Mawtini

My homeland, my homeland, Glory and beauty, sublimity and splendour…

(opening lines; Ibrahim Tuqan died in 1941 and the poem is in the public domain)

About this poem

Ibrahim Tuqan wrote “Mawtini” — “My Homeland” — in 1934, in the years between the mounting land sales of the early Mandate and the general strike and revolt that broke out in 1936. Mohammed Flayfel set it to music, and the pairing did what neither text nor tune could have done alone: it produced a song simple enough to be sung by a crowd and specific enough to be unmistakably Palestinian.

It served as Palestine’s de facto national anthem for six decades, until an official anthem, “Fida’i,” was adopted in 1996. It never stopped being sung. In 2004 the poem was adopted as the national anthem of the Republic of Iraq, replacing the anthem of the Saddam Hussein period — so a Palestinian poem written under British rule is now the anthem of a different Arab state, and remains the informal second anthem of the country it was written for.

Its persistence has something to do with what it does not say. The lyric names no enemy, no party, and no date. It addresses the homeland directly, in the second person, and stakes everything on the address itself — which is why it has survived every political configuration Palestinians have passed through since 1934, and why it is still what a crowd sings when it does not know what else to sing.

Sources

• Mawtini — Wikipedia (Arabic text, English translation, and history of adoption)
• Ibrahim Tuqan — Wikipedia