If hijaz is the sound most people call "Arabic", bayati is one of the sounds Arabic music is most often in. Its second note has no key on a piano, its top half can go two ways, and one small change to it gives you a different maqam altogether.
Written by M III D O · 29 September 2026
Maqam World, the standard online reference for Arabic maqam theory, calls bayati "by far one of the most popular and common maqamat in the Arabic repertory". It is the head of its own family of maqamat — Bayati, Bayati Shuri, Husayni and Muhayyar — all of which start from the same four notes.
The songs that reference lists as examples make the point on their own: Umm Kulthum's 'Ala Balad el-Mahbub Waddini (1935, music by Riyad al-Sunbati) and Akun Sa'id (1932, music by Zakariya Ahmad), Muhammad Abdel Wahab's Lamma-nta Nawi (1929), Farid al-Atrash's Nura Nura (1953), Fairouz's Ya Rayt Minnun. Its page for the bayati jins adds Umm Kulthum's el-Ward Gamil (1946) and Ba'id 'Annak (1965, music by Baligh Hamdi).
As in the hijaz guide: a maqam is not just a set of notes but a route through them, built from smaller fragments called ajnas (singular jins). Bayati starts with jins bayati, and everything after that is a choice.
Written from D, as the reference notates it, the root jins is four notes:
Jins Bayati from D. The intervals are in tones: three-quarters, three-quarters, one.
The second note is the whole story. It is not E and it is not E♭ — it sits between them, which is why the notation marks it with a flat crossed by a slash, the half-flat sign. The distance from D up to it is three-quarters of a tone, and so is the distance from it up to F. Two equal steps that are each bigger than a semitone and smaller than a whole tone.
Play D, E♭, F, G on a keyboard and you get something close enough to recognise and wrong enough to hear. Play D, E, F, G and it is wrong the other way. Neither of the two notes a piano offers is the note. That is the same problem the quarter-tone guide describes for rast, and bayati is where most producers first run into it.
The fourth note, G, is the ghammaz — the point where the next jins begins.
After jins bayati on the tonic, the scale continues on the fourth degree with either jins nahawand or jins rast. Two different upper halves on one lower half — the same pattern hijaz follows.
Jins nahawand steps a whole tone, a half tone, then a whole tone: G, A, B♭, C. Every note of the upper half exists on a keyboard; only the second degree of the whole scale does not.
Jins rast steps a whole tone, then three-quarters, three-quarters: G, A, B half-flat, C. Now the scale has two notes that live between the keys — the second and the sixth.
The reference also describes Maqam Muhayyar as a version of bayati whose journey starts at the octave: it often climbs using rast on the fourth degree, then lingers on jins bayati at the top before coming down.
Lower the fifth degree and you are somewhere else. Maqam Bayati Shuri keeps jins bayati on the tonic but puts jins hijaz on the fourth degree — G, A♭, B, C — so the augmented second from the hijaz guide appears in the upper half of a scale whose lower half is pure bayati. Maqam World notes it is popular in its own right, especially in the muwashahat and adwar vocal forms; Sayyed Darwish's work is among its examples.
That is what the family idea means in practice: the first four notes tell you where you are from, and the fourth degree decides where you are going.
This part is mine rather than the reference's.
Arabiana Oud has Bayati as one of its maqam buttons. Its quarter-tone map lowers the notes a maqam needs by a quarter tone, so the half-flat second can be played from an ordinary keyboard instead of being rounded to the nearest key.
For the rhythm under it, the darbuka guide writes out maqsum, baladi and saidi stroke by stroke.
The intervals and scales above are read from the notation published by Maqam World for jins bayati, jins nahawand, jins rast, the bayati family and bayati shuri; the song examples are the ones those pages list. Maqam World is by Johnny Farraj, co-author with Sami Abu Shumays of Inside Arabic Music (Oxford University Press). What to do with any of it is mine.