رباعيات الخيام

The song begins where Khayyam's quatrains so often begin: at sahar, the last watch of the night, with a voice urging the sleeping world awake. Riad al-Sunbati sets the summons in maqam Rast — the "mother maqam" of Arabic music, upright and clear — giving the philosophy a dawn-lit solemnity rather than a tavern haze. The whole work unfolds from this one call.

In Khayyam's scene the call comes from the tavern (al-han); in Ahmed Rami's sung text it comes "from the unseen" (al-ghayb). Rami himself recounted making the change, along with turning the "cup of wine" into the "cup of longing" — small substitutions that lift the summons from the wine-house to the metaphysical, and let a devout mid-century radio audience receive Khayyam without scandal.

Two cups govern the opening: the cup you fill, and the cup being filled for you. Fate's hand pours your allotted life whether you drink or not — so drink. It is the entire carpe diem argument compressed into one image, and Umm Kulthum's phrasing habitually leaned on "kaffu-l-qadar," fate's hand, letting the line's warning ring over the hall before the next quatrain answered it.

The most quoted quatrain of Rami's Khayyam, and the one closest in spirit to Edward FitzGerald's Victorian rendering — "Unborn TO-MORROW, and dead YESTERDAY, why fret about them if To-day be sweet." Past and future are dismissed in a single breath; only the present is real property. Sung weekly to a mass audience, these four lines became proverbial Arabic — many who quote them do not know they are quoting Khayyam through Rami.

"Leave sleep, and coax the string" — the dawn voice commands music, and for once the song describes itself: an audience kept awake all night by a singer is told that long vigils never shortened a life. The line "khafif al-zill" (light of shadow — Egyptian idiom for a charming, graceful person) domesticates the Persian sage into Cairene affection.

The excerpt's final quatrain marks the great pivot of the sung sequence: from seizing the day to seeking mercy. "Sin made me drunk, and yet I woke sober upon hopes of Your mercy" — drunkenness, the poem's ruling metaphor, is converted into repentance, and the same cup that held longing now holds forgiveness. Sunbati's sequence ends the evening not in skepticism but in prayer, and audiences received these lines as the night's true summit.