Damascus-SANA
The origin of the zajal dates back to the Arabian Peninsula in the pre-Islamic era. It is a traditional form of Arabic poetry in the slang dialect. It was sometimes improvised, in the form of a debate between a number of zajal, accompanied by a melodic rhythm.
Concerning the nobility of this folk art, researcher Muin Hamad Al-Amatori shows that the ancients classified zajal among what they called the melody poetic arts or the non-Arabized poetic arts such as the Mawlia, the Quma and the Kan that appeared in the medieval literary era.
Al-Ammaturi researcher points out that zajal has gone through many phases since the time of Ibn Qazman, one of the pioneers of zajal in Andalusia, who lived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries AD, and his product was an image of the blending of Arab and European civilizations.
Regarding the development of the structure of the zajal system, Al-Amatori explains that the sources indicated that the zajjalin in the first stage of the emergence of this art were organizing the zajal in the form of the usual Arabic poem with single verses, one rhyme and one weight, and thus it was similar to the qarayed and these systems were called “zajal poems”.
As for the modern era, according to Al-Amatouri, the Zajalun tended to the systems in simple forms and avoided complexity and splitting the parts. Therefore, their systems take either the form of the poem or those based on the quatrain units and their strikes, and they treated through them the various purposes that the traditional Arabic poem touched, such as praise, satire, spinning, description, and others.
Zajal, according to Al-Amatori, is the poetry of the common people and is the closest thing to a popular song that is popular with the Sunnis. As for Al-Qaradi, it is from the monkey, i.e. the jolting of the tongue because it is of light weight so that the tongue thunders when singing due to the speed of its weight.
The importance of zajal, according to Al-Amatori, appears in that it expresses a true expression of the genius of the nation in its daily language and in its collective memory represented by its vast masses. The connection between the two literatures is achieved and the great chasm separating them is bridged.
The weights of the azjal are hardly more than the usual weights in Arabic poetry if they are not less than them, as it sometimes included a mixture of more than one weight.
Al-Amatori points out that we have always noticed a harmony between the mixed weights in one zajal, and its weights are sand, simple, repetitive, fragmented, fast, close, zajal, and uprooted.
Regarding the difficulty in determining some weights of zajal, al-Amatori explains that the difference in formation in the colloquial dialect has made it more difficult for many scholars to determine the weights of zajal, because of the recourse of the zajal to weights they invented and took to know and control the number of vowels and consonants in the parts and verses, which were identified by some scholars with a number of audio clips. .
This ancient art, which our country embraced despite the prolonged period of time, reflects, as Al-Amatori affirms, its connection to the environment and its expression of events and facts, despite the lack of documentation and documentation of its poets and the eyes of his poems.
Shatha Hammoud