ABSTRACT
It is no literary quip or quibble to start by saying that studying the kharjas amounts to studying the tail-ends of some of the muwashshaḥāt. But the fact that the kharjas are still made a subject of study on their own indicates that many scholars still view their role in the muwashshaḥ as more crucial than that of a tail-end. If we did not tacitly accord such a crucial role to the kharja we would be more likely to study the kharjas in the context of the more general subject of Hispano-Arabic and Hispano-Hebraic stanzaic poetry. In other words, some eight and a half centuries after Ibn Bassām of Santarem (d. 1147), there are those who still accept his view that the kharja, and particularly if it is in Romance or vernacular Arabic, has a basic role to play in the structure of the muwashshaḥ.
