Mother Maqam ...Farida Mohammad Ali. The Arabic word farida means apart or alone. The Iraqi singer Farida Mohammad Ali truly is a one-off. She is one of only a handful of artists to have mastered the ancient musical discipline of maqam a lifetime's pursuit, as the singer must develop not only a command of complex melodies and scales but also the scripture and philosophy behind them. He must also, traditionally, be a man, the performance of maqam being a male preserve throughout the Arab world..."I was fortunate to be born in the southern Iraqi town of Karbala, where attitudes towards women were a little more tolerant," Farida says. "Even so, for a woman to sing maqam is most unusual, because it is more than simply music: it is bound up with culture, food, spiritualism. It is a way of life."Maqam exists in various different forms, but Farida specialises in the genre known as maqam al-baghdadi, which has its roots in the culture of Mesopotamia, the earliest known civilisation in the world. It is a secular form that, like blues or jazz, places emphasis on the musician's ability to improvise within an established framework. It's a plaintive sound, whose settings of ancient Sufi texts often speak of sadness and exile, delivered with an immense vocal and tonal range. When Farida became the first Iraqi woman to perform maqam in the US in 2001, the New York Times reviewer likened her to Linda Ronstadt, while the Chicago Tribune detected "the swelling sweetness of Bonnie Raitt wrapped around the gale-force power of Pavarotti".In 1997, Farida set up the Iraqi Maqam Foundation with her husband,Mohammad H Gomar, a master of the dozza (or djooza), a traditional Arabic violin. The foundation exists to promote and preserve Iraqi classical music, yet is not based in Baghdad but in a modest, suburban house in the Dutch city of Utrecht, which Farida and Gomar have made their home for the past 14 years.The only outward signs of Farida's celebrity are the posters in the living room in which she appears in a selection of traditional embroidered robes and is billed as "the diva of maqam". "I'm not really a diva," she says. "When people recognise me in...