دارت الأيام

The song begins with "and" — we-daret — as if we have walked in on a story already years old. Abdel Wahab honors the device with one of his longest instrumental preludes, then sets the vocal line in maqam Rahat al-Arwah, "the rest of souls," a rare, low-lying relative of Huzam whose very name promises the serenity the lyric is working toward.

An entire plot in three spare lines: time, distance, quarrel. Mamoun al-Shinnawi's economy was legendary — where other lyricists describe, he itemizes, and lets the singer's voice supply everything between the items.

The hinge of the whole work: one chance meeting deletes years of grievance. Al-Shinnawi builds the surrender as a cascade — I forgot the quarrel, forgot the sleepless nights, forgave the torment — three verbs of amnesty in a row, and Abdel Wahab steps the melody upward with each one, so that forgiveness physically rises in the voice.

The forgotten "night I stayed sleepless" is the old Kulthum landscape — decades of her repertoire happen in that night — dismissed here in a single line. It is the rare Umm Kulthum song in which insomnia loses.

The song's most quoted paradox: love's torment is both the bitterest and the sweetest, "amarr" and "ahla" rhyming their opposites away. In concert this couplet became a tarab engine — she would turn the phrase over and over, and the line has since detached from the song to live as a proverb about love's costs.

Fagr (dawn) chimes against hagr (estrangement) — a jingling internal rhyme that announces the finale's change of weather. The music brightens with the text; analysts of the score note how Abdel Wahab lets the melody lean into neighboring modes as the rosy light spreads.

Morning shakes joy awake and joy gives love its orders: "get up, let us rejoice." The premiere at the Qasr al-Nil cinema theatre in 1970 capped a famously grueling preparation — Abdel Wahab drove the orchestra through some twenty-nine rehearsals, until Umm Kulthum teased him that he had exhausted her. The polish of the finale is where all those rehearsals went.