Muwashshah
Quick answer: The muwashshah is a strophic poem invented in medieval Spain, sung in Arabic or Hebrew and closing with a vernacular kharja. Learn how the form works.
A muwashshah is a strophic poem invented in al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, around the tenth century: instead of the single rhyme of the classical qasida, it moves through five or so stanzas whose rhymes alternate between fresh sounds and a recurring pattern, and it was written to be sung. The name comes from wishah, an ornamented sash or double belt, a good image for a form that winds two rhyme threads around each other.
The muwashshah was a scandal and a delight: a courtly Arabic form that broke the monorhyme rule, borrowed popular song shapes and often ended in the street's own language. Hebrew poets of Spain, including greats like Judah Halevi, adopted it eagerly, making it one of the rare forms shared across two literatures and two faiths.
The Sash of Rhymes
A typical muwashshah alternates two kinds of unit: the ghusn, stanza lines with their own changing rhyme, and the simt or qufl, returning lines whose rhyme stays constant through the poem. A skeleton might run AA bbbAA cccAA, where the capital letters are the recurring thread. The final recurring unit is the kharja, the exit, frequently in colloquial Arabic or in the Romance vernacular of Spain, and often voiced as a girl's love complaint quoted from song. Subjects were love, wine and praise; performance was musical, and the form's descendants still structure Andalusian song traditions across North Africa.
History and Reach
Tradition names the blind poet Muqaddam of Cabra as the inventor, in the decades around 900. The form flourished in the courts of Seville, Cordoba and Granada, crossed into Hebrew with poets such as Moses ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi, and spawned a fully vernacular cousin, the zajal. When the singers of al-Andalus dispersed, the muwashshah travelled east and south; Egyptian and Levantine composers set muwashshahat for centuries, and Aleppo remains famous for them.
Trying the Architecture
You can build an English muwashshah by alternating free stanzas with a returning rhymed couplet, saving your most colloquial, most overheard line for the end. The form teaches a trick contest judges reward as structure: recurrence with development, the same sound returning while the poem around it changes. Writory's monthly contest has no formal categories, but a poem with this kind of visible design tends to score well on structure and creativity alike.
What poets can take from this
- Keep two rhyme threads distinct: one that changes each stanza, one that always returns.
- Write the ending first; the whole form leans toward its final vernacular exit.
- Let the last lines drop register, from literary to spoken, as the classical kharja did.
- Think musically; the muwashshah was composed for singing, and its stanzas are verses and refrains.
- Study a translated muwashshah beside a zajal to hear the difference formality makes.
Try it yourself
Write a poem of three stanzas plus a returning couplet after each, and end the final couplet with a sentence you have actually heard someone say aloud this week.
Questions
What is the difference between a muwashshah and a qasida?
A qasida runs on one metre and one rhyme from start to finish, while a muwashshah is strophic, cycling through stanzas with changing rhymes plus a recurring refrain thread. The muwashshah was also composed for music.
What is the kharja at the end of a muwashshah?
The kharja, meaning exit, is the closing refrain, often in colloquial Arabic or the old Romance vernacular of Spain and often voiced as a quoted snatch of song. It is prized by scholars as early evidence of Romance lyric.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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