The BBC Radio 3’s World Music Awards used to be seen as an opportunity to make known to British audiences singers and music that have a huge following in other parts of the world but are virtually unknown here. These days such isolation is rapidly vanishing.

Souad Massi from Algeria sings ballads of tender intimacy and nostalgic introspection that have won huge popularity in the Arab world, France and now in Britain. She is the winner in the Middle East section of this year’s awards, to be presented next week. Her following comes as much from those captivated by her soulful, emotionally charged delivery as from those who salute her feminist defiance of Islamic militancy.

Last month marked the return here of Kazem al-Sahir, the Arab world’s most celebrated and charismatic singer, an exiled Iraqi who has captivated millions across the Middle East and who has begun to build a reputation far beyond the suffering country where he was born, studied and first recorded.

Iraq has become a metaphor for misjudgment, mismanagement and hate. But to the Arabs al-Sahir’s voice tells of something very different — of love, longing, nostalgia and pride in an ancient civilisation and gentler culture.

His face and voice dominate television across the Middle East. His CDs have sold more than 30 million copies. His lyrics are known by millions more. But his fame has spread beyond those speaking Arabic. He received the Unicef award in England for the song Tathakkar (Memory), and in 1999 he performed it before members of the US Congress and UN diplomats.

Two years ago he was the overall winner of the World Music awards. Last week, performing for the Melkonian Foundation for children, he sang several old favourites but added others that summed up the tragedy of Iraq, including a haunting, unaccompanied ballad for a country “where we used to be one and where we are now all separate”. The largely Arab audience, waving flags and cheering, was clearly moved.

More surprising is the almost rapturous welcome that British critics have given to another Arab woman singer, Reem Kelani. A Palestinian, brought up in Kuwait and living in Britain, she has so far had little exposure on television or the publicity of a mass audience. But she has just released Sprinting Gazelle, a haunting and powerful CD of traditional Palestinian songs painstakingly collected over 20 years.

Kelani makes no compromises: her bittersweet themes are matched by a haunting, nostalgic delivery with an implicit message on the Palestinian plight. She dwells on themes central to the tragedy — the loss of a community, loss of land, bitterness of exile and happiness of long-lost days.

Yet her music, which mingles joyfulness and vibrancy with darker emotions, has transcended the barriers of language. Older Arabs recognise songs not heard for 60 years; young British schoolchildren, in musical workshops across the country, are moved by universal themes, even in a different language and from a different world. The sprinting gazelle, in a song she found in a refugee camp, is as much a symbol of flight as it is of life that bounds beyond political tragedy.

MICHAEL BINYON