A scale tells you which notes are allowed. A song tells you what to do with them. Here are five classic pieces in the bayati family, read one phrase at a time, so you can see where bayati goes when it leaves home and how it gets back.
Written by M III D O · 14 October 2026
The bayati guide covers the scale: jins bayati on D (D, E half-flat, F, G), then either nahawand or rast on G. This piece is about the route.
Every map below comes from Sami Abu Shumays, a violinist and teacher who co-wrote Inside Arabic Music (Oxford University Press) and published a phrase-by-phrase analysis of each song at maqamlessons.com. He splits a recording into phrases and names the jins each one sits in, and the scale degree it sits on. I copied his phrase lists in order; the colours and the counting are mine.
Bayati 1 = jins bayati on the tonic (D) — home.
Nahawand 4 = jins nahawand on the 4th (G A B♭ C).
Rast 4 = jins rast on the 4th (G A B half-flat C).
Hijaz 4 = jins hijaz on the 4th (G A♭ B C) — the "Shuri" turn.
Ajam 6 = jins ajam on the 6th (B♭).
Bayati 8 = bayati again, an octave up.
Abu Shumays calls it one of the all-time greatest hits of Arabic music and "a great piece for students", because it shows the very basics of maqam bayati. He also notes that Farid had a preference for bayati and possibly wrote the largest share of his songs in it.
24 phrases. The two "Husseini 5" phrases are, in his words, actually rast — the name marks a melody that stops on the 5th degree.
Count it and the song is almost a two-chord loop: 10 phrases on bayati 1 and 9 on nahawand 4. The melody steps up to G, colours it with B♭, and falls back to D, over and over. Rast 4 is named only three times. One of them, phrase 16, is most of the mawwal in the middle of the song (a free, unmetered vocal section), and Abu Shumays notes that a mawwal leaning mostly on rast 4 is typical of Farid in bayati.
The two "Husseini 5" phrases near the start matter too. Maqam World lists Nura Nura as an example of maqam husayni: the bayati variant whose melody leans on the 5th degree as a point of tension and resolves down to the 4th. It says that move is obligatory inside bayati itself, and you can hear it here in the first minute.
So the everyday sound is bayati below and nahawand above, and the B half-flat of rast is kept for the moments the melody stops on A or the song opens up.
A late Umm Kulthum song, very popular with dancers, and in his words "a very rich Tarab composition as well". His analysis covers only the first two verses: the opening instrumental starts in maqam kurd, and later verses leave the bayati area altogether. Those first two verses, he says, "give a fairly full picture" of the maqam.
Verse 1: his entries 1–16 of 37. Entry 6 is his alternative reading of entries 2–5, not a new phrase.
The first verse is a full tour in sixteen phrases. It starts with the same bayati–nahawand rocking as Nura Nura. Then, at phrase 7, comes what he calls "the first real Ajam, even though hinted before": three phrases resting on B♭, the 6th degree, which gives a brighter, almost major colour. Then the line climbs through rast 4 to bayati on the octave, twice, and comes all the way down through nahawand to the tonic.
The second verse adds the one colour the first one lacks. At phrases 24 and 27 he marks Hijaz 4 — "Shuri": A♭ and B natural over G, the darker turn that defines bayati shuri, used here as a passing shadow inside bayati. He adds a warning for anyone transcribing it: don't mistake it for another jins when the melody happens to end on the 3rd.
He also points to the instrumental intro to the second verse (from phrase 16) as one of Baligh's best melodies. If you only study one passage of bayati, that is a good one to loop.
A wedding song, sung here by Mohamed Kheyri over the zaffa rhythm used in wedding processions. Abu Shumays describes the melody as simple, and singles out "the dark turn to hijaz (the Bayati Shuri pathway) at the end".
The first nine of his 23 phrases. The pattern repeats with variations.
This one does not start at home. It opens high, on ajam, works down through nahawand, and only reaches bayati on the tonic at phrase 7 — and then immediately turns to hijaz before settling. Across the whole song the hijaz turn appears three times, each time just before the return to bayati 1.
One song, two labels. Abu Shumays files his recording under maqam bayati. Maqam World lists Qadd Ah Ya Hilu under bayati shuri — but with a different performance, by Nay Barghouti. A maqam belongs to a performance and its phrases, not to a title: the same tune can lean on the shuri turn more in one version than another. That is a better habit than arguing over a single label for a whole song.
An instrumental. The sama'i is a form the Arabs adopted from Ottoman Turkish music in the 19th and 20th centuries, and Abu Shumays calls this one probably the best-known sama'i in the Arabic repertory — the one "every student learns as their first".
His phrase list for it reads like a summary of the other songs: bayati 1, rast 4 low, ajam 3 and ajam 6, nahawand 4 with the "Husseini" emphasis on the 5th, rast 4, bayati on the octave, and home. What it does not contain is the shuri turn — he notes that he added that himself in his own recording, and that it does not occur in the sama'i.
Maqam World gives the second section (khana) of this sama'i as one of its examples of maqam husayni, alongside Nura Nura. In his list, that is where the "Husseini" phrases sit.
The one true bayati shuri piece here. Abu Shumays calls it "a phenomenally virtuosic performance" from an Umm Kulthum who had fully reached her maturity, and uses it to show an older shuri pathway.
All 19 phrases. Phrase 1 is the instrumental doulab (a short opening tune); phrase 10 starts the lead-in to the verse.
Compare it with Nura Nura. Same lower half, same back-and-forth — but where Farid swings between bayati and nahawand on G, Qasabgi swings between bayati and hijaz on G, for ten phrases straight. That one swapped jins is the whole difference between the two maqamat. The new move is in the middle: three phrases resting on the 7th degree with nahawand, which he describes as the older shuri pathway, with hijaz acting as a neighbour on the way back.
This part is mine rather than the source's.
To play any of this in tune, Arabiana Oud has a Bayati button that lowers the half-flat notes for you. The quarter-tone guide explains why the E in bayati is not on your keyboard.
Phrase lists, quotations and recording details are from Sami Abu Shumays's analyses at maqamlessons.com: Nura Nura, Ba'id 'Annak, Ah Ya Hilu, Sama'i Bayati al-'Aryan, Mihtaar Ya Naas and his bayati overview. The bayati shuri examples and the husayni note are from Maqam World's pages for bayati shuri and husayni, by Johnny Farraj, his co-author. The colours, the counts and what to do with them are mine.