Malhun

What it is

Malhun is sung poetry in Moroccan Arabic, accompanied by lute, violin, rebab (a bowed instrument) and small drums¹. The linguist Hassan Jouad describes it as sung literature in dialect that arose in Morocco and developed in the milieu of the craft guilds; because the audience mostly could not read, the strictly constructed verses were composed orally and meant to be heard². It combines song, theatre, metaphor and symbolism in accessible language and a festive mood³.

The themes range from love, human beauty, nature and food to imaginary journeys and social questions; the poems often carry a moral lesson⁴. The poems are called qasida (plural qsayed), and the repertoire comprises at least 5,000 songs⁵.

Where it comes from

Malhun arose in the Tafilalet in south-eastern Morocco⁶. From there it reached the large cities, where it was cultivated above all in the craft guilds of the old towns⁷. A report by the news agency MAP names Meknes, Fez, Marrakesh, Salé and Azemmour as cities where it flourishes because the poets moved there⁸.

History

The sources do not agree on a century for its beginnings: Hassan Jouad places them at the start of the 15th century⁹, as does a column in Le360 that names “El-Harbi” by Ibn Aboud as the oldest qasida¹⁰; the English Wikipedia names the 14th century of the Marinids as well as the 15th¹¹. Well-known poets include Sidi Kaddour Alami from Meknes and Thami Mdaghri¹². According to the chronicler Ibn Zaydan, Alami was born in Meknes around 1741, studied there at the Great Mosque, counted Sultan Moulay Abderrahman among his pupils and died in Meknes in 1850¹³. Mdaghri came from Mdaghra in the Tafilalet, studied in Fez and found recognition at the court of the sultans Abderrahman and Mohammed IV¹⁴.

On 6 December 2023, at its 18th session in Botswana, the UNESCO committee inscribed malhun on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity¹⁵. The nomination came from an association in 2016 and was prepared with the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco and the Ministry of Culture; malhun has been in the national inventory since October 2018¹⁶.

How it is made

Three roles have carried the tradition since its beginnings: the poet, who composes the verses, the keeper, who learns them by heart and passes them on, and the singer, who performs them with a group of professional musicians¹⁷. Each poem follows a qiyyas, a stanza model with its own melody; because text and melody are learned together, the keepers write the texts down in a kind of phonetic notation that reproduces the sung model¹⁸.

A qasida consists of verses sung solo (aqsam), between which a refrain, the harba, returns; the dridka, a simplified harba in a faster rhythm, announces the end¹⁹. In the past malhun was learned through apprenticeship with singers, musicians, copyists and poets and with the craftsmen who make instruments and costumes; today also in associations and conservatoires and from printed collections of texts²⁰. Since the 1960s malhun has been on the curriculum of the music conservatoires, and the state broadcaster maintains an ensemble of its own²¹.

When

Traditionally malhun was heard at family celebrations of the craftsmen and at private evenings that enthusiasts hosted in turn; with radio and the gramophone record the audience grew larger and younger²². Today it is heard at family celebrations, in large concert halls and at dedicated malhun festivals²³. In the Tafilalet, which MAP calls its historical cradle, the 16th Rencontre Sijilmassa du Melhoun took place in 2010 in Errachidia, Erfoud and Rissani²⁴.

How to recognise it

Malhun is composed in dialect, not in Classical Arabic; in this it differs from Andalusian music, whose poems use Classical Arabic²⁵.