NASEER Shamma, an Iraqi oud player and composer who left his home country in the early 1990s, opened his first oud school – his “dream”, as he calls it – in a single room at the Cairo Opera House in 1996. Since then, the Cairo school has grown dramatically, and Shamma has built two schools in Algeria and, most recently, a branch in Abu Dhabi. Plans are underway to open a school in Sudan, one in Luxor after Ramadan and another in Morocco soon afterwards. Ouds for Shamma's students are made according to his preferred style. They feature a simple face with only three holes, a plain body, no traditional embellishments and a shorter arm than most ouds. Notably, the bodies of Shamma's ouds are made from one type of wood, as opposed to the strips of numerous kinds of wood often used. According to Shamma, the unity of wood in his ouds creates a sound that “is perfect and more refined when you hear it in concert.” He says his ouds are known everywhere he has spent a significant amount of time, particularly in Cairo. “If you try to have an oud made on Mohammed Ali Street in Cairo, where there are a host of oud-makers, they'll ask you if you want the Middle Eastern oud or the Shamma oud,” he notes with pride. Indeed, Shamma is such a master of the traditional Arab stringed instrument that he has taught himself to play one-handed, motivated not by showmanship but by friendship. He developed the technique to help a former student who returned from the Iran-Iraq war without his right arm. Shamma is often moved by his country's tragic recent history and the plight of Iraqi refugees driven from home in the violence. He donates concert proceeds to pay for medical care and schooling for refugees and lobbies Arab governments to offer aid. The soft-spoken, 45-year-old composer says he was compelled to act after he met poor refugees last year on a visit to Syria. Destitute Iraqis now flock to his Cairo office for help, and Shamma is distraught he cannot do more. “You know it's more deep, my music, and more strong now, because always there is pain everywhere ... and in my heart. And of course all that is very clear in my music,” he says on a recent night at the oud school he runs. Beit al-Oud, or the House of the Oud, sits in Cairo's Islamic quarter in one of the medieval inns that served traveling merchants. The building's narrow, beautifully carved stone passageways lead to an inner courtyard where Shamma gives classes for dozens of students. Drawn to the oud as a child, Shamma became part of a school of Iraqi musicians that transformed it into a solo instrument, freeing it from its traditional role in the classical Arab orchestra or accompanying singers. He went on to develop a style that blends East and West, modern and traditional. His most stunning innovation came about because of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, which left thousands of people missing limbs. One was a friend and student. A sobbing Ahmed Fayaq, his right arm lost in battle, greeted Shamma after a 1986 concert. In the emotion of the moment, Shamma sought to give him hope with what seemed an impossible promise: The next time Fayaq saw him performing, he would be playing with his left hand only. “I stayed in my house four months without giving any concerts,” Shamma says. “Every day I practiced, practiced, practiced. At the end of a month, I thought, ‘This is impossible.' But in the end I did it. ... I kept my promise.” Since then, Shamma has taught the technique to disabled musicians. The fingers of his left hand vigorously tap at the strings along the instrument's neck, producing an exciting percussive effect that reverberates through the oud's belly, transforming it into both drum and delicate stringed instrument. Another innovation was Shamma's redesign of the oud, based on a ninth-century drawing. Most ouds have five identical pairings of strings known as courses, plus a single string. Shamma's revised oud has eight courses. It is the troubled history of Shamma's homeland that has most influenced his playing. Two million Iraqi refugees are stranded on the outskirts of Arab capitals surviving on menial jobs and dwindling savings, and Egypt is home to as many as 120,000, according to government estimates. Shamma and five friends spent $51,000 in the first half of 2008 to send more than 200 students to school. He raised another $24,000 for the U.N. refugee agency with a concert in Damascus, Syria, in June. “Shamma's creative journey was transformed once before. He was imprisoned in 1989 in Baghdad after a government informer recorded him speaking against Saddam's dictatorship. He was ordered to be executed -- inmates were put to death each day at 6 A.M. -- but was freed after 170 days because of pleas from his fans. “Of course all my life changed and ... all my music changed completely,” he says. The blend of Iraq's tragic history with his music is most vivid and disturbing in his song “It Happened at al-Amiriyya,” about the U.S. bombing in the 1991 Gulf War of a shelter in which more than 400 civilians are said to have died. The song's beautiful opening chords are interrupted by the jarringly realistic mimicking of an air raid siren -- an effect he achieves by sliding a finger back and forth on the strings along the instrument's unfretted neck. These days, what's weighing on Shamma's mind -- and music -- is the many musicians in the Iraqi diaspora. He wonders how a country can exist without its artists. “Music is for building the soul, the mind,” he says. “When there is a good level of music, there is a good mentality, and you don't see terrorists or suicide bombings. When there is culture, you don't see that.”
