GROOMING, THE OLD SCHOOL WAY: The Baghdad barber who attracts customers with his traditional style

In an alley in the Shawaka neighbourhood in Baghdad, most of the stores sell gear for fishing. But there is one store that stands out: In it, a barber’s chair, razors, scissors and combs. This is where barber Salem Rashid works.

Salem Rashid, nicknamed “Abu Ali”, is 64 years old and has been working as a barber for more than 50 years. He started when he was just 10 because his family was poor and encouraged him to start work in this area early.

“I used to work in a small shop with my teacher, a barber called Farhan, who is actually still alive,” he recounts. “I was an apprentice at the age of 10 and became a professional at 18. After that, I joined the army and continued cutting hair in the military too.”

The first time he started cutting hair, he says, he was incredibly nervous. “I was trembling and my heart was aching with fear, and I wondered what the customer would look like after the haircut. Would he be satisfied?”

He even recounts having nicked his clients while shaving them because he was so nervous. But that doesn’t happen anymore. “Now I could shave my customers with my eyes closed,” he boasted.

These days, Rashid only works once a week as he is semi-retired. He lives in a neighbourhood  far from the shop but comes weekly in order to cut the hair of friends and loyal customers. On other days of the week, his son Hassan does the work.

His first business was located in the Alawi area, a popular shopping district. But after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Rashid was forced to move his barbershop because fighting broke out in the area.

“I love the old style of barbering,” Rashid says. “The days that I don’t work, I feel sad. It is almost a holy profession.”

Rashid believes that there’s a big difference between old-style barber work and more modern ways of doing the job. He’s also noticed that younger men don’t like older barbers to work on them because they feel that the older hairdresser won’t have the same contemporary ideas.

“The current popular style of haircuts for young men was actually considered a punishment in the army,” he recounts, laughing. “I remember an army adjutant wanting to punish his deputy officer and he told me to give him a “number four”. That was considered embarrassing and even insulting. Now everything is different,” he noted.

Rashid is careful to maintain all the tools in his store, including the mirrors and the shavers, the hand-held tools that have been his lifelong companions. Some have been with him for 50 years and he cleans them, continuously. He used to take these tools to shave his military colleagues. “These tools are my whole life and I cherish them very much,” he says.

The manual machines fell out of use in the 1980s and his son uses electric shavers. But Rashid still uses his older shavers.

In fact, they’ve even become an attraction.

“A young man I didn’t know came to me and said he wanted to be shaved with these hand-held machines because his father used to use them when he was a little boy,” Rashid says. “The young man was so happy. And there are still regular customers, who come to me because they have been styled and shaved by me for over 35 years, and they also like the older shavers.”