New York- Something I happened in my years covering the era of the terror wars known in the Anglosphere more formally as Operation Inherent Resolve-more simply the war against the so-called Islamic State-was the mystical sound of the tanbur. The tanbur is a long-necked lute played in traditional Kurdistani music across greater Kurdistan. Its precise origins are lost to time but the Penn Museum in Philadelphia has a good piece on the instrument’s history here.
The tanbur has an entrancing sound that can bring from a hot war zone to a llabyrinthine Sufi journey in your heart and mind. Away from the frontlines during that period of tumult, I would encounter someone playing the soothing scales of this enigmatic instrument. One afternoon, I was wandering around the base of Hewler;s [Erbil’s] millennia old citadel and found myself in a carpet shop wth this guy just leisurely strumming his very modern iteration of this historic sound. Just as the azan begins outside, the song gently concludes.
