Mine is a story that spans centuries.
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My place is the Placeless,
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My track is like that of a bird across the endless sky.
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I am the music that echoes from the unseen world.
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At the dawn of Islam,
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The rich poetry that marked the Arabian heartland
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Mingled with the melodies of the oud,
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The rhythms of the duff, and the art of the human voice.
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I carried these outward,
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Journeying along with the message of the new revelation.
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That message travelled west, and I travelled, too.
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In each new landscape people added their voices,
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Their words, their instruments — to my song.
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Across the lands of North Africa, all the way to Andalusia, my song was heard.
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It carried the ethos, the spirit, of Islam.
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I was welcomed.
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My sound awakened something deep within the soul,
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A memory beyond words.
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For the wise ones have said:
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«These melodies are the sounds of the revolving spheres of heaven.
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We were all part of Adam, we heard these melodies in Paradise.
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Water and clay may have clouded our sight, but an echo of their sound lingers
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in our memory.»
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In Moorish Spain’s Golden Age, I was reborn as the music of Andalusia.
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So powerful was my grip on the imagination,
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That even today this music awakens the noblest aspirations in its listeners.
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And when the Moors left the Iberian Peninsula,
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My voice was not silenced.
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My echo is heard across Europe and beyond,
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In the song of the troubadour,
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And in the sounds of the instruments I brought with me:
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The lute,
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The guitar,
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And the violin
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Now my Andalusian music flourishes in the Maghreb,
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Where I live on in sacred ceremonies and songs
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«Music will show you the path beyond Heaven.
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Immerse yourself in its sound,
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And the veils that hide your Light
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Will fall in a heap on the floor.
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And from those early days of Islam in Arabia’s heartland,
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I also travelled north and east.
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In Turkey, the ney, the reed flute, added its achingly sweet sound of Divine
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longing to my song.
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«Listen to the lament of the reed,
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Telling its tale of longing,
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Ever since it was cut from its reed-bed,
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All who hear it weep at its sorrow.
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I moved on to Persia.
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I was welcomed in that land,
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Where poets and musicians of exquisite skill joined me in their quest to touch
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the Divine.
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I was recognized.
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I was loved.
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One poet said:
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«In music there are a hundred thousand joys,
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And any one of these will shorten by a thousand years
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The path to attain knowledge of the Divine mysteries.»
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While I travelled and grew,
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The greatest Muslim thinkers — Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi
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Ibn Sina — wrote of my qualities for healing body and soul.
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And they gave me a structure that would always define my homeland as the heart
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of Islam.
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No matter what embellishment each people add to me,
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Still my essence shines through.
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My home is everywhere,
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But my heart is one.
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I journeyed farther east,
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With the trade caravans and the mystics,
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Until my song reached the great Indian subcontinent.
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Harmoniums and rababs and tablas joined singers in ecstatic praise of the
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Divine.
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The qawwali was born.
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And now as I continue to travel across time and lands and waters,
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I grow and change and still my essence remains the same.
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When the sound of my song is heard,
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Revealing that truth and beauty that lie beyond words,
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You will always know me. |