Iraq Culture & Language

Iraqi culture carries an unusually long memory, and a recent history that has damaged a great deal of what carried it.

Music

The Iraqi maqam is a classical vocal tradition with its own modal system, performed with santur, joza and percussion, and it is UNESCO-listed. Alongside it sit the rural chobi dance music of the north and a popular song tradition whose stars are known across the Arab world.

Reed and mudbrick

The southern mudhif is built from bundled marsh reeds bent into arches, with no nails, timber or stone, and the technique is identifiable on Sumerian cylinder seals. In the north, mudbrick villages and the tell mounds of ancient cities are the visible archaeology.

The kitchen

Masgouf — carp split, spiced and grilled upright beside an open fire on the Tigris bank — is the national dish. Alongside it: biryani, dolma, kubba, quzi, and date syrup, from a country that was until recently the world’s largest producer of dates.

Pilgrimage as culture

Ashura and Arbaeen dominate the religious year, with passion plays, processions and the collective feeding of millions of walkers. Whatever one’s view of the devotion, the logistics are extraordinary.

Coffee houses and storytelling

Baghdad’s traditional coffee houses — Shabandar on Mutanabbi Street is the famous one — are where men sit over tea and backgammon and where the hakawati, the professional storyteller, once worked a room through a serialised tale over weeks. Mutanabbi Street itself is the book market, named for a tenth-century poet, and its Friday crowd is the clearest surviving picture of the city’s intellectual life.

Writing and loss

Iraq has a strong modern literary and artistic tradition — Jawad Saleem’s Freedom Monument in Baghdad, the poets Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Nazik al-Malaika, who helped free Arabic verse from classical metre. Much of the cultural infrastructure was damaged after 2003, and rebuilding it is ongoing.

Arabic and Kurdish are both official. Iraqi Arabic differs noticeably from the Gulf and Levantine dialects; Kurdish in the north is mostly Sorani in the east and Badini, a Kurmanji dialect, in the west of the region.

Turkmen, Syriac and Neo-Aramaic are spoken by minority communities — the latter a living descendant of the language spoken across the region two thousand years ago.

English is spoken by guides, in the better hotels, in Erbil’s business sector and among the educated young, and is rare otherwise. A guide who translates is part of how travel here works.

A few words open doors: as-salamu alaykum as a greeting, shukran for thank you, zain for good in Iraqi usage, and sepas for thank you in Kurdish, which is noticed and appreciated in the north.