In an ideal world, says Simon Shaheen, music should be without borders, and he’s put that dream into practice by collaborating with artists as diverse as Sting, Quincy Jones, and Hindustani guitar innovator Vishwa Mohan Bhatt. In reality, however, his Palestinian homeland is ringed by barbed wire and patrolled by an occupying army—which is one of the reasons why he decamped to New York City in 1980. It was there, he says, that his life’s work really came into focus.

“I remember when I was a little kid, five years old, playing on the oud, and everybody said, ‘Oh, imagine if he was playing in Beirut, or in Cairo,’ ” Shaheen explains, interviewed at the Hotel Vancouver during a brief visit to town. “I heard this constantly, every week, but I did not have this luxury. I wasn’t permitted to go to the Arab countries and play Arabic music within the context of the Arab countries’ musical environment. So my only chance was to come to America, and then obtain American citizenship and an American passport, in order to go to the Arab countries and play Arabic music.”

The irony, needless to say, is not lost on this skilled and articulate practitioner of the oud and violin, who’s one of the Arab world’s most visible artistic ambassadors to the West and also a bit of an agent provocateur within his own culture. Since arriving in the U.S., Shaheen has helped bring Arabic music out of restaurants and cabarets and onto the concert stage. On the international stage, however, he’s just as concerned with freeing Arabic music from its own self-imposed shackles.

As an example, he cites a controversial visit he made to the Cairo Conservatoire. “I wanted to lecture on improvisation, the taxim, in the Arabic sense,” he recalls. “But there was a great resentment, because they viewed improvisation as something that comes from God. You don’t teach it; you’re either born with it, or you are not.”

Typically, Shaheen won his adversaries over with a blend of humour and surprise. “I played them a recording of somebody playing the oud,” he says, smiling. “I said, ‘Okay, let’s analyze what we heard.’ And, you know, the reaction was that this was a fantastic player who knows the repertoire very well, who knows improvisation; it sounded like they were born with it. But I said, ‘No, this was an American lady—but she studied with me for almost 11 years. She paid her dues, she studied well, and she understood the repertoire and the culture behind it very well. What’s the big deal?’ So this was a turning point at that time.”

Shaheen also hopes that his current music-and-dance project, The Call: Songs of Liberation, will prompt another transformation, both in North America and back in the Middle East. Here, it’s a chance for audiences to connect with some of the most powerful songs of the Arab world; there, it’s a reminder that the Arab Spring is rooted in an earlier struggle against colonialism.

“We have songs in the Arab world from the 1950s and the early ’60s, songs that were composed by the greatest composers of the time and were performed by great singers in Lebanon and Syria and Egypt and Iraq, including Oum Kalthoum and Fairuz,” says Shaheen. “And if you listen to the lyrics of those songs as if they were composed a year ago, two years ago, at the beginning of the Arab Spring movement, they are reflections of what’s going on now, just as much as they were reflections of what was going on in the 1950s.”

The underlying idea, he adds, is to highlight the musical and cultural depths of the Arab world, but without buying into any kind of us-versus-them ideology.

“It’s not about nationalism in the sense of animosity and fighting, but a kind of nationalism that represents the freedom of the spirit,” he stresses. “This is what I’m concerned with. That other side, I don’t care for at all.”