The Sharon song

An addendum to the Hamas victory rally I attended (and covered) yesterday. (Besides the fact that it brought back memories of another Hamas rally I once attended two years ago. I was quite a site- heavily pregnant, running down Gaza’s streets in my maternity jeans amidst throngs of Hamas supports to chase down Ahmed Yassin for an interview.)

At the celebration yesterday, an elderly man sang a song he had composed about the Israeli withdrawal. It was really quite funny- you can only appreciate it if you spoke Arabic. I recorded it for a radio piece I did that is playing on Pacifica headlines but I can’ figure out how to link it here.

Basically the man used an Arabic singing technique called “Inshad” (like a ballad) and “Mawal”, which is the prelude to the song (kind of Arabic scales in which the singer expresses his emotion almost through wails) which is often used to evoke the emotions of the crowd. They can be quite beautiful and are used in classical Arabic music.

The funny thing is the subject of the Mawal in this case was Sharon. To hear Sharon’s name in a Mawal…I mean… that was the most bizarre and incongruent thing ever and made me laugh out loud…forget about red-roofed villas across from a decaying refugee camp.

The song went something like “Sharooooooooooooon…withdraw your troops from Gaza…Sharoooooooooon….and tell those who don’t run away that the Qassam [rocket] awaits them”. Then after the initial prelude /mawal is over, the man erupts into full-fledged song-ballad, where he sang “Today is your wedding Gaza, and tomorrow will be your wedding West Bank,” alluding to the fact that the battle, for Hamas, is for from over.