14/11/2023–|Last updated: 11/14/202310:45 AM (Mecca time)
The icon of Sudanese music and singing, Muhammad al-Amin Hamad al-Nil al-Tahir al-Izriq, died yesterday, Monday, in the United States, at the age of 80. His artistic career documents the features of Sudan’s political, social, and cultural history and reality.
Muhammad Al-Amin – who was born in the city of Wad Madani, south of Khartoum in 1943 – was distinguished by his vocal and melodic abilities that are described as simple and unpretentious. Very few of the great musician’s songs were composed for him by others, so any melody that Muhammad Al-Amin puts on bears his own artistic fingerprints.
The Sudanese visual artist residing in America, Taj Al-Sir Al-Malik, wrote these words in his eulogy for the late musician:
I went out that afternoon, heavy with sorrow, walking through the halls of the Nova Alexandria Hospital, the straight, clean, shining halls, the pieces of marble from which the lights were reflected, as if they had just been stacked, extending in front of me and behind me as if they were an eternal path.
I went out onto the public road with my eyes full of tears. I left behind me in a room on the second floor, quiet, filled with peace and tranquility, and surrounded by angels. The professor, exhausted by the struggle, was lying in the most beautiful of reassurance, with a smile on his face towards the sky, and the receptionist from the Horn of Africa, his eyes widening with joy. Surprised, he asked me: Muhammad Al-Amin…the artist, oh my God, I will visit him after my shift ends.
I thought to myself: Do the doctors with the coats and the passionate expressions and the army of beautiful nurses know that this patient with gentle features, residing in their expert hands, trained in the tricks of boiling wounds and suppressing pain, is the delight of the liver of an entire nation?
Do they know that this resident of their scalpels is our country’s Sinatra (one of the most popular American musicians), and Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix and Dylan combined?
Abdel Wahab, Baligh and Al-Taweel, Ebadi Al-Jawhar, Muhammad Abdo, Farid and Ballan, Wadih Al-Safi, Ajram, Charles Aznavour, Demis Roussos, Talahun, and Marley… unique in his era and a unique fabric, knowledge in the history of the music of one nation, Sudan, if only they could.
But they were companions with him, as befits diviners, shaking their heads in amazement when they learned, and when his forehead radiated with that golden radiance that the eye did not see, and insight perceived him as a halo above the heads of creative people.
Then the street embraces me and takes my hand in despair on the flowery, engineered pedestrian sidewalks, and the Uber driver on the opposite side is talking on the phone to his beloved. I thought so, so I thought well of him, and he smiles, as if I were whispering to him.. Since the day I saw you, it is as if the whole universe is singing, my heart is smiling towards the world.
It is as if the artist, in his existential absorption, is eavesdropping on the music of heaven
And he wishes people would listen to his latest tunes
But the tyranny of war came between him and us, so his heart returned to him
Kesira Asefa.
He held back his voice, which was roaring like a storm
Heralding the revolution that has begun, he recommends vigilance, caution, and preparation, and welcomes the month of ten, the month of ten, and tweets from inside prison with Mahjoub Sharif’s poetry:
Birds wounded by your knives…your prisoners!
He stopped the movement of the galaxy with the melody of the epic, and created glory for the human being of Sudan, who was tough in features and alive with feeling.
Do they know how much we love him and how much we will remember him?!
We will remember him whenever lightning flashes in the sky of the island, and whenever its horizon heats up and its expanses thunder and rain rains.
We will remember him whenever the streets ignite with anger, like a boiling cauldron, and his nobility shines.
Whenever an unjust dawn dawns upon us, and whenever a tyrant falls and crumbles from a worn-out, gnawing place.
We will look at the street and see it in the eyes of the defeated
Coming from the Sennar Gate carrying a buffalo hide prayer, a skull pitcher and a rosary made from the teeth of the dead.
We will find it in papyrus paintings, pyramid sculptures, and the biography of Abadamak (the Nubian god of war).
In the forest, the desert, the savanna plain, the tropical sun and nirvana.
He will secure us on the day of adversity when hardship becomes apparent
He will be immortalized by the Quintet, the Seven, the Mardum, the Hombi, the Delib, and the Military Marshals.
Its melody will resonate from the organ, the hymns of the violins, and the ethereal introduction of Zad al-Shajoun, which could only be produced by a genius spirit.
His soul will be healed and rejoiced in the praises of the Arkis that permeate hearts and domes, in the isolation of the vast void.
He will be born from us and in us until eternity
Brilliant in the green of the basil, the suns of the Aseel, and the magic of the firstborn
He will be remembered by the people of Al-Tuqaba and Al-Masid
And the people of words and poems
He will remain in our minds
The musician of generations and the initiator of the struggle, unique in the sublimity of his conscience, passionate about the concerns of his people, fertile with inspiration, deep in longing, a reacher and pinnacle of the arts of the people of Sudan and humanity as a whole.
Our pride is between the two worlds
Muhammad Al-Amin Hamad Al-Nil Al-Tahir Al-Azirq
Here we salute you with the greeting of Madani, the beauty of the island and its maiden. We salute you, Madani the Sunni, who is lying on the shore of the Blue Nile, bathing in its waters, resting on its sands, warming itself with its love, resting in its spaciousness, resting on its soil and soil, its edge and its edge, from it, it is the island, your beginning, your news, and your end.
May you rest in eternal peace
May God bestow upon you a special mercy out of His grace
And ina for your parting moments.
And unto God and to Him we shall return.
And after,
Had it not been repeated, the words would have been exhausted.
