Tawfiq Abu Khamees, Tasjeelat Al-Dar Al-Bayda’a
Tawfiq Abu Khamees carries history in his bones. He is 84 years old, from Silwad, a village on the outskirts of Ramallah, Palestine. He has lived through catastrophe—the Nakba, the Naksa, exile, the violence of displacement that tore through generations like an unrelenting storm. His past is a ruin and a battlefield, yet through it all, one thing has never left his side—music. Not just sound, but an inheritance, a weapon, a refuge. In a world where identities are erased, rewritten, and forgotten, his love for music remains untouched. It is defiance. It is survival. It is proof that something can be carried forward when everything else is taken away.
That is why, in Burj Al-Barajneh, Lebanon, before the Israeli invasion of ‘82 pushed him into Jordan, he built a sanctuary of sound. And when he arrived in Amman, he built another—Tasjeelat Al-Dar Al-Bayda’a. A store, a vault, a temple of melodies that refused to fade, where cassettes lined the walls like sacred texts. He did not just sell music—he archived it, preserved it, made sure the voices of Abdel Halim, Umm Kulthum, Fareed Al-Atrash, and the haunting tones of Iraqi maqam would never be lost to time.
That is why, in Burj Al-Barajneh, Lebanon, before the Israeli invasion of ‘82 pushed him into Jordan, he built a sanctuary of sound. And when he arrived in Amman, he built another—Tasjeelat Al-Dar Al-Bayda’a. A store, a vault, a temple of melodies that refused to fade, where cassettes lined the walls like sacred texts. He did not just sell music—he archived it, preserved it, made sure the voices of Abdel Halim, Umm Kulthum, Fareed Al-Atrash, and the haunting tones of Iraqi maqam would never be lost to time.
Cassette tapes were more than just music; they were the pulse of an era. There were no musical studios—only empty houses, hidden from the street to keep the sound of cars from bleeding into the recordings. A party one night, an album pressed onto tape by morning, and by the next day, those who had danced the night away could buy the sound and take it home. This was how music lived, how it spread, how it survived.
To Tawfiq, every tape is a child. He spent decades making copies, never selling his originals—"Nobody sells their children." But illness is a cruel accountant, and now, he is letting go. The thought aches him. He is not just selling plastic and magnetic tape; he is selling years, echoes of conversations, the ghosts of musicians who never knew him but would have understood him deeply.
He remembers the past with an intensity that makes it feel alive again. Every story he tells is heavy with time, layered with the voices of a world that once was. The old Syrian shop, Tasjeelat Shamdan in Al-Salihiyyeh, where cassettes were priced by rarity, where Sha’lan, the owner, refused to sell to anyone he deemed an unworthy listener. "If you were a true listener, you wouldn’t ask about the price," he once told Tawfiq, drawing a line between those who merely hear and those who truly listen.
He talks of Lebanon, of entering a studio and knowing instinctively that a Sabah vinyl had been pressed incorrectly. He, a man with no formal training or education, caught what trained ears had missed. He tells me that listening is an art, an instinct—one does not need to play music to hear better than those who do.
He speaks of his friends—Abu Mohammed, a pillar of Amman’s cassette-collecting world, a man whose library of tapes and books is unmatched. Abu Mohammed is not just a collector but a historian, the kind of listener who shop owners and fellow collectors turn to when they seek knowledge they cannot find elsewhere. He holds originals that have disappeared from the world, treasures of forgotten voices. He is a walking archive, a custodian of sound, the last link to an era when music was passed from hand to hand, not streamed across invisible waves.
Now, the world has shrunk, compressed into digital streams and endless algorithms, where music is no longer something you seek, but something that seeks you. And yet, true collectors still hold weight—their role has not faded, only shifted. Once, being a music collector was an act of devotion, a responsibility. The selector was as vital as the musician, archiving sounds, preserving voices, ensuring that melodies didn’t vanish into the abyss. The joy was in the search, in the unearthing of lost recordings, in the careful deliberation before choosing a vinyl or cassette that would stay with you for life. The tangible, the ritual, the weight of the object in hand—it all mattered. Now, someone stumbles upon a cassette in their home, dust-covered and unfamiliar, and they look at it like an alien artifact. They do not know how to press play, and maybe they never will.
I stepped into his shop, pulled in by the gravity of history, by the weight of voices trapped in magnetic tape, by the scent of old cardboard and plastic that held more than just sound—it held lives, decades, stories. I wanted to meet the man who preserved these echoes, to understand what it meant to live for music, not just listen to it. And I did. We sat surrounded by shelves of history, towers of tapes stacked like monuments, each a heartbeat of a time that refuses to be buried. The songs had outlived their creators, not as mere echoes, but as living testaments carried forward by those who refuse to let them be forgotten. We spoke of the act of listening—not as a passive act, but as a form of devotion, of keeping something sacred alive. Not everything fades; some things fight to remain, to persist, to remind us that the past is not behind us—it is within us, vibrating in every note that still plays.
I hold onto moments like these—the weight of history pressed into sound, the depth of a single conversation, the beauty of an old tape spinning one more time before it is lost to silence. This is why I document, why I frame and capture, why my camera is more than just a tool—it is a bridge between the past and the present, between memory and oblivion. To see, to listen, to preserve, to remind. The world may shift, stories may be rewritten, but some things refuse to disappear. Tawfiq still opens his shop every morning, still touches the tapes like sacred relics, still presses play. And as long as he does, his music remains—not as an echo, but as a heartbeat that will never fade.