Few artists captured Iraq’s shifting social landscape as vividly as Sajida Obeid. Emerging under the Baʿath regime, surviving the violence of the 2000s, and rising anew in the digital era, she turned taboo subjects—drinking, desire, female autonomy—into shared moments of song and dance. Her work reveals how Iraqis negotiated control, morality, and joy across decades of upheaval.

In the human imagination, November is not simply a month in the calendar that begins and ends in thirty days; it is something more. It is a time of transformation and renewal, a season for contemplating longing and absence, and for summoning memory.

In Europe, when the second day of the month arrives, the light recedes, the fog descends, trees shed their leaves, and emptiness takes on a certain beauty. This is when the rituals of honouring the dead and the spirits of absent loved ones begin—one of the strangest moments of collective remembrance in the human calendar.

On this day too, Latin American communities turn collective memory into a carnival of colours, flowers, and music. In Día de los Muertos, people do not simply remember; they perform rituals that build a bridge between two times: the time of mortality and the time of eternity.

In the Arab imagination, naw’ al-wasmī begins with the arrival of November. It is a season when rain follows intense heat, and grass returns after drought—a time of beauty, fertility, and abundance. In this season, the land shifts from imminent endings to new beginnings.

And in Iraq, November is the month in which Sajida Obeid was born—the musical phenomenon who redefined the body and memory, and the power exercised over this Iraqi body and this Iraqi memory. She transformed singing from a vocal performance into a bodily experience that crosses the sharp lines carved by society into the stone of tradition.

The body

The body in Sajida Obeid’s songs is not merely a body of pleasure. It is the body of war, the body of memory, the broken body, the besieged body. It is the Iraqi collective body in all its scars.

Sajida does not sing simply for us to dance; she sings so that dance becomes a social commentary on the repressed body—especially the female body—in a society that sets its rules of “what is acceptable and what is forbidden” upon the individual.

Sajida Obeid transformed the ‘ayb—the taboo—in the Iraqi lexicon of tradition into art. In a society that publicly rejects drinkers and marks them with stigma, where no one is expected to weep over Jasim the beer drinker or even speak of him, Sajida not only made it possible to speak of Juwaysim Abu al-Ghiira—she made society dance as it discovered the traits of “the Arak drinker and beer-bottle idler”.

All we usually know of grandmothers is their wise and blessed presence at home. No one ever told us of a grandmother’s other habits. Sajida Obeid came to tell us that the old woman of the house might well be “drunk on a bottle of beer”.

When she sings “What should I tell my mother when she finds the bottle has broken?”, she is not anxious about the matter itself, nor about her mother, because she is going to tell her anyway. Her anxiety is about the Other reflected in the figure of the mother—one could place many words inside these brackets: the family, the tribe, society, religion. The anxiety is justified because Sajida is the one who broke the bottle. Had it been Sajid who broke it, there would have been no such uproar—and we would never have had this extraordinary song.

Sajida Obeid sings beyond the limits of what is “permitted” for the Iraqi body. She sings where the lines of shame, sin, and prohibition lie—“red lines” that are difficult even to talk about, let alone dance upon.

She surpassed all this complexity embedded in the Iraqi body and released it—light and free—into the song, which itself is free of musical complication; all her voice needs is the khishba (drum) to accompany it.

She exposed this quintessential Iraqi duality: pious social virtue by day, drinking and dancing by night. Sajida’s songs may be the aesthetic key to reading the Iraqi body as one of the manifestations of social identity.

The body trapped in the home and public space breaks its constraints in more forgiving settings—and here Sajida’s songs appear as an instinctive key that sets the body in motion through al-radh and al-haj‘a (Iraqi chanting and dancing). This is why she appears constantly at gatherings, weddings, and before the phone camera in the intimacy of the individual sphere—even when the audience is the distant community behind the screens.

In her songs, the Iraqi body tries to reclaim the sovereignty stripped from it by society—to reclaim its right to move, rejoice, and exist.

In mid-December 2021, Sajida Obeid performed a concert in Baghdad. The Associated Press described the event as “mesmerising”, noting how “the audience rose to its feet all at once, drawn to the raw power of her voice”.

Noor al-Rubaie, a 27-year-old dentist, told the Associated Press about attending the concert and why her favourite song is “inkisrat il-shisha”. For Noor, its importance lies in the fact that “it tackles subjects still considered taboo for women in Iraqi society”. That is why the song is her favourite—just as it is for millions of Iraqis who share Noor’s love for Sajida Obeid’s art.

The bullet

In pre-2003 Iraq, Sajida’s voice was no less enchanting than it is now. She performed at the Babylon Festival and in cities across the country; both the state and society listened and danced—and both were closed spaces.

In a 2022 interview on Samarra TV, Sajida Obeid spoke about Anisa, her niece, who used to accompany her as a dancer at her shows. Sajida said she called her Fanous (Lantern) because of her beauty and that she had raised her since she was a child.

Fanous was killed in front of Sajida during a concert in Ramadi, and Sajida herself was wounded by a bullet in the abdomen. She rarely recounts the details, and Iraqi journalism preserves almost no archive of the incident. But the story reveals the danger of the environment in which Sajida tried to sing. In her few appearances, she speaks with deep modesty, insisting that she sings for love in its broad human sense.

In 2021—the year Sajida performed in Baghdad—an important event took place relating to singing and the Iraqi body. Religious groups cancelled musical concerts in the city, and their followers staged protests outside Sindbad Land, denouncing the performances as “immoral and contrary to religion”.

What followed was a ban on alcohol and a wave of hostility towards the Iraqi body, embodied in the campaign against so-called “low-level content”. The state, the tribe, and religion converged to suppress any form of expression outside the accepted “frameworks”: the state’s framework (discipline and mobilisation), religion’s framework (modesty and sin), and the tribe’s framework (‘ayb and honour).

This expanding constriction created a need to summon “what is forbidden” into “what is permitted” (art), and to occupy freer spaces in order to escape the closed public sphere. This rekindled the desire to redefine the Iraqi body once again. Sajida Obeid became an icon of this resistance and an embodiment of the will.

The Associated Press described the audience at her Baghdad concert as “men and women of all ages and backgrounds swaying and singing along. Some women wore the hijab, others danced with bare legs and in tight short dresses. They came from across Baghdad, transcending the sectarian divisions that had long scarred the city”.

This moment resembles another moment in Iraqi history, one shaped by similar political and social forces—the moment in which Sajida Obeid first appeared in Iraq’s artistic landscape: the 1970s. It was the period when rural culture blossomed inside the city, especially Baghdad, producing rural-inflected voices, accents, dress, and even official discourse.

In this rentier/Baʿathist/modern-rural state, attempts to unify taste—including artistic taste—were serious enough to kill for. Sajida Obeid entered through the openings permitted by state and society—spaces people escaped to from the official song, which had begun turning a relentless shade of olive green.

Television and radio were not simply media; they were instruments of cultural discipline. They were the state’s voice in the citizen’s head—waking them up, accompanying them to work, choosing their evening film, and instructing them when to switch off the TV. And yet, despite this rigidity, Sajida managed to pass through the “official filter”, because the authorities regarded her as presenting a “safe rurality”—one that did not challenge politics and was allowed to complain and critique social phenomena.

Within this margin she shone, becoming a growing social and artistic phenomenon parallel to the intensifying mechanisms of cultural discipline. In every moment when such discipline is exercised, Sajida Obeid appears like a national lament.

Fanous

The most beloved and recognisable form of dance linked to the Iraqi body is al-haj‘a. It has deep historical, ritual, and cultural explanations. The archive holds rich material tracing its connection to ancient Sumerian times (the rituals of Inanna and Tammuz). Though Sajida has sung in all forms of rural musical tradition, her most famous and beloved songs are those of al-haj‘a.

Al-haj‘a is not song and not dance; it is a ritual performance—without sanctity—of voice, movement, and memory. Watching millions view her performance of al-haj‘a in the play al-‘Ālam fī Layla (“The World in One Night”) invites comparison to the Zar rituals in East Africa. But al-haj‘a is not for exorcism or collapse. It is more beautiful: its “sacred” moment lies in the body that performs it, not in any deity or spirit. It is an intensely personal moment, even when enacted collectively.

In a rare 1975 dossier on Iraqi Gypsy music in Annals of the Náprstek Museum, Václav Kobitsa described al-haj‘a as an existential act rather than an artistic one.

In Kobitsa’s account, al-haj‘a appears as the craft of the marginalised—those denied official means of livelihood—and as the craft of Iraqis who made their bodies into musical instruments. It is the art of a community that lived through sound.

This community, which dances simply to live, also performs an act of silent protest—a society of rhythm located outside Iraq’s class boundaries, a shadow of rural life and a shadow of urban life.

Al-haj‘a was the dance performed by women before men for a set fee. It was the ritual of an economy of the body. And Fanous, who was killed during Sajida’s concert in Ramadi, was a painful embodiment of this economic ritual—an eruption of joy performed by bodies exiled from the state and its definitions of citizenship.

In the 1970s moment when Sajida Obeid entered Iraq’s artistic sphere, the state incorporated al-haj‘a into its cultural-disciplining tools (television and radio). Kobitsa notes that the state replaced the rababa with the oud, as the latter was considered the “instrument of the elite” and softened the harshness of the Gypsy sound, making it suitable for broadcast.

The rababa of that time was often made of tin rather than wood—a forced modernity born of poverty. Metal made the sound harsher, which did not suit the state’s economic order, so the tools of joy were modified.

As for the khishba, the wooden block that encodes the kinetic energy of al-haj‘a, Kobitsa describes it as an instrument that reminds the body of its own rhythm. When the “village girl” strikes it, she does not create melody; she extracts it from the skin of the drum. This sonic tension produces a resistant rhythm—the very magic of al-haj‘a.

From these roots, Sajida Obeid’s songs grew. Over the years, rhythm became an idea about the body and oral memory. With each new era, she moved gracefully to its tools while preserving the captivating force of her voice—from festivals, gatherings, and weddings to the era of the algorithm.

Her songs once played on cassette recorders, circulating in weddings, cars, and parties. With the same physical energy, they have become algorithmic ghosts—wherever they appear, they incite movement and dance.

TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook reshaped Sajida’s songs from social events in specific places (a wedding or gathering) into an everywhere-algorithm. This is the genius of a singer who began half a century ago yet still resembles her beginnings: warm and tender.

If we were to divide Sajida Obeid’s journey into three eras, they would be: the era of expansion within the closed space—the cassette, the tape recorder, and the Baʿath-era of the 1980s and 1990s; the era of satellite diffusion in the chaotic political, security, and sectarian landscape after 2003; and the era of digital transcendence in the age of social media after 2018, where Sajida Obeid becomes an aesthetic phenomenon that crosses Iraqi social groups.

Sajida Obeid entered the digital economy of emotion. She is no longer simply a singer; she is a moment that summons the body—whether in dance, sport, or humour. The language is no longer the Iraqi dialect; it is rhythm itself. Al-haj‘a is no longer a social event confined to a wedding or gathering—it has become digital content in a global space that shares culture and knowledge in environments that are not merely tolerant, but open, constantly reproducing and reinventing this culture and knowledge.