الأطلال Al-Atlal (The Ruins)

An apostrophe to the poet's own heart, in high classical Arabic — the register of the qasida, not the street. Sunbati sets it in maqam Huzam, a mode of the Sikah family whose quarter-tone-tinged home note gives the opening its ceremonial, grief-lit color: mourning conducted with perfect posture.

Ibrahim Nagi, a physician and leading romantic poet, died in 1953; Umm Kulthum sang his words thirteen years later. The sung text was assembled from more than one of his poems, trimmed and reordered — a reminder that a Kulthum song is an act of editorship as much as composition.

The Arabic turns on a celebrated pun: hawa means both "love" and "it fell." Love was a palace built of fantasy, and the same word that names the passion names the collapse. This kind of jinas — twinned words with divergent meanings — is a signature pleasure of the classical lyric tradition.

"Pour for me, and let us drink to its ruins" fuses the two oldest genres of Arabic verse in a single breath: the atlal elegy of the pre-Islamic ode and the khamriyya, the wine song. The lovers hold a wake at the ruin, toasting what destroyed them — and the next line doubles the play with another jinas, rawa meaning both "to narrate" and "to quench."

The most electric moment of the song. A lover's plea to be released became, in the halls of the late 1960s, something larger: after the defeat of 1967, audiences heard "give me my freedom" as a collective cry, and she answered their applause by repeating the line in ever-fiercer arcs. Few passages show more clearly how tarab turns a text into an event.

The dignity of the line lies in its bookkeeping: everything given, nothing withheld, therefore nothing owed. The classical verb forms carry a formality that colloquial song cannot reach — this is heartbreak argued like a case at law, and Umm Kulthum delivers it with the gravity of an advocate.

The ghazal's conventional "bond of love" turns literal here: a shackle that has drawn blood at the wrist. The quatrain then closes its account with bitter symmetry — I did not cling to the chain, and the chain showed me no mercy. In concert these lines rode the same rising wave as the freedom cry, each pass flung higher than the last.

The poem here joins the old Arabic tradition of the khamriyya, the wine song: intoxication as the only honest measure of love. In performance this question drew some of her most soaring melismas, the voice itself reeling — controlled abandon, the paradox at the center of her art.

Listeners' shouts — "'Azima!", "Allah!" — often forced her to circle back and sing this passage again, differently. No two nights of "Al-Atlal" were alike; the surviving recordings are single evenings of a work that was, by design, never finished.

The excerpt closes where the evening closed: in fatalism. After the fury of the freedom cry, the song's final posture is acceptance — everything is decree, unhappiness was never ours to choose — the qasida's oldest consolation. Sunbati lets the melody settle onto Huzam's home note like a mourner finally sitting down, and night after night the halls refused to let the silence hold.