Today passes the eighth anniversary of the death of the Iraqi singer Afifa Iskandar at the age of 91, as she was born in the city of Mosul to an Armenian father and a Greek mother in 1921, and excelled in singing from a very early age, then she soon developed her talent and rose to the ladder of the famous artists. In her time until many titles were given to her.

Its inception

Afifa Iskandar comes from an artistic family that is fluent in many types of arts. The theater actor, member of the Iraqi Artists Syndicate, Muhammad al-Omar says that her mother, Marika Dimitri, played 4 musical instruments, and worked as a singer in one of Baghdad's nightclubs until 1940, while her father was a singer. And a fan of the arts of singing and melodies.

Due to her family's passion for art, Iskandar began singing at the age of five, but Muhammad al-Omar indicates that her first concert was in 1935 in the city of Erbil (northern Iraq) at the age of 14, as her early marriage did not stop when she was 12 years old. An obstacle to its ambition.

He added that her musician husband Iskandar Estefian encouraged her to continue singing and develop her talent, and she performed dozens of concerts in Baghdad clubs until her songs entered the Iraqi radio in 1937, to spread her art everywhere, which allowed her to obtain the title of (monologue) by the Arab Music Society in order to find her. Iraqi singing and maqam colors, as well as granting it the title of Shahrara Iraq

Regarding her mastery of the Iraqi maqam, Omar comments, "(Afifa) Iskandar can be considered the first Iraqi woman who excelled in singing difficult Iraqi maqamas, as well as the first who sang the eloquent poem along with popular poems and al-Jalghi al-Baghdadi.

Her artistic balance

Despite the spread of Afifa Iskandar's songs in Iraq in the period leading up to her travel to Egypt, the actual beginning of her and the spread of her fame in the Arab world was after she traveled to Cairo in 1938, as Omar indicates that her ambition took her to Cairo to work for a long time with the band "Badia Massabni" She was famous in the forties, as well as her work with the late Egyptian singer Tahia Carioca.

As for the writer and TV director, Muhammad al-Hashemi, he quotes his father, who was a contemporary of Afifa Iskandar in her youth, that she was loved by everyone, and was able to penetrate the hearts of Iraqis and the Arab world, and as a result, she deserved several titles such as (Shahrura Iraq) and (Fatina Iraq).

About her art and songs, he points out that Afifa's artistic career was full of 1500 songs in various types of Iraqi singing and shrines, as well as her participation in the Egyptian film (Happy Day) with the artist Muhammad Abdel Wahab and Faten Hamama.

He confirmed that she was wronged at the time after director Mohamed Karim cut her song from the movie due to its long duration, as Al-Hashemi relates about her before her death that the truncation of her song caused her great sadness, and she refused at that time to file a lawsuit against the film director, citing that her experience with major Egyptian artists was a bus.

She also participated in the film Cairo - Baghdad, the first Egyptian-Iraqi joint production.

Afifa Iskandar on the cover of an Egyptian magazine to advertise the Iraqi-Egyptian film (Cairo-Baghdad) 1946 #IraqZaman pic.twitter.com/Oj9yoZyPp8

- Cindy (@CindyYassen) December 10, 2019

Regarding her most beautiful and most popular songs so far, Al-Hashemi says in his interview with Al-Jazeera Net that her songs "burned (burned) the soul" and "My beloved Eid Mubarak", and that the song "Ya Yama Antini (give me) the paths" was the most beautiful and is still sung on various occasions.

He added, "The number of her songs exceeds any famous Arab artist. Even Umm Kulthum did not sing a quarter of her songs, but she did not gain wide Arab fame."

Mari saw that cutting her song from Abdel Wahab's movie prevented her from achieving widespread fame (Al-Jazeera)

Happy day

And in this approach goes the artistic director Bayat Merhi, who believes that had it not been for the deduction of her song with Muhammad Abdel Wahab in the movie (Happy Day), she would have achieved unrivaled fame, stressing that her songs, which he described as (the wonderful), such as “Ya Akid Al-eyebr” and “Ya Sukari Ya Asali and “Burned the Soul” are still present among Iraqis, and many artists have re-sung them.

The reason for the popularity of these songs is attributed to the fruit of her cooperation with the most prominent Iraqi composers of her time, such as Ahmed al-Khalil, Khazal Mahdi and Yassin al-Sheikhly, as well as her travels between Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, which allowed her to see the various types of singing, and thus she sang al-Fusha and colloquial Iraqi in various colors.

Afifah Iskandar's last artistic station was a year before her death when she was 90 years old when she participated in the series (Fatina Baghdad), which is an extension of her television and cinematic participation in nearly 11 films, the most prominent of which were "Cairo-Baghdad" and "Leila in Iraq." .

Neglect and death

Despite the great artistic balance and her fame in the royal era, Afifa Iskander's last years were full of loneliness, isolation and neglect.

Al-Hashemi explained that her singing salon, which she established in the forties of the last century in Baghdad, witnessed the presence of senior men of the monarchy, arts and literature, and the Iraqi Prime Minister at the time, Nuri Al-Saeed, was keen to attend its councils every Monday, as well as King Faisal I's admiration for her songs and the love of the artistic community for her and her art.

However, this love and royal support ended, according to Al-Hashemi, with the coup that overthrew the royal era in 1958, as its refusal to kill the royal family caused great problems for it and deliberate neglect by the then Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim, as its relationship with the state improved only during the era of the President Iraqi Abdul Salam Aref, as he points out, has not received any attention from the successive Iraqi governments and the Artists Syndicate, and has suffered in the last years of her life from isolation, loneliness and poverty.

Al-Lami said that successive Iraqi governments neglected Afifa Iskandar in their last years (Al-Jazeera)

The head of the Iraqi Artists Association, Muhammad al-Lami, goes in this regard, who confirms that, unlike her artistic career, Afifa Iskandar witnessed in her life great negligence by the Iraqi governments in addition to the neglect of the local and Arab artistic cultural unions and societies that, upon her death, were content to publish condolences on social media. Various media.

Al-Lami added in his interview with Al-Jazeera Net that he accompanied her for a week when she was transferred to Sheikh Zayed Hospital in central Baghdad, then she was transferred to the Medical City Hospital due to severe bleeding in the brain, but she died there after only one day on December 21, 2012 without being Get little attention.

Al-Lami concludes that one of the sad ironies of her life is that although she died alone and forgotten, the search engine "Google" celebrated her birthday last year to remind Iraqis of a great artistic mission that Iraq has not seen so far.