Ali Najm: Refusing to Leave Baghdad Behind

For Iraqi singer Ali Najm, music has never been entertainment. It has always been language—the closest thing to confession, to prayer, to history passing through the body. Long before audiences sang his words back to him, Iraqi music was how he understood himself and the world around him. It was the rhythm of the floorboards in family homes, weddings, long nights, and half-remembered stories. “I see it as a way to connect cultures, so I aim to present honest art that reflects the spirit of our region,” he states. 

From hit singles like “Bismar” and “Quarish Baba” to his “Hay Al-Wolof’ collab with singer Adeeba, Najm’s journey didn’t follow a straight line. Before becoming a musician, he once dreamt of being a painter or designer, but moved to Syria as a teenager, mesmerised by American Idol and the idea of standing on a stage. When Arab Idol came closer to home, he chased it—first as a dreamer, later as a contestant who would eventually be cited among the strongest voices in the region. For many, that moment might have been an endpoint. For him, it became the beginning of something heavier, more personal.

That moment still lives with him: standing on stage for the first time, performing his own song and hearing it return to him, sung by strangers. More than mere validation, it was a reminder that music does not belong to the one who creates it, but to everyone who recognises themselves within it. Independent singers aren’t detached, he says. They’re acutely woven into their environment, responding to its rhythms and reflecting its truths. “We are not borrowing from some parallel world,” he explains. “We’re making music from the ground we stand on.”

Now working independently between Baghdad and the Gulf, Najm continues to modernise traditional forms of Iraqi music without diluting their identity. He reinvents chobi, hacha’a, and ancestral rhythms, blending the emotional weight of Iraqi tradition with contemporary production. “Is this really an old Iraqi song?” is a common response when people hear his fusions. That question, more than praise, is proof of his mission working.

Najm’s work is about conservation of maqam and tarab in motion, rather than using fusion as a gimmick—not to modernise for the sake of a trend, but to make it audible to a generation that may no longer recognise the voices of their own heritage. There is an honesty to the way he approaches sound, an insistence that the old doesn’t need to disappear for the new to exist. The ghost of Salima Murad, muse and musical ancestor echoes through his work in a form of continuation. 

The artist is currently working on his first musical mixtape, a body of work exploring Iraqi identity, where each track reflects a fragment of the country interpreted in a modern way. In the making of tomorrow, he envisions a regional creative scene that’s unafraid of its own voice—independent artists creating freely, without imitation or apology. For him, true success is not chart topping or international recognition alone. It is longevity. Legacy. Music that survives him. “I dream of creating music that lives on.”

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