Why Is Arabic Music Full of Greetings?
Words by Nina Allaert
Wa in la-akum habibi, sellimouli alayh… It was on an evening train from Leipzig to Berlin that I was bopping my head to the chorus of Abdel Halim Hafez’s “Sawah”. Crossing over from Egypt to Lebanon, the next song that came on shuffle was by Melhem Barakat. After a beautiful instrumental intro, he started to sing: Sallim alayha ya hawa… Piecing together the meaning of these lyrics with my beginner-level Arabic, I realized both songs made use of the same motif – that of greeting.
Using the imperative form of the verb sallim - meaning “to greet” – an anguished Abdel Halim Hafez implores us: “Should you happen upon my beloved, greet them for me.” Reminiscing about a past lover, Melhem Barakat in a similar vein asks us to “greet her”. And wasn’t there also Fairuz’s iconic song “Sallimli alayh”, with its famous chorus: “Greet him for me, and tell him that I greet him”? Scrolling through my playlist, it dawned on me that there was a tradition in Arabic music of passing on greetings through song. Failing to find an equivalent in the Western music I had been socialized with, I began to wonder what lay behind this intriguing lyrical motif.
What fascinates me here is not so much the greeting in itself, but that these songs favor greeting through the help of an intermediary. Neither Abdel Halim Hafez, Melhem Barakat nor Fairuz speak their greetings and feelings directly to the addressee. Instead, each one of them addresses us, the listener, and asks that we pass on their greetings for them, effectively rendering us a messenger.
To put it differently, 15 years after Stevie Wonder topped American charts with “I just called to say I love you”, Fairuz, arguably the biggest singer still alive in the Arab world, was making music history with a song whose title could be translated as “Pass him my greetings” (1999). The Billboard Hot 100 of 1972, the year in which Abdel Halim Hafez’s “Sawah” was first performed, is equally teeming with unmediated messages to lover-addresees, from Al Green’s “Let’s stay together” to The Raspberries’ “Please go all the way”. While the top-charting songs in the West typically take the shape of a monologue directly addressed to the lover, their Arabic counterparts more frequently play with both direct and indirect address, often implicating the audience as an intermediary between the singer and the object of their desire.
As always, the million dollar question is, why? In his study of Love songs in Arabic as a mode of communication, linguist Mahmoud Al-Khatib posits that love songs communicate two types of information. Firstly, they tell us something about “love as a socio-psychological phenomenon.” Each love song is a testament to the human experience of love, illustrating how individuals experience affection, desire, disappointment, heartbreak... Secondly, love songs also provide insight into “the sociocultural norms of the society in which they are composed and sung.” A love song is never just a reflection of one individual’s psyche; it is also always an indicator of the cultural norms, values and expectations around love.
As I started looking for answers as to why Arabic songs make use of this indirect address of the loved one, these societal norms kept coming up. My Lebanese friend Rawad put it this way: “It’s very important to keep in mind that this platonic love is really important in Arabic culture. Songs often include this indirect greeting because a lot of the time, arranged marriages and such were keeping people from the person they love.”
My friend Rowan, from Alexandria, added: “In Egypt, you don’t go and talk to the girl directly. You usually talk to someone else, who can then talk to her, because if you are too forward, you are seen as not polite enough.” Further citing the taboo on dating and love before marriage, Al Khatib concludes that “in some cases, lovers in some Arab communities have no chance to meet or to communicate with each other, except for sending and receiving written messages.”
Fairuz’s “Sallimli alayh” can be read as a textbook case of a song about a love made impossible. Its lyrics are notoriously ambiguous, but hint at a special relationship that is unknown to the public and perhaps has not even been fully articulated by the two lovers themselves. Throughout the song, the singer repeatedly asks the listener to greet her loved one for her. Obviously still smitten, she recalls the “smiles of his eyes” and tell us something “imprinted in his memory” is weighing him in the present, though she never states what this may be. He seems to have closed himself off from the world and has shrouded himself in silence, but she knows he still whispers her name:
هيدا حبيبي
الي اسمي بيهمسوه
تعبان على سكوتو ودارسو
واضح شو بوه
ما تقول شو بوه
عمول حالك مش عارف
This is my lover
Who whispers my name,
He has worked hard on his studied silent game
It is clear what ails him,
Do not ask what ails him,
Pretend you do not know
Especially fascinating is the privileged status accorded to the listener, who is not excluded from the lovers’ intimacy, but rather included in it. Indeed, the song abandons the popular lyrical trope in which the singer is the only person who truly understands their lover. Instead, Fairuz addresses the listener as someone who shares in her special knowledge of her loved one: “You who understand him, greet him for me.” Trusting us to tactfully navigate the complex emotional state of her lover, she advises us to tread lightly and "pretend you do not know". Here lies the essence of the song: There is a silent understanding that all parties involved know. She knows, he knows, we know. But some things are too painful when acknowledged directly.
هوه ومفتحهم عينيه
وبوسوه بخده وطولي عليه
فهمت عليي كيف سلم؟
سلملي عليه
Kiss his wide open eyes for me,
Kiss his cheeks and linger there for a while,
Do you understand how?
And pass my regards to him…
Besides greeting, the listener is charged with another, even more delicate duty: that of kissing her lover for her. The listener thus becomes an active agent not only in the lovers’ emotional, but also physical intimacy. The insistence behind the “Do you understand me?” underlines the strength of her feelings and the urgency of her message. Finally, she asks to “pass my regards to him”. Kiss him for me, greet him for me. The rest will go without saying.
Like so many Arabic love songs, “Sallimli alayh” is heavy with the themes of distance and separation. I believe herein lies the key to another, perhaps more political, explanation behind the prevalence of the greeting motif. Indeed, “Sallimli alayh” can be read as a song about the distance imposed on two lovers by society's morals. But it could also be that their separation is first and foremost a physical one, caused by migration, exile or war.
One need only to observe the current Israeli aggression on Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, and the centuries-long history of war and occupation that preceded it, to grasp why separation might have come to play such a key role in the collective consciousness of the Arab world. Experiences of exile, displacement, and migration have long become part of fabric of Arab society. As a result, even in love songs, feelings of homesickness and alienation and are never far away, with romantic yearning and yearning for home often being inextricably linked.
Legendary Egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafez’s “Sawah” is one of such classics in which lovesickness and homesickness converge to make a powerful song about loss and longing. The lyrical I calls himself a “wanderer”, the moon his sole witness as he roams the land on an endless journey. If Fairuz’s “Sallimli alayh” is about the feelings we leave unspoken, the lyrical I in “Sawah” makes it abundantly clear what ails him. The song is the lamentation of a deeply distraught man who has lost his lover and lost the way. He is laying open his wounds for all to see, hoping someone might take pity upon him and guide him to his lover: home. In the chorus, the lamenting makes way for a request:
ﻭﺍﻥ ﻟﻘﺎﻛﻢ ﺣﺒﻴﺒﻲ
ﺳﻠﻤﻮﻟﻲ ﻋﻠﻴﻪ
ﻃﻤﻨﻮﻧﻲ ﺍﻻﺳﻤﺮﺍﻧﻲ
ﻋﺎﻣﻠﺔ ﺍﻳﻪ ﺍﻟﻐﺮﺑﺔ ﻓﻴﻪ
Should you happen upon my beloved,
greet them for me
Put my mind to ease, how is the estrangement [ghorba]
treating my dark-skinned lover?
Once more, the motif of greeting figures surprisingly prominently in this song. As with Fairuz’s “Sallimli alayh”, the listener is made a messenger. But in “Sawah”, the separation between the lovers is more obviously a physical one. Spacial metaphors abound, and the use of the Arabic word ghorba, meaning the crippling feeling of alienation when absent from one’s native land, indicates that not only the singer, but also his lover is experiencing a form of exile. Each experience a double separation: cut off from their home and from each other, they have no way to communicate except to hope someone crosses their lover’s path and passes on their well-wishes for them.
Though “Sawah” was first sung in 1972, it is part of a much older musical tradition known as tarab. This genre is said to trace its roots back to early Islamic Quranic recitation, giving it a history of well over a thousand years. Tarab leads me to my final guess as to why greeting plays such an important role in Arabic music. Though big 20th-century artists like Abdel Halim Hafez and Fairuz are undoubtedly musical innovators in their own right, their lyrics often draw from tarab’s incredibly rich poetic repertoire, which evolved in times when it was simply impossible to “call and say I love you.” As a result, even in modern songs, lovers often still rely on messengers, not technology, to pass on greetings.
The centrality of the audience in Arabic music also helps further explain the motif of greeting. Traditionally, every single aspect of tarab hinged on the exchange of energies between singer and audience, and the strong emotions it provokes in both parties. Highlighting the importance of emotionality, scholar Jonathan H. Shannon notes that “stories circulate in Aleppo of people dying from being overpowered by strong emotions while listening to a song.” Arousing this level of near-death ecstasy in listeners is what singers are after. Without an audience, tarab simply loses its raison d'être.
In keeping with this tradition, Abdel Halim Hafez’s songs were not written to be recorded in a studio, and indeed never were. They were conceived to be performed live, much like all music before the advent of sound recording was – per definition – live music. As a result, these artists are aware that they never sing alone, but always in the presence of others: others who are active witnesses to their emotions, who share their joy and may relieve their pain.
And so it is interesting to note that Abdel Halim Hafez uses the plural imperative form sallimou when he sings “greet my lover for me.” Far from being a trivial grammatical detail, the plural makes explicit that he is not addressing a single listener, but the entire audience. As in: all of you listening in the crowd, “should you happen upon my beloved, greet them for me.”
In a musical tradition in which the audience was not an afterthought but the sine qua non of every creative act, it is only natural for listeners to be part of the music’s lyrical fabric. Even Fairuz’s “Sallimli alayh”, which departs further from the tarab tradition and was studio recorded, highlights this through different calls for audience participation. In the outro, she claims to be singing the mathhab (the path, doctrine, ideology) and asks that we “answer” to her when she sings, that we “add to” her song and “repeat” it back to her. But of course, her closing request to us remains: Greet him for me…
وانا عم غني المذهب
لما بغني ردو عليه
وبعدو نفسه المذهب
ولولا قدرتو زيدو عليه
وعودو تبقو عيدو الكوبليه
سلملي عليه سلم
And I am singing the path
And when I sing, answer to it
And it is still the same path
And if you are able, add to it
And go ahead and repeat the couplet
And greet him for me…
Sources & References
Al-Khatib, Mahmoud: “Love songs in Arabic as a mode of communication”. In: Grazer Linguistische Studien 59 (Frühjahr 2003), p. 21-45.
Shannon, Jonathan H.: “Intersubjectivity, Temporal Change, and Emotional Experience in Arab Music: Reflections on Tarab.” In: Cultural Anthropology 18.1 (2003), p. 72-98.
Othman, Inana: “The body, between event and memory: Alienations and embodiments in the time of pandemic”. In: Syria Untold, https://syriauntold.com/2021/01/25/the-body-between-event-and-memory/ (25.01.2021).
