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From the YouTube page: This is Mary Fahl's song Ben Aindi Habibi. It's almost impossible to find so here it is! From her album The Other Side Of Time.

Arabic   Ben aindi habibi Si te bais mesture Trairá samaya lmchi ad-unione. Amanu ya habibi Al-wajs no me ferás Non, besa mía bokelya Awsak to no irás.

English translation Come to my house, my beloved, If you leave, this betrayal Will bring misery. Come to our passionate rendezvous. Mercy, my beloved! You'll make me desolate if you go! Good man, kiss my little mouth And don't leave me just yet.

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"Ben Aindi Habibi" was a traditional kharja written in the 11th or 12th century. Fahl said in an interview that she had discovered "Ben Aindi Habibi" while on tour with the October Project and considered it her favorite song on The Other Side of Time.

The kharja (in Arabic , meaning "final"), also known as jarcha in Spanish, is the final refrain of a muwashshah, a lyric genre of Al-Andalus (the Islamic Iberian Peninsula) written in Classical Arabic or Hebrew.

The muwashshah consists of five stanzas (bait) 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.

The kharja is often read separately from the longer poem with which it was written down.

About a third of extant kharjas are written in Classical Arabic. Most of the remainder are in Andalusi Arabic, but there are about seventy examples that are written either in Ibero-Romance or with significant Romance elements. None are recorded in Hebrew even when the muwashshah is in Hebrew.

Generally, though not always, the kharja is presented as a quotation from a speaker who is introduced in the preceding stanza.

It is not uncommon to find the same kharja attached to several different muwashshahat. The Egyptian writer Ibn Sanā' al-Mulk (1155-1211), in his Dar al-Tirāz (a study of the muwashshahat, including an anthology) states that the kharja was the most important part of the poem, that the poets generated the muwashshah from the kharja, and that consequently it was considered better to borrow a good kharja than compose a bad one.

Kharjas may describe love, praise, the pleasures of drinking, but also ascetism.

Though they comprise only a fraction of the corpus of extant kharjas, it is the Romance kharjas that have attracted the greatest scholarly interest. With examples dating back to the 11th century, this genre of poetry is believed to be among the oldest in any Romance language, and certainly the earliest recorded form of lyric poetry in Ibero-Romance.

Their rediscovery in the 20th century by Hebrew scholar Samuel Miklos Stern and Arabist Emilio García Gómez is generally thought to have cast new light on the evolution of Romance languages.

The Romance kharjas are thematically comparatively restricted, being almost entirely about love. Approximately three quarters of them are put into the mouths of women, while the proportion for Arabic kharjas is nearer one fifth.




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