يا مسهرني Ya Msaharni (You Who Keep Me Sleepless)

“Ya Msaharni” is a song of lasts and onlys. It is the last lyric Ahmed Rami wrote for Umm Kulthum, closing a partnership that began in the mid-1920s and gave her more songs than any other poet. It is the first and only melody Sayed Mekawy ever composed for her. And it belongs to 1972, the final full season of her performing life — which makes its central question, “how many days does a lifetime hold?”, almost unbearably well aimed.

The story behind the words is disarmingly small. Rami, by then an old man who had loved her in verse for half a century, is said to have written the song as a gentle rebuke after she went days without asking about him. The opening line is that rebuke verbatim: “It never crossed your mind, even one day, to ask after me.” From this domestic grievance the poem widens into the universal complaint of the sleepless — the days that pass without “a word, not a messenger,” the patience that runs out faster than the estrangement does.

Mekawy was an inspired late choice of composer. A blind sheikh raised on Qur’anic recitation and the popular song of old Cairo, he was famous for “El-Mesahharati,” his Ramadan suite in the voice of the man who drums the neighborhood awake before dawn — and there is a lovely irony in the professional waker of sleepers composing a song addressed to “the one who keeps me sleepless.” He set the text in maqam Rast, the most upright and classical of modes, and by most accounts insisted the electric organ and guitar of her late-sixties orchestra step aside so the Eastern core of the ensemble could breathe. After a decade of monumental modernism, “Ya Msaharni” sounds intimate, hand-made, almost like a sahra among friends.

Yet its scale in performance was anything but small. From the stage of the Qasr al-Nil cinema theatre, she stretched the song across an evening, circling the refrain until the audience sang the reproach back to her. The recordings preserve a special tenderness in the hall — as if everyone present sensed they were near the end of something, without saying so.

That is how the song is heard today. In 1972 it was a lover’s complaint; now it is a farewell in disguise. The estrangement is long, patience is short, and life’s days are running — she premiered those words, retired within a year, and died in 1975. Rami’s last line of reproach became, in retrospect, the truest thing anyone ever set before her: that she had kept a whole nation up at night, and the nights were nearly over.