Please recommend some NEW dark, sweaty Arabic music!

Yes!

"Drums also feature prominently in the program of music from Oman. The three large music and dance ensembles appearing from this Arabian Peninsula nation blend traditional Arabic vocals with percussion drawn from both South Asian and African traditions. The festival runs through Monday, June 27, then picks up again Thursday, June 30, to run through Monday, July 4, on the National Mall between 7th and 14th Streets NW. Live musical performances and demonstrations are presented from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with special celebrations, performances, and concerts continuing until 9 p.m.

Maybe browse here: http://www.rashid.com/search_result.asp?special=New+Release

There is generally a lot of belly dance music there. I'm not too familiar with that end of things (or with rai).

I do know I plan on buying the new DJ Cheb I Sabbah album, La Kahena.

I liked the CD Syrian singer Yousef Shamoun put out this year, Taneh Wu Raneh, but I'm not sure that will sound dark and sweaty enough for you. It has some cheesy moments, but I think if you pay attention to the rhythms, it's got a real pleasantly heavy feel to it.

Their selection tends to overlap by about 75% at least.

(I know these are the sites I always link to.)

I'd say there are, yes, because you have remnants of traditions from before Arabs invaded, plus you have traditions brought to the region by Africans from further south (brought as slaves, I think). The rhythms can sound pretty distinctively African, rather than Arab, at times. There are rhythms widely used in one region that aren't found in the other (unless there is some conscious borrowing going on). It's complicated, and although I've listened to enough to recognize regional/national styles in many cases, I don't know it in any real detail.

Percussionist Mahmoud Fadl (an ethnically Nubian Egyptian, like Hamza el Din) seems to be pretty solid, though I've only heard one CD all the way through. His recordings might turn up in a mainstream store. Zein al-Jundi: Traditional Songs from Syria (2004) is pretty good although I don't like her voice much and I'm not sure what you'd think of it. It's not all fast either. But it's a good show-case of Syrian rhythms.

Fela - "Boustan El Fol"

Nour Mhanna - "Ya Hasidin Al Nas"

Mohammad Iskandar - Hakini

the bobby and nihal show

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/bobbyandnihal/index.shtml

plays a lot of desi, which seems to be r&b/hiphop/drumNbass/house/grime/mashups but with indian vocals. some of it may be a bit watered down for you in that it's somethimes like 70=80% western and less eastern (like, the a track might sound like your standard-issue r&b except with an indian singer and light tabla) but a lot of the stuff is more mixed up and often quite cool...

A desi posting might go better here:

Who can recomend some good Bhangra

I'm not sure about 'dark' or 'sweaty' but Omar Souleyman, the Syrian wedding musician who has an anthology out on Sublime Frequencies, is certainly 'awesome' and 'hectic'.

And on a slightly less authentic tip (i.e. the album should have been called 'Hard Rock From Greenwich Village, NY'):

Ah, right, it says NEW in big letters in the thread title doesn't it?

I gotta get Souleyman

"A desi posting might go better here:"

yeah but i was searching "arabic" before i posted a question about arabic stuff and this came up, so i added what i hoped would be a useful answer to the question. look, there's a bit of overlap in all these subjects so if you guys wanted to stop being all pedantic about it would probably be ok

Technically Kurdish, not Arabic, but the two albums I have by Aynur Doğan (Keçe Kurdan, 2004, and Nûpel, 2005) are dark, passionate, and have well-defined, resonant production (her Istanbul producers listened to RealWorld ethnic recordings, certainly). I discovered her through the doc Crossing the Bridge, and she's easily the best thing in it:

The albums allow a bit more modernity in, with huge-sounding frame drumming and occasional analog pads, and non-intrusive Cairo strings on a few tracks. Too often middle-eastern passion has cringe-worthy production missteps that date it badly. Maybe that fate will befall these, but not yet.