George Jardaq

George Jardaq wrote one song for Umm Kulthum — "Hazihi Laylati," "This Is My Night" — and it was enough to lodge a Lebanese man of letters permanently in her repertoire. Born in Marjeyoun in southern Lebanon in 1931 (sources differ on the exact year), Jardaq was a journalist, teacher, playwright and essayist, steeped from boyhood in al-Mutanabbi and in Nahj al-Balagha; his monumental study of Imam Ali, "The Voice of Human Justice," made his name across the Arab world and beyond. Yet it was a night-poem that carried him furthest: a lyric of pure seized present, in which the singer commands the night to linger and the beloved to stay, love argued against time itself. Mohammed Abdel Wahab set it, and Umm Kulthum premiered it in December 1968; it became one of the glories of her late period, its long crescendos among the most requested of her final concerts. That she reached for a Christian writer from south Lebanon says everything about the span of her art — her stage admitted every current of Arabic writing. Jardaq died in Beirut in November 2014, mourned as the poet of her night.