Mulla Abdussaheb: "Ya Yumma Weya Baba"

The Muslim leader Abu Ja‘far Al-Mansur founded Baghdad in 762, and for hundreds of years the city served as the glorious capital of the Abbasid caliphate. Then the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258, ruining everything. The Ottoman Empire eventually took Baghdad over, but the Ottomans were too stoked on Turkish nationalism to care much for the cosmopolitan city come the end of World War I. Baghdad passed into the pasty hands of the British empire, who kicked off another ruinous era—at which point we find a bunch of men sitting around in the city’s coffee shops, sipping tea and listening to early recordings of the Maqam songs, improvisations based on traditional scales that can back to the Abbasid caliphate. Oh, Baghdad—everyone says your glories have faded, yet your culture is so resilient!

Colonial politics may have dominated the talk in Baghdad’s coffeehouses back when the British formed the nation-state of Iraq, but this was evidently no concern of the singer in “Ya Yumma Weya Baba.” The song begins with a long, wailing solo from a mutbij, sounding like an especially nasal harmonium. The percussionist lays down a simple beat, and the male singer dreams up an illicit lover. “I beg you in the name of the Prophet, give me love,” he sings, the mutbij answering with reedy whirling. “Let’s spend the night together / There’s always time for recrimination later—after our lovemaking.”

Just a few months ago, at Joe’s Pub in New York City, I saw a group of musicians who had studied Maqam in Baghdad in the years before the United States occupation, which transformed Iraq into a perilous land of chaos. The band was dressed in the standard garb of the Maqam performers, black suits and pressed Navy-style hats. The singer, like his predecessor in “Ya Yumma Weya Baba,” forgot Baghdad’s political tragedies for the moment and sang, instead, of love. I got to thinking: While countless empires have come and gone, the Maqam songs have survived. Today’s Baghdad may be a maze of concrete blast barriers, military checkpoints and extremely dangerous marketplaces, but the music of Baghdad, like tea, is ever-present and always pleasant.