Ba Zamin Qasam

The qasam — the oath — is one of the oldest rhetorical structures in Arabic and Persian literary tradition, and it appears throughout the Quran: 'By the sun and its brightness, by the moon when it follows it, by the day when it reveals it' (91:1-3). To swear 'by the earth, by time, by the God of both worlds' is to call on the entirety of existence as witness.

The poem's brevity is structural, not accidental. The oath-poem asks to be heard as a legal or sacred speech act, not as a narrative. It does not tell you what is being sworn to — the object of the oath is implied by context, which in a love song context is the swearing of devotion, fidelity, or truth of feeling.

Ahmad Zahir recorded a number of pieces that function more as gestures or declarations than as fully developed songs, and Ba Zamin Qasam is among the most concentrated of these. The repetition of the couplet doubles the swearing: the oath said twice is not redundant but reinforced.