Iraq's Elvis Ready to Rock America
Feb. 26, 2003 -- At 12, he sold his bicycle in a Baghdad souk to buy a cherished guitar. Thirty years, two wars and several migrations later, Kazem al Sahir is one of the Arab world's most-loved, top-grossing singers, whose unabashedly romantic music sends millions of women swooning.
His smooth voice, accompanied by a full, complex orchestration, can be heard in falafel stores, record shops and Arab households throughout the world.
And now, as his troubled homeland looks set to suffer yet another debilitating war, al Sahir is ready to reach out to American audiences as he launches a four-city U.S. tour later this week.
From the hot, dusty streets of a working-class neighborhood in Baghdad to a blustery winter in North America is a long journey, and the Iraqi superstar has had to overcome more than his fair share of obstacles along the way.
In his hotel room in Las Vegas — where he was rehearsing for his upcoming shows in New York, Chicago, Detroit and San Francisco — al Sahir recalled his early years, when he had a tough time convincing his family that music was going to be his life.
"My family wanted me to complete my studies, to have a stable career," said al Sahir, 42, in a phone interview with ABCNEWS.com. "I'm the seventh son of nine siblings and we all lived together in a very small house — it was a solid upbringing, but it was hard in those days, and my parents wanted me to be secure."
Over the years, the hardships have eased a bit, but they have never really ceased.
The son of a lowly Iraqi government employee went on to become one of the Arab world's superstars. He now has Canadian citizenship, which greatly assists his mobility; a home in Cairo, which grants him proximity to the all-important Egyptian market; and managers, agents, concerts, awards, fans, and comforts he never dreamed of.
But family worries continue to dog the Arab world's Elvis Presley-meets-Luciano Pavarotti.
His siblings and their families still live in Baghdad. His mother — who used to live with him in Cairo — has gone back home to Baghdad, refusing to be away from her children in these difficult times. And the fear of yet another war drives Iraq's most famous living musician sleepless with worry.
"I wish there won't be a war," he said. "Inshallah (God willing) there won't be a war. I just want everybody to live in peace. I want people to return to their work like they used to, to have the right to live as human beings and to live their lives in peace."
A Fine Diplomatic Balance
Politics and art have often crossed paths, sometimes overtly and sometimes inadvertently. But while many Western artists, including a number of musicians, have spoken out against a war with Iraq in recent weeks, al Sahir has to perform a tricky balancing act.
Although he left Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, mostly living in Jordan and Lebanon, al Sahir is able to visit his homeland. But the fact that he has a large extended family still residing in Iraq puts the singer in a delicate position with the government in Baghdad.
While the ruling Baath Party has been quick to employ al Sahir's fame as a national symbol, calling him a true "son of Iraq," gossip and unsubstantiated — but potentially damaging — reports have dogged al Sahir in the rumor-rife Arab world.
Local reports, especially in the Egyptian press, have periodically suggested that al Sahir might be "an agent for Baghdad," and there has been speculation that the top-selling singer could be vulnerable to attacks by various exiled Iraqi opposition groups.
Al Sahir has been supporting several humanitarian programs working with children in Iraq, and he's not averse to making measured — mostly innocuous — pleas for peace. But he refrains from making any overtly political statements.
He'd much rather talk about his music. "My music is about love, about the Earth, about the stars, about light," he said. "My music tells a story — like watching a movie — I try to create mental pictures with my music."
Songs of Love and Loss
Despite his attempts to steer clear of the political sphere, there's little doubt that for most of his fans across national, political and sectarian divides, the handsome singer crooning his songs of love and yearning is a powerful symbol of the troubles that have wrecked his ancient homeland.
Although he is not in political exile, his music often deals with the loss of home, a separation from the homeland angst that speaks to millions of Arab refugees and exiles across the world.
In his displacement and loss, al Sahir is not alone. Although definitive figures are hard to arrive at, an estimated 4 million Iraqis live outside their homeland in a diaspora largely created by Saddam Hussein's regime. Against a population of about 23 million in Iraq, they form a significant proportion of the world's Iraqi population.
Most Iraqis in exile live in the Middle East, from refugee camps in Iran and Saudi Arabia to expatriate communities in Jordan and Syria. A few — primarily the wealthy, educated and well connected — have made it to the coveted West, mostly Britain and the United States.
But while Iraqis in the United States mostly come in as asylum applicants or on family member visas, a number of Iraqis remain in legal limbo across Europe and in Australia, where they have sought asylum.
According to Rahman Aljebouri, manager of the Iraqi Community Organizing Project at the Washington-based Iraq Foundation, the United States is currently home to 450,000 people of Iraqi origin, more than 50,000 of whom arrived between 1991 and 2002.
While the majority of Iraqis in the United States are Shiite Muslim, the U.S. Iraqi community is made up of a diverse body of ethnicities such as Kurds, Assyrians, Sunnis and Turkmen, with just as many religious affiliations.
Many experts say Iraqis in the United States mostly oppose Saddam's regime, although there is a diversity of opinions about what Iraq really needs and how it could be achieved.
"I think they are mostly opposed to Saddam," said Aljebouri. "But there are many Iraqis, including working-class Iraqis, who don't want to deal with politics and they don't want to be used for particular agendas, all in the name of the Iraqi community."
‘The Land of Slaughtered Love’
It's a trap al Sahir, as a de facto Iraqi spokesman-cum-artist-in-exile, is painfully aware of.
"I respect my fans," said the softspoken superstar, speaking very carefully. "First of all, everything I do, I have to think very carefully before I do it because my fans respect and love me and I have to watch everything."
But while lyrical love songs form the bulk of his work, al Sahir is also capable of offering complex, allegorical statements on displacement, war and oppression.
In his hit single "Mustakeel (I Give Up)," al Sahir takes a hard look at nostalgia. "My home is not my home anymore," he sings. "And the land of slaughtered love is not my land anymore."
And while the Iraqi artist has by and large proved to be an adept practitioner of the political trapeze act, he has often run into trouble with the Arab establishment.
After the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s — a crippling eight-year war in which he lost a number of loved ones, including his best friend — al Sahir composed "Ladghat el Hayya (The Snake Bite)," a satirically defiant song about fear and betrayal that was promptly banned by Iraqi censors.
‘The Difficult Years’
In the highly politicized climate of the Middle East, al Sahir has also had to be careful with his market.
Following the 1991 Gulf War, al Sahir fled to Jordan, but wasn't able to work or travel for the next two years. It's a chapter of his life he refers to only as "the difficult years." Al Sahir's fortunes picked up after he entered into a tremendously creative partnership with respected Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani in the mid-1990s.
But politics and the market are ever-fickle things. Although he spends several months a year in Cairo and has been embraced by the Egyptian market, al Sahir has had to be careful about Iraqi-Egyptian relations.
And in 1998, when 23 top singers from 16 Arab countries gathered in Beirut to perform in the Arab world's biggest sing-along, al Sahir did not appear in the music video, "The Arab Dream," apparently due to fears that Kuwaiti singer Nabil Shuail would refuse to join in if al Sahir was included.
A Meeting of the Old and New
Despite the occasional hiccups, over the years al Sahir's music has won widespread acclaim and adulation in the Arab world.
Last year, his hit love song "Ana wa Laila (Me and Laila)," was voted the sixth most popular song in the world in a worldwide BBC listeners' poll.
"His music is very popular," said Simon Shaheen, a U.S.-based Palestinian musician and founder of the highly acclaimed Arabic fusion band Qantara. "He tries to use Arabic classical poetry and infuse it with a contemporary, 20th-century Arabic arrangement."
With his years of classical music training at Baghdad's prestigious Music Academy, al Sahir's music is a far cry from the simple, essentially two-beat rhythms of pop music, a genre that is popularly called shaabi music in Egypt.
On his latest U.S. tour, al Sahir will be accompanied by a 15-piece orchestra composed of Egyptian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Jordanian and Syrian musicians, many of whom have heard of but never played with the Iraqi musician before.
"His arrangements are not easy," said Bassam Saba, a Lebanese-born musician now settled in New York who will be accompanying al Sahir on the nay, or Arabic flute. "I had never played with him before, so for some of us, the rehearsals have been very strenuous work. But he's a very cool guy and he's very flexible and open to suggestions."
This time around though, al Sahir is hoping his audiences will be open to the message he carries. "In these difficult times today, I feel it is important for people to see the other face of the Iraqi people — that we also have artists, poets, philosophers, writers and celebrities; that we also have a creative culture and it's not just what they see on the news."