Many years ago, a Jordanian visitor to Iraq was invited to a women’s only party at a lavish Baghdad estate. This was in the late fifties, when the monarchy was still in existence, and the rumblings of revolution had yet to be heard. A graceful young woman in a cream dress got up and began to sing. Surprised that she had been invited to an afternoon of entertainment for which she had been unprepared, the Jordanian looked around at her hosts and asked who the young woman was. The Iraqi matriarch sitting next to her sniffed, then said icily, “My dear, this is Iraq’s Um Kulthoum, Afifa Iskander”.

Um Kulthoum, for those who don’t know of her, was an Egyptian phenomenon, a singer with an amazing voice and an even more amazing following. Every Thursday night, Arabs from the Nile to the Euphrates would tune into Egypt’s state radio to listen to her newest song, which would go on for several enthralling hours. It is said that her funeral brought out so many thousands of weeping Egyptians in 1975 that it upstaged that of Jamal Abdul-Nasser’s, the deceased President of Egypt.

To compare any singer to Um Kulthoum was the biggest compliment a singer could receive, especially in the fifties (this is before Arab rock had been invented). Afifa Iskander deserved it, not because of her overpowering voice nor her magnetic presence (factors which had made Um Kulthoum a star) but because of the warmth of her personality and the astonishing way she sang Iraqi ballads and made them her own. She was Iraq’s Um Kulthoum because she sang Iraqi songs that spoke to Iraqis everywhere in the same way that Um Kulthoum, despite her great Arab following, sang primarily to Egyptians; and she became a national icon precisely because she was able to sing songs that did not imitate the style of Egyptian or Lebanese chanteuses, but were profoundly, natively Iraqi.

In March 2004, I accompanied two elderly men on a visit to Afifa Iskander’s apartment, overlooking the Tigris river. The woman who received us at the door was getting on in years and obviously not well, but she was warm and amiable and quickly made us comfortable. Of course, the past came alive again under our questioning. She told us that she had taken early retirement after Saddam Hussein had come to power because she sensed she never wanted to sing for this man, as she had sung for all of Iraq’s past monarchs and Prime Ministers. He had tried to entice her with money and presents but she refused them all. And so for thirty-five years, she had kept a low profile, seeing friends and paying private visits to people whom she had kept up a close relationship with over the years, but she never undertook any public recitals.

While we were there, a neighbor came in and read our fortunes in our coffee cups; Afifa sang a medley of her old songs, and the river, spread out before us like glass, turned grayer and darker as the evening wore on. I thought about the visit later. Here was a woman whose livelihood was singing, and yet she had willingly circumscribed her own source of revenue so as not to sing for a dictator. How many of Iraq’s Baathist-connected oligarchs, the new rich in Iraq, could have said the same thing?