hundred artists, one hundred scholars and intellectuals, one hundred entrepreneurs and innovators, oner hundred people with special needs and one hundred athletes and public figures. Their combined verdict will account for 20% of each country’s total score, the popular vote for the remaining 80%. The intent is balance: the wisdom of diversity tempered by the will of the crowd.
What will Menavision actually sound like? Imagine the opening night.
Morocco opens with a young woman from Essaouira blending gnawa trance rhythms with electronic bass, her voice carrying the call-and-response of the maâlem tradition. Algeria sends a raï revival, sharp and modern, sung in darija with French interjections. Tunisia answers with mezoued fused with hip-hop, a love song to the medinas. Egypt offers something cinematic, a thirty-piece orchestra channeling Umm Kulthum through a synth, sung by a Coptic-Sunni duo from Alexandria.
Lebanon, as host, presents a piece sung simultaneously in Arabic, Armenian and Syriac, a tribute to its layered identity. Syria takes the stage with a muwashshah reimagined for strings and beats, a song of return. Israel, Jordan and Palestine each send entries refusing easy slogans: a Mizrahi-Andalusi hybrid sung in Hebrew, Arabic and Ladino, a dabke love song, an oud chant arranged for orchestra. Iraq sends maqam baghdadi, that ancient modal tradition, sung by a young woman from Mosul. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states surprise audiences with a khaleeji electro-pop wave, sleek and confident. Iran competes with a Persian tasnif fused with shoegaze guitar, a poem by Hafez reborn. Turkey brings an Anatolian rock entry, while Armenia closes with a duduk-led ballad that seems to come from the bones of the earth.
One of the quiet revolutions of Menavision lies in the prominent role of the region’s religious and ethnic minorities, whose musical traditions have shaped the region culture far more than headlines suggest. Eastern Christians, Maronites, Copts, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Syriacs, Armenians, Greek Orthodox of Antioch, will bring to the contest a vocal heritage stretching back to the earliest centuries of liturgical music.
The Syriac and Byzantine chant traditions are, after all, among the oldest continuously sung musics on earth. Their modal systems influenced both Gregorian chant in the West and maqam in the East. Coptic hymnody preserves vocal ornaments that musicologists trace to Pharaonic temple music. Armenian sharakan hymns and the duduk that accompanies them have given the region one of its most recognizable timbres. When a Lebanese Maronite cantor opens the second night of Menavision with a single sustained note that bends into a qadr, audiences from Rabat to Tehran will recognize the sound as something shared, something older than the borders separating them.
Beyond Christians, the show also showcases Amazigh voices from the Atlas and the Rif, Kurdish musicians from four countries, Druze and Alawite ensembles, Bahá’í and Zoroastrian poets set to music, Yazidi singers carrying their wounded but living tradition, and the Mizrahi and Sephardi Jewish heritage that connects Marrakesh, Aleppo, Baghdad and Tehran through a single musical thread.
This is where Menavision will quietly accomplish what diplomacy struggles to do. For three evenings a year, viewers across the region will watch their neighbors at their best: dressed up, smiling, excited, singing their hearts out. They will discover that an Iranian song can move them to tears, that an Israeli melody sounds unexpectedly familiar, that a Tunisian beat makes them dance.
Music does not solve borders. It does, however, suspend them for a few minutes. Children growing up watching Menavision will know the faces of artists from twenty-two countries before they ever know their flags. They will hum a Saudi chorus on their way to school in Athens-on-the-Bosphorus, learn a few Armenian words from a duduk ballad, recognize the Syriac Halleluyah not as foreign but as part of their own inherited sky and realize how much hebrew and arabic are interwined languages.
The first edition will close on a Saturday night in late May 2030, with the twenty-two delegations on stage together, singing a piece commissioned for the occasion, a hymn in four languages, written by composers from Morocco, Israël, Iran and Armenia. The blockchain will count its final votes. The College of five Hundred will deliver its verdicts. A winner will be crowned.
But the real victory, viewers will sense, will be the simple fact that the show happened at all that from Marrakesh to Yerevan, for one luminous week, the region chose to sing, United.
Love it ❤️ beautiful and hopeful vision ! Always dream big My love 🥰