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Concept
Kharja
Summary
A kharja or kharjah (خرجة tr. kharjah ˈxærdʒɐ, meaning "final"; jarcha ˈxaɾtʃa; carja ˈkaɾʒɐ; also known as markaz), is the final refrain of a muwashshah, a lyric genre of Al-Andalus (the Islamic Iberian Peninsula) written in Arabic or Andalusi Romance (Mozarabic).
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.
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 Mozarabic or 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.
Official source
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