فكروني

The drama begins offstage: an unnamed "they" happens to mention the beloved, and the whole edifice of forgetting collapses in a sentence. Abdel Wahab Mohamed — the radio generation's master of conversational lyric, no relation to the composer — builds the entire song on this accident of talk: love rekindled not by a meeting but by a rumor of memory.

"Fakkaruni" — they reminded me — is the hook of hooks: one word, thrown twice, that gives the song its title and its obsession. Mohammed Abdel Wahab sets it in maqam Rast, the foundational "mother mode" of Arabic music, whose poised, sunlit gravity lets the word return dozens of times across the evening without exhausting itself. She re-colored it on every pass, and audiences waited for each return the way one waits for a wave.

Longing catches fire "in my heart and in my eyes" — the eyes because that is where tears burn and where the absent beloved is still seen. The doubled location makes remembering a full-body event, and Umm Kulthum's melismas on "nar esh-sho'" (the fire of longing) fanned the image into her most incendiary vocal writing of the mid-sixties.

Memory returns wholesale: the past comes back "with its bliss and its ease." The premiere took place on Thursday, 1 December 1966 — a night with its own footnote in ensemble history, since the qanun chair was filled by Abdel Fattah Mansi, substituting for her longtime qanunist Mohamed Abdo Saleh, who was ill.

The line is a catalogue of opposites — sweetness, torment, cruelty — strung on the rocking rhythm of the colloquial suffixes (-awto, -awto). The honesty is the point: nostalgia here does not edit. The past is wanted back whole, pain included, and the melody gives each noun its own small melodic step, like beads told on a string.

After an evening of remembering, the conclusion is surrender: "your love is forever, it has no ending." What began as an accident of conversation ends as a creed. Fittingly, the song itself famously refused to end — "Fakkarouni" is often cited as one of the longest recorded performances in her repertoire, with one surviving concert recording said to stretch past two and a half hours.

The final repetition sheds words as it returns — "your love has no ending" — enacting endlessness by refusing to complete itself. It is a composer's trick worthy of Abdel Wahab's craft: the phrase about infinity is the one phrase the orchestra never quite closes, and she would suspend it across the hall until the audience finished it for her with applause.