The bayati family has four members. Two of them, Bayati and Bayati Shuri, are covered in the bayati guide. The other two use the same notes and differ in where the melody leans and where it starts. Both are named after a note.
Written by M III D O · 14 October 2026
In older Arabic theory the notes had names instead of letters. The AMAR Foundation for Arab Music Archiving and Research summarises Muhammad Shihabiddin's treatise Safinat al-mulk wa nafisat al-fulk: the seven steps of the rast scale were first named with Persian numbers plus kah, which AMAR translates as "scale" — yakah (one), dukah (two), sikah, jaharkah, banjkah, shishkah and haftkah (seven). Four of them later became known by new names: rast for the first, nawa for the fifth, husayni for the sixth and awj for the seventh.
| Step on rast | Old name | Later name | Note | Degree in bayati on D |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | yakah | rast | C | — |
| 2 | dukah | dukah | D | 1 (tonic) |
| 3 | sikah | sikah | E half-flat | 2 |
| 4 | jaharkah | jaharkah | F | 3 |
| 5 | banjkah | nawa | G | 4 |
| 6 | shishkah | husayni | A | 5 |
The note letters assume rast on C, the way Maqam World writes it. AMAR also records that the theorists disagreed about yakah; that does not change the steps above it.
Maqam World supplies the other name: the octave above the tonic, the high D, "called Muhayyar in the old Arabic scale".
So with bayati written from D, husayni is the note A, the 5th degree, and muhayyar is the D an octave up. Each maqam carries the name of the note it is built around, which is the easiest way to remember them.
Maqam World's definition, in full: Husayni is "not very common as an independent maqam in the Arabic tradition, though its sayr (emphasizing the 5th scale degree as a note of tension resolving down to the 4th degree) is obligatory within Maqam Bayati. In the folk music of the wider region, this is actually the most common variant of Bayati". Sayr means the route a melody takes through the maqam.
Read from Maqam World's notation for maqam husayni. The 6th degree is written twice, and a dashed line joins the 5th back down to the 4th.
Two things in that notation are worth noticing. First, the lower half is plain jins bayati, so the scale is the bayati scale. Second, the 6th degree is written both ways: B half-flat and B♭. The Arabic version of the page describes the upper part as a "quasi-jins" that moves between rast and nahawand on the 4th degree. So husayni is not a different set of notes. It is a different habit: the melody climbs to A, stays there as if waiting, and only then settles on G.
Sami Abu Shumays, Maqam World's co-author on Inside Arabic Music, puts it the same way in his song analyses at maqamlessons.com: "Husseini" refers to "a suspended emphasis on 5, which eventually settles to 4". He adds that it can happen over either upper jins, rast or nahawand.
Notice that two of those, Nura Nura and the sama'i, are also standard examples of plain bayati. That is what "obligatory within Maqam Bayati" means in practice: you rarely meet husayni on its own, but you meet the husayni move in almost every bayati piece.
Maqam World describes Muhayyar on its bayati page rather than on a page of its own: "a version of Maqam Bayati whose sayr starts at the octave note". It "often uses Jins Rast on the 4th degree to ascend then emphasizes Jins Bayati on the octave before descending through the other ajnas common to Maqam Bayati".
Same scale again. What changes is the shape. Bayati begins low and works up; muhayyar announces the high D first, sits in bayati up there (D, E half-flat, F, G an octave higher), and spends the rest of its time coming down.
Abu Shumays describes the same climb from the other side: inside bayati, "frequently Rast is used to reach up toward the octave tonic, as well as to Jins Bayati on the octave". You can see it in his reading of Umm Kulthum's Ba'id 'Annak (music by Baligh Hamdi, 1965), phrases 10 to 16:
Up through rast on G, bayati on the octave twice, then down through nahawand to the tonic. From his analysis of verse 1.
That passage is the route Maqam World gives for muhayyar, almost step for step. But the song is bayati, and neither source calls this passage muhayyar. That distinction is the honest place to stop.
What I could not find. I looked for songs that a reliable source names as being in maqam muhayyar and found none I could confirm. Maqam World has no separate muhayyar page with examples; the link goes to bayati. Arabic search results mostly lead to Tunisian ma'luf, where modes (tubu') called Mhayyer Sikah and Mhayyer 'Iraq exist. That is the same word in a different tradition, and I found no source tying those modes to the bayati variant described here. So this guide gives no muhayyar song list. If you know a recording with a solid source behind it, I would like to hear it.
Three of the four share a scale. In this family the difference between maqamat is less about which notes you play and more about where you start, where you wait and where you rest.
This part is mine rather than the sources'.
Definitions, examples and the husayni notation are from Maqam World by Johnny Farraj: husayni (and its Arabic version), bayati, which describes muhayyar, and the bayati family. Quotations and phrase readings are from Sami Abu Shumays at maqamlessons.com: Bayati pathways: Rast, Bayati pathways: Nahawand & Ajam, Nura Nura and Ba'id 'Annak. The note names are from the AMAR Foundation's article "The rast maqam" (archived copy; the foundation's site was under maintenance when I checked). What to do with any of it is mine.