Sheikh Uthman al-Mawsili
photo: الدبوني · cc by-sa 4.0 ↗Uthman al-Mawsili was born in 1854 to a Mosul water-carrier, orphaned at seven, and blinded soon after by smallpox. The neighboring al-'Umari family took him in, taught him the Qur'an, and, struck by his voice, hired him a music tutor. As a young man he traveled to Baghdad to study Iraqi maqam, then to Mecca for the hajj, and repeatedly to Istanbul, where his recitation moved Sultan Abdulhamid II and the Sufi shaykh Abu'l-Huda al-Sayyadi to tears. He composed dozens of muwashshahat, taught singers across the Ottoman Arab world -- among them, briefly, a young Sayed Darwish in Aleppo -- and in his final Istanbul years cut cylinder recordings that still survive. A blind orphan from a poor river-front family became, by his death in Baghdad in 1923, the voice Ottoman Iraq measured its own maqam singers against.
Baghdad's maqam masters didn't advertise; a student had to travel and place himself under one. Sometime in his teens, newly orphaned and already blind, al-Mawsili left Mosul for the capital and sought out its leading singer. A 2010 profile drawing on Dr. Adil al-Bakri's biography records that "Baghdad was a key milestone in 'Uthman's life where he became a student of Rahmat-Allah Shiltagh, the virtuoso of Iraqi Maqam and innovator of Maqam al-Taflees..." It was Shiltagh's school -- not the Qur'an schools of Mosul -- that gave the blind boy his professional grounding in maqam.
listen forShiltagh cut nothing -- he died in 1872, decades before recording reached Baghdad, so there's no track of his to play. What survives is al-Mawsili's half of the exchange: a cylinder cut in Istanbul around 1911, of his own composition "li-l-'ashiq fi'l-hawa dala'il," sung in Maqam Shahnaz. Listen for the long, unaccompanied vocal lines that bend and slide between notes rather than jump cleanly -- the ornamented, melisma-heavy style Baghdad's maqam masters were known for drilling into their students before either man ever saw a recording device.
Hajj Abdullah al-Kirkukli gets no innovation credited to his name and no anecdote attached to it -- just the same flat sentence, repeated across the Iraqi maqam histories compiled on one specialist blog. Dr. Omar al-Talib's account puts him in one breath with Shiltagh: "درس الموسيقى على شلتاغ...و على عبد الله الكركوكلي و غيرهما من أساتذة الفن" -- "he studied music with Shiltagh...and with Abdullah al-Kirkukli, and other masters of the art." Named every time as a co-teacher in Baghdad, elaborated on never: a second imprint that's real but whose specifics never made it into the record.
listen forAl-Kirkukli left no recording and no described specialty to test against Shiltagh's -- the sources name him as a co-teacher in Baghdad and stop there. What survives instead is another of al-Mawsili's own Istanbul cylinders, "Nilt al-Maqam al-Ashraf," one of the roughly fifty devotional muwashshahat credited to him. Listen for the same unaccompanied, richly ornamented vocal line his Baghdad training produced, carried here into a religious register rather than the secular one of his more famous disc.