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Kharja
Sign in to saveA kharja or kharjah ( ; ; ; also known as a markaz 'center'), is the final couple of abyāt, or verses, of a muwaššaḥ ( 'girdle'), a poem or song of the strophic lyric genre from al-Andalus. The kharja can be in a language that is different from the body; a muwaššaḥ in literary Arabic might have a kharja in vernacular Andalusi Arabic or in a mix of Arabic and Andalusi Romance, while a muwaššaḥ in Hebrew might contain a kharja in Arabic, Romance, Hebrew, or a mix.
Book · Open Library
- Author
- Richard Hitchcock
- First published
- 1977
- Editions
- 5
- Subjects
- Bibliography, History and criticism, Muwashshah, Spanish poetry, Arabic poetry, history and criticism
via Open Library
~10 min read
Article
18 sectionsContents
- Characteristics of the kharja
- Corpora
- Corpus of Arabic ''muwaššaḥāt''
- Corpus of Hebrew ''muwaššaḥāt''
- Others
- Romance kharjas
- Debate over origins
- Debate over language and reading
- Examples
- Romance
- Arabic
- History of ''kharja'' scholarship
- Manuscript sources
- Modern study
- See also
- References
- External links
- Editions of the Kharjas and Bibliography
A kharja or kharjah ( ; ; ; also known as a markaz 'center'), is the final couple of abyāt, or verses, of a muwaššaḥ ( 'girdle'), a poem or song of the strophic lyric genre from al-Andalus. The kharja can be in a language that is different from the body; a muwaššaḥ in literary Arabic might have a kharja in vernacular Andalusi Arabic or in a mix of Arabic and Andalusi Romance, while a muwaššaḥ in Hebrew might contain a kharja in Arabic, Romance, Hebrew, or a mix.
The muwashshah typically consists of five strophes of four to six lines, alternating with five or six refrains (qufl); each refrain has the same rhyme and metre, whereas each stanza has only the same metre. The kharja appears often to have been composed independently of the muwashshah in which it is found.