Rahim AlHaj’s music can seem bleak at first. His 2017 album, Letters From Iraq, is a mournful meditation on the violence wrought by the U.S. military invasion of his home country. So it comes as something of a surprise that this master of the oud—a pear-shaped Middle Eastern string instrument that inspired the invention of the guitar—is exuberantly funny, punctuating his sentences with a goofy cackle and exclamations such as “Oh, my God,” and “Can you believe it?”
Born in Baghdad in 1968, AlHaj was a musical prodigy renowned across Iraq by 13. He studied under the “king of oud,” Munir Bashir, at an elite conservatory. Music, however, wasn’t his only focus. Under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, AlHaj became an outspoken dissident. He spent two years as a political prisoner, enduring torture before fleeing to Syria, Jordan, and, in 2000, the United States.
