Muwashshah
Quick answer: Learn the muwashshah, the strophic song form of al-Andalus: its interlocking rhyme scheme, five-stanza shape, the vernacular kharja, and how to write one.
Before the sonnet reached Italy, poets in Muslim Spain were already building elaborate stanzaic songs. The muwashshah appeared in al-Andalus around the end of the ninth century, and tradition credits its invention to Muqaddam ibn Muafa, a blind poet from Cabra near Córdoba. The name comes from wishah, an ornamented sash, and the poem earns it: stanzas of courtly classical Arabic interlock through a returning rhyme, then the whole song ends with a sudden switch of voice and register called the kharja.
The form crossed languages early. Hebrew poets of Spain, among them Judah Halevi and Moses ibn Ezra, wrote muwashshahs of their own, and in the early thirteenth century the Egyptian anthologist Ibn Sana al-Mulk codified the rules in his treatise Dar al-Tiraz. The form still lives in the Andalusi classical music of North Africa, where ensembles sing these medieval texts today.
How the stanzas interlock
A muwashshah usually runs to five stanzas. Each stanza has two parts. The ghusn, meaning branch, is a group of lines with a rhyme unique to that stanza. The qufl, meaning lock (also called the simt), is a line or pair of lines whose rhyme repeats identically across the entire poem. If the poem opens with an initial qufl, called the matla, medieval critics called it complete (tamm); without one it is bald (aqra).
Written as a scheme, a complete muwashshah with couplet locks looks like AA bbb AA ccc AA ddd AA eee AA fff AA. Meter is genuinely disputed: some scholars hear the quantitative meters of classical Arabic verse, others a syllable or stress count borrowed from Romance song. Both camps have evidence, so an English writer can fairly choose a steady syllable count and keep it.
The kharja, the exit line
The final qufl has its own name, the kharja, which means exit. Ibn Sana al-Mulk advised poets to compose it first and build the poem backwards toward it, which remains excellent advice. The kharja breaks register on purpose: while the body of the poem is polished classical Arabic, the kharja drops into colloquial Arabic or Andalusi Romance, and is very often given to a new speaker, typically a girl voicing desire or complaint.
Those Romance kharjas matter beyond poetry. They are among the earliest recorded lyrics in any Iberian language, little splinters of a spoken world that would otherwise be lost.
Writing a muwashshah in English
Start at the end. Find or invent one line of plain, living speech: something overheard on a bus, a text message, a parent's phrase. That is your kharja. Choose a rhyme sound for it, because every qufl in the poem must rhyme with it.
Now build five stanzas. Give each stanza three lines on its own fresh rhyme, then a couplet that returns to the kharja rhyme. Keep line lengths close to even so the poem stays singable. In the last stanza, introduce the person who will speak the kharja, then let them say it. The classical move is a phrase such as 'and then she sang', a hinge that hands the poem to another voice.
What it suits, and how beginners break it
The muwashshah is built for longing: love poems, praise, homesickness for a city, anything where formality strains against feeling. The two-register design creates real drama, a courtly surface cracked open by ordinary speech.
The common beginner failure is writing the kharja in the same polished voice as everything else. That wastes the form's one theatrical trick. If your final lines could sit anywhere in the poem, they are not a kharja. The other hazard is rhyme strain: the lock rhyme returns six times, so pick a rhyme sound with plenty of common English words behind it.
What poets can take from this
- Write the kharja first and make the whole poem lean toward it.
- Choose a lock rhyme with many available words; you will need it six times.
- Keep a steady syllable count per line rather than forcing strict meter.
- Let the kharja change speaker, register, or even language.
- Read the finished poem aloud; a muwashshah that cannot be sung is only half built.
Try it yourself
Take one sentence someone you miss actually said, set it as your kharja, and write five formal stanzas of address that finally fall into that borrowed voice.
Questions
What is the kharja in a muwashshah?
The kharja is the final refrain-rhymed unit of the poem, written in colloquial language rather than the classical register of the body. It is usually voiced by a new speaker, often a woman, and medieval critics advised composing it before anything else.
How is a muwashshah different from a zajal?
They share the same strophic skeleton, but the muwashshah is written in classical Arabic or Hebrew with a vernacular kharja, while the zajal is composed in colloquial language throughout. The zajal also tends to return only part of the refrain rhyme in each stanza.
Do I need Arabic meter to write one in English?
No. Scholars still argue over whether the originals used quantitative Arabic meter or Romance-style syllable counting. A consistent syllable count or a steady four-beat line works well in English.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.