“I am a king of angels, from beginning to end. Arrani you’ll soon be crying out, weeping endless tears,” sings Akram Qawar in Arabic while gesticulating at his opponent. Muhammad al-Arrani sings back: “What are you mumbling about? No one understands your verse, did you just come here to make a fool of yourself in the arena?”

“Who’s [sic] uncles are out here doing battle raps,” one fan exclaims in the caption on a video in which he dances along to the sound of a similar exchange to the one above. If you’ve seen these videos of predominantly middle-aged men insulting each other poetically in Arabic you too may have likened them to modern day rap battles. What they actually are is a centuries-old genre of Arabic sung poetry called zajal.

In its general sense, zajal refers to poetry composed in any of a number of colloquial Arabic dialects. Much more specifically, it refers to a kind of musical poetic performance, often involving verbal duels, which is especially popular in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Jordan.

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