Introducing the poet and the occasion of the poem

03Introducing the poet and the occasion of the poem

• Ahmed Shawqi (Amir al-Shu'ara) is the most prominent poet of the Revival and Neo-classicism school and of the generation of development.
• He was exiled to Andalusia (Spain) during the First World War because of his national position.
• There he felt he had lost his freedom and been deprived of his homeland and his people.

The occasion

• He composed the poem in exile, out of longing for and yearning after Egypt, out of anger at colonialism, and remembering the glories of the Muslims in Andalusia.
• Andalusia holds a place in the heart of every Muslim and in the heart of a sensitive poet.
• The poem belongs to "Shawqi's Andalusians" — his poems of exile.
• It answers ("mu'arada") al-Buhturi's seniyya on the palace of Khusraw: Shawqi said that whenever he stood by a stone or circled a relic, al-Buhturi's verses came before him.
• He took the same metre and the same rhyme, composing on the same radif — the sin with the kasra — which is what is called mu'arada (emulation).
• Among the verses of this emulation is his line saying that the palace of Khusraw taught al-Buhturi a lesson and the palaces of the Umayyads healed him — meaning that the palaces the Umayyads built in Andalusia healed him and gave his heart rest from the misery of distance from his homeland.