An oud maker in his workshop in central Baghdad. Residents rarely play the oud in public now for fear of angering militants critical of secular music.
BAGHDAD — Dhia Jabbar hides his oud in a sack when he walks down the street in his Baghdad neighborhood.
He used to teach students in the back room of a photo shop, where the sound could not be heard. But last week, militia gunmen invaded the store, destroying one of his instruments and ordering him to stop teaching. He had dreamed of a performing career, but now he has lost hope.
“Iraq is dead,” he says.
Seven thousand miles away, Rahim Alhaj, who fled Iraq in 1991, carries his oud without a second thought through the streets of Albuquerque, where he now lives. In New York, Washington and other cities, he plays for audiences of hundreds. An album he recorded was recently nominated for a Grammy Award.
The two musicians are bound by their passion for the oud, a pear-shaped instrument whose roots run deep in Iraq’s history. Some say that in its music lies the country’s soul.
Both men trained at the same prestigious conservatory in Baghdad. Both have a deep love for traditional Iraqi melodies.
But Mr. Jabbar, 29, and Mr. Alhaj, 40, are also tied together by having watched — one from close up, one from far away — their country’s descent into sectarian violence.
Mr. Alhaj worries constantly about his mother and brother, who still live in Baghdad’s dangerous Sadr City neighborhood, in a house without electricity or running water. When there is fighting between Mahdi Army militia members and American and Iraqi forces there, as has been the case virtually every day in recent weeks, he calls his family frantically.
“It’s hard because I’m so far away from them and so far from their struggle, and I feel helpless,” he said.
The violence he reads about stirs troubled dreams: images of being tortured, as he was in the 1980s under Saddam Hussein’s government, or of seeing people being executed.
In 2004, he returned to Baghdad to give a concert at his family’s house. The friends he grew up with, he said, wore beards and felt uncomfortable listening to him play; secular music was considered “haram,” forbidden. An oud maker he knew was forced to build his instruments secretly in a tiny workshop on his roof.
One morning, Mr. Alhaj awoke in his family’s home to hear his niece singing a famous Iraqi love song. But the lyrics had been changed; the words no longer spoke of romantic love, but only of God, of heaven and damnation.
“What happened?” Mr. Alhaj asked. “What happened?”
Mr. Jabbar watched the transformation of Baghdad in real time. He saw religious fervor engulf the street outside his family’s house in the Shaab neighborhood, where he used to sit outside and play for passers-by. Salons and casual concerts, once common, became rare and clandestine. The teaching and performing jobs that used to await talented oud players when they finished training disappeared.
“I have lost 10 years of my life,” he said, “the years that I worked to be able to play for people.”
Iraq was once famous for its oud players. The instrument was a common sight in Iraqi households, much like the guitar in the United States. According to one legend cited in Grove Music Online, a standard reference, the oud was invented by Lamak, a descendant of the biblical Cain. When his son died, Lamak is said to have hung his remains in a tree and seen in the skeleton the bowled body and elegant neck.
A ninth-century jurist in Baghdad extolled the oud’s healing powers, as did Muhammad Shihab al-Din, a 19th-century writer. “It places the temperament in equilibrium,” he wrote. “It calms and revives hearts.”
Even Saddam Hussein was not immune to the instrument’s charms. He is reported to have received an oud, made from rare woods and inlaid with ivory, from a famous maker, Mohammed Fadhel. Mr. Hussein ordered a renowned oud player to teach him how to play, but arriving in the dictator’s presence, the man was so terrified he could not speak. Another oudist summoned to replace him gave Mr. Hussein two lessons, the story goes.
As a child, Mr. Jabbar fell asleep to music on his father’s tape recorder. Later, he sang national songs in a choir in secondary school. At 18, late for a professional musician, he took up the oud, studying the mysteries of the Iraqi maqam, the complex system of tonal sequences and improvisation passed from master to student. “I was born to learn it,” he said.
When American tanks rolled into Baghdad in 2003, Mr. Jabbar was filled with excitement.
“I used to sit with my friends and talk about our dreams and what would become of Baghdad after the invasion,” he said. “I was expecting that Baghdad would be just like Hollywood. We were moving around freely. Sometimes we would go home at 2 a.m.”
But the new freedom did not last. He heard whispered stories of musicians who had been threatened by religious extremists. One of his professors was attacked while driving from Syria to Baghdad. The gunmen smashed the man’s oud, and said they would kill him if he continued to play. A month later, the professor fled Iraq.
“I started to be more careful and not to talk about my studies,” Mr. Jabbar said. “I used to say that I was studying painting or history or to become an English teacher.”
In some neighborhoods, he could carry his oud without much fear. In others, he said, “it was suicide to carry it with me.”
He plays where he can, in occasional festivals, in secret gatherings with friends. Once in a while, he stops by the shop of an oud maker, Ahmad al-Abdalli, on a winding street of central Baghdad’s market district.
“Before this, many players would come here and gather and play and sing, and when they go home, they are relieved and happy,” Mr. Abdalli said. “But now, they do not come, or if they come, they are only one or two at a time and they play for only a few minutes, so as not to attract the attention of the fanatics.”
Mr. Jabbar owns a valuable oud, built, like Mr. Hussein’s, by Mohammed Fadhel, an instrument so precious even his wife may not touch it. But he thinks about selling the instrument.
Mr. Alhaj, too, owned a Mohammed Fadhel, given to him decades ago by his teacher in Baghdad. He used to sleep with it next to him. He even talked to it, worrying his parents.
But in 1991, when he left Iraq, slipping into Jordan, a border guard confiscated the oud. As he saw it disappear, Mr. Alhaj recalled, he started shaking and became ill. “This is the saddest moment of my entire life,” he said.
He arrived in the United States in 2000, after years in Syria, and a refugee worker found him a job at McDonald’s. “What kind of institute is that?” Mr. Alhaj said he asked. “Do they teach Arabic classical music there?”
Eventually, he began to perform again. He does what he can to keep Iraqi oud music alive, giving concerts to benefit Iraqi children and talking to audiences about the oud and its history.
He knows he is lucky to be able to play freely, to be able to speak out without fear. “I have a chance to raise my voice here,” he said.
He rejoiced when the Hussein regime fell, he said, but he opposed the American invasion. Sometimes the thought crosses his mind that “there is a soldier there, and I do not know if he is killing my brother.”
Mr. Jabbar, for his part, jokes that he harbors a secret fantasy.
“I am going to make a coup d’état and make everyone in all the neighborhoods play the oud,” he said. “It will be a revolution.”
Qais Mizher, Anwar J. Ali and Ali Hameed contributed reporting.
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