Twentieth Century Baghdad by Night

During the first decades of the twentieth century Baghdad transformed from a regional Ottoman city to a fast-growing capital and its urban landscape and layout changed dramatically. During a time encompassing the late Ottoman period, the British mandate and the years of the Iraqi monarchy, the city experienced rapid modernization, urbanization, and political reforms. In tandem with these urban transformations, practices and institutions of leisure and entertainment began to move from the private realm and were transformed into public activities that often took place on a commercial scale. The emergence of new institutions of leisure in the urban landscape, such as cinemas, nightclubs, and cafés, was a significant and noticeable change that resulted in novel ways of inhabiting and spending time in the city at night. In the process, darkness was chassed away and nighttime was increasingly and rapidly turned into a space and opportunity for leisure. Nightfall fundamentally changed the streets of Baghdad and offered new forms of nocturnal amusement, entertainment, diversion, and distraction. When the sun set and the temperature dropped, a nocturnal world of leisure welcomed the city’s inhabitants. At night, uniformed watchmen kept order on al-Rashid Street, Baghdad’s modern thoroughfare, and looked out for intoxicated men returning from the area’s bars and nightclubs. Al-Rashid Street was also where, in the 1920s and 1930s, the majority of the city’s cinemas mushroomed. Around the same time, Abu Nuwas Street, which is an extension of al-Rashid Street and which runs along the Tigris, became one of the city’s main hubs of nocturnal leisure due to the bars, casinos, and nightclubs that could be found there.

Already decades before the emergence of nightclubs and cinemas, Baghdad’s hundreds of cafés played a key role in transforming and conquering darkness and nighttime as a respectable site of leisure and sociability. Not only did the café offer opportunities for socializing outside of the home, it also offered various forms of entertainment and, perhaps more importantly, made it respectable for men to go out, even at night. Some cafés, before the establishment of nightclubs, employed singers and performers. Live forms of entertainment were often more widespread and frequent during the month of Ramadan when café leisure extended well into the night. During Ramadan, cafés stayed open late and saw an increase in the number of visitors in the evenings after the breaking of the fast. In a way, Ramadan nights made the city of Baghdad available as a place of leisure to a larger group of people and allowed for nocturnal movements otherwise not sanctioned. While Ramadan did not change the gender segregated world of the café, the liminal time of the holy month did loosen up the age-related segregation enforced at cafés. Young boys who were normally not welcome in cafés during the evening could more freely move around the city, allowing them to attend some of the many performances that took place in cafés during Ramadan.

Unlike cafés, which in many ways bridged the gap between night and day, nightclubs belonged squarely in Baghdad’s urban night. Nightclubs began to appear in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities in the 1920s. As a result, certain forms of entertainment and leisure moved from Baghdad’s cafés to its nightclubs which employed female dancers and singers from across Iraq, Egypt, and the Levant. Most nightclubs shared a similar layout and included a bar, a restaurant serving drunk and hungry costumers, elaborately decorated walls and ceilings, a stage for performers and musicians, rows and small tables with lamps, tablecloths, ashtrays, flowers, and chairs for the guests. Tables were used by wealthier patrons who could afford to host female performers at their tables. In most nightclubs, it was forbidden for patrons to request songs. One reason for this prohibition was that fights would sometimes break out between audience members when they felt that their requests had been ignored or when their requested song was not played as quickly as they preferred. Some of these fights resulted in serious injuries and even casualties. When nightclubs began selling alcohol, the admittance fee was usually the cost of the first drink, which was much higher than in the city’s bars. When the consumption of alcohol became an integral part of nightclub leisure, nightclubs quickly became the only public places in the city where alcohol could be purchased until midnight. At a time when nightclubs, bars, and liquor stores were wide spread, it is not surprising to find a large number of popular Iraqi songs dealing with alcohol and drunkenness. One example is Hudairi Abu ‘Aziz’s famous song Ishrab Ka’sak (Drink Up) in which the singer urgers friend or lover to continue drinking and to “continue to be happy / forget the past / the night is sweet and brings relaxation.”

The popularity and demand for nocturnal leisure in the form of nightclubs increased the demand for new songs, new styles of music, and composers. Many of the musicians and composers, whose careers and fame were a result of the increase in nightclubs and taste for modern music, were Iraqi Jews. The most famous among them were Ezra Harun and later on the al-Kuwaiti brothers. From the 1930s onwards, the al-Kuwaiti brothers composed the majority of the music and wrote many of the songs that became the soundtrack to Iraqi nightlife. The al-Kuwaiti brothers started their career playing at the Jawahiri nightclub. They later opened their own club named Abu Nuwas. Together, the brothers composed more than 500 songs. The most popular of these were performed by the first generation of Iraqi divas, including Munira al-Huzuz, Zakiyya George, Samila Murad, and ‘Afifa Iskandar. The songs of these women continue to influence Iraq’s soundscape today. While most female performers came from poor or 45 middle class families, a small number of Iraqi women rose to national and regional fame. Those who rose to fame, the divas, became linked to cultural and political elites, and the public sphere through their radio and nightclub performances. Several of them also appeared in Iraqi and Egyptian films. In the early days of cinema production in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, the industry relied on female performers who started their careers in Baghdad’s nightclubs. Some of these women became entertainers of a different kind and managed to escaped nightlife’s connotations with moral ambiguity and sex work.

Not surprisingly perhaps, establishments of nocturnal leisure were often negatively depicted as institutions encouraging idleness and seen as centers of of immoral activities. To some Iraqi educators, officials, and politicians the newly available and myriad distractions, such as cinema and nightclubs, posed a threat to Iraqi society at large. Some of the opposition to nocturnal leisure was rooted in a combination of moral and medical concern. In 1934, an Iraqi medical doctor, Fa’iq Shakir, gave a speech to the Iraqi Children’s Welfare Society about syphilis and other venereal diseases. Shakir blamed a number of social practices and institutions of leisure. In Shakir’s opinion, brothels and nightclubs, which he linked to sex work, the consumption of alcohol, and indecent and revealing clothing, corrupted and lead Iraqi youth astray. Such concerns resulted in attempts to control, organize, and manage the nocturnal leisure time of Iraqi. Most of these attempts, however, were unsuccessful and and the conquering of the night continued unabated.

Pelle Valentin Olsen is a cultural, social, and transnational historian of the modern Middle East with a research and teaching focus on the history of leisure, labor, gender, sexuality, popular culture, and cultural production.

Illustration: Baghdad, omaka par (1918) av Jazeps Grosvald, Värmlands museum.