Muwashshah ( literally means "girdled" in Classical Arabic; plural or ) is the name for both an Arabic poetic form and a secular musical genre. The poetic form consists of a multi-lined strophic verse poem written in classical Arabic, usually consisting of five stanzas, alternating with a refrain with a running rhyme. It was customary to open with one or two lines which matched the second part of the poem in rhyme and meter; in North Africa poets ignore the strict rules of Arabic meter while the poets in the East follow them. The musical genre of the same name uses muwaššaḥ texts as lyrics, still in classical Arabic. This tradition can take two forms: the waṣla of the Mashriq and the Arab Andalusi nubah of the western part of the Arab world. History While the qasida and the maqama were adapted from the Mashreq, strophic poetry is the only form of Andalusi literature known to have its origins in the Iberian Peninsula. Andalusi strophic poetry exists in two forms: the muwaššaḥ: a more complex version in Standard Arabic with the exception of the concluding couplet, or the kharja, and zajal: a simpler form entirely in vernacular Arabic. The earliest known muwaššaḥs date back to the eleventh century. It was exported to the east, and celebrated there by figures such as and Ibn Dihya. The corpus of muwaššaḥs is formed by pieces in Hebrew and in Arabic. Tova Rosen describes the muwaššaḥ as "a product and a microcosm of the cultural conditions particular to al-Andalus. The linguistic interplay between the standard written languages—Arabic and Hebrew—and the oral forms—Andalusi vernacular Arabic, Romance, and Mozarabic—reflect the fluidity and diversity of the linguistic landscape of al-Andalus. The earliest known source on the muwashshah is Ibn Bassam’s Dhakhīra fī mahāsin ahl al-Jazīra. He ascribes the invention of the muwashshah to the 10th century blind poet Muhammad Mahmud al-Qabri or Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih.Nonetheless, there are no extant muwashshah poems attributed to these authors. The poetic form Examples of poetry start to appear as early as the 9th or 10th century. It is believed to come from the Arabic roots wšaḥ (وشح) which means any thing that a woman might wear on her neck from a necklace to a scarf, and the verb Tawašḥ means to wear. Some relate it to the word for a type of double-banded ornamental belt, the , which also means a