Salima Murad

Origins and early life

Salima Murad was born in Baghdad around 1900 into an Iraqi Jewish family, and she remained Jewish all her life, never converting and never leaving Iraq.

Work and career

She began singing in the cafés of Baghdad at a time when public singing by women was considered disreputable, and her voice carried her from those rooms to the recording studios of the 1930s, when Iraqi radio and the Baghdadi record industry were being built largely by Jewish musicians. She sang the compositions of the brothers Saleh and Daoud al-Kuwaiti, themselves Iraqi Jews, and their partnership produced much of the modern Iraqi song repertoire; her recordings of maqam-inflected love songs made her the most famous singer in the country.

The prime minister Nuri al-Said gave her the honorific Pasha, and she is the only Iraqi woman to have been addressed by that title. After the mass exodus of Iraq's Jews in 1950 and 1951 she chose to stay, married the much younger singer Nazem al-Ghazali, and continued to perform, though she was barred from radio for a period in the 1950s during an antisemitic campaign and her name, like those of the al-Kuwaiti brothers, was later erased from official broadcasts.

She died in Baghdad in 1974, and she appears as a character in the Iraqi Jewish literature of Samir Naqqash and Eli Amir.