One Thousand Years of Cultural Harmony between Judaism and Islam r 259intimate and complex religious dilemmas regarding his relationship with
God. Najarah’s main concern is much more crucial; it is the emotional
state of the nation resulting from its memories of the painful expulsion
and the urgent need to create an atmosphere of faith in and hope for a
better future.
Najarah adapted Arabic and Turkish songs that describe earthly and
sensual love as models for his religious songs. This was expressed through
an abundance of metaphors and images of sensual love, while giving the
plot of a secular love song a religious meaning (Tietze and Yahalom 1995,
17).
Tietze and Yahalom (1995, 16) describe two sources of mystical con-
cepts and ideas that inspired Najarah. The first consisted of the ideas and
rituals of the Baktashy Dervishes, the mystics from Turkey, who sang sen-
suous love songs with mystical portent. In his poetry, just as in Ibn Gabi-
rol’s, the sensual flavor appears in the form of carnal images describing the
relationship between God and the people of Israel. In this respect, Najarah
kept the tradition of the Spanish school of Hebrew poets, who were influ-
enced by the Islamic classical school of mysticism. Despite the fact that
Najarah was not a mystic himself, and the extent of his personal involve-
ment in Jewish mystical life is uncertain, the second and new source of
influence reflected in his work involves the mystical ideas formed by the
kabbalist Isaac Luria (1534–72). Luria contributed new concepts that con-
tinued to be pivotal in Jewish mysticism long after his death (Tietze and
Yahalom 9, 41). Thus Najarah continued to amalgamate in his songs both
Islamic and Jewish mysticism, a combination that appeared in the Mishaf
for the first time in Ibn Gabirol’s work.
Najarah adapted and further endorsed the mishqal havarti foneti (pho-
netic-syllabic meter, PSM), known also as the Italian system (see Beeri
1985, 52; Tobi 1995, 26). The PSM is based on the principle of creating
a fixed number of syllables in each line of the poem, which is usually
strophic and with short lines. The syllables are defined with no distinction
between their length, long or short, as was the case in Dunash’s quantita-
tive meter, or accentuation, accented or not accented, prevalent before
Dunash’s innovation. As a result, the shva n ̔a (mobile shva) is regarded
as a vowel (Schirmann 1997, 689).^13
Najarah’s preference for the PSM is heavily reflected in his work. Per-
haps because most of his songs were written to existing Arabic or Turkish
songs, the simplest way he could adjust the Hebrew language to these