دارت الأيام Daret El Ayyam (The Days Turned)

When Umm Kulthum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab first joined forces in 1964, the Egyptian press called it “the meeting of the clouds” — the two largest forces in Arabic music finally occupying the same sky. “Daret El Ayyam,” premiered in 1970 at the Qasr al-Nil cinema theatre, is one of the ripest fruits of that late partnership: a song about quarrel and reconciliation, made by two sovereigns who knew something about both.

Mamoun al-Shinnawi opens in the middle of the story, with a conjunction: “And the days turned, and the days went by, between distance and quarrel.” Three lines, no scenery, an entire failed love disposed of like a case summary. Then the accident that undoes it all — a chance meeting — and one of the loveliest cascades in his career: I forgot I had quarreled with him, forgot the nights I stayed awake, forgave my heart its torment. Three verbs of amnesty, stacked; Abdel Wahab steps the melody upward under each one, so that forgiveness audibly climbs.

The composer set the work in maqam Rahat al-Arwah — “the rest of souls” — a rare, dusky relative of Huzam whose name alone maps the song’s journey from torment to peace. The preparation behind that serenity was anything but restful: accounts of the production describe some twenty-nine rehearsals, an unheard-of number, with Abdel Wahab drilling the enlarged orchestra until Umm Kulthum teased him that he had worn her out. The obsessiveness paid. From the long instrumental prelude to the radiant finale, “Daret El Ayyam” is among the most polished constructions of her late period, its modern orchestral color — including, by contemporary report, the young guitarist Omar Khorshid’s first appearance with her ensemble — folded neatly inside a classical frame.

At the song’s center sits its most famous paradox: “the bitterest torment and the sweetest torment — the torment of love, for those who love.” The couplet became a tarab engine in concert, turned over and over to the hall’s roars, and it has since escaped the song entirely, quoted as a proverb by people who could not name its composer. That afterlife is the surest sign of a great colloquial lyric: it stops belonging to anyone.

What distinguishes “Daret El Ayyam” in the Kulthum canon, though, is its ending. Her monuments tend to close in magnificent unresolve — ruins, longing, the sleepless night. Here, uniquely, dawn actually arrives: rosy-colored, personified, shaking joy awake and ordering love to its feet. Sung by a woman entering the final years of her performing life, that morning has a valedictory glow. After all the turning days — hers, Egypt’s, the song’s — the last word is: get up, let us rejoice.