APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA
I didn’t know, until the Iraq War, that Samarra was in Iraq. I knew of it only as some distant city in Asia, perhaps on the Silk Road like Samarkhand. In any case, the locale was less important than the legend, and the attitude toward fate that it implied.
In an earlier generation, many more people would have known immediately the point of a reference to “an appointment in Samarra.” The British novelist W. Somerset Maugham had used a version of the tale. Then the American writer John O’Hara, having learned from fellow author Dorothy Parker of Maugham’s use of the story, “Appointment in Samarra” the title of one of his novels—which later was among those listed in a Time magazine Top 100. Before television, at least, those who enjoyed reading would often have known the phrase.
I’ll give my own version in the fashion of folk tales generally: this is what I remember from all that I have gotten from my elders:
A rich man sends a servant to the marketplace to buy provisions, but instead, he returns pale and trembling. “Master,” he says, “I saw Death in the marketplace, and he looked at me a long time, with a strange expression on his face. I am so afraid. Please, can I take a horse and go visit my relatives in Samarra?”
The master lets him go—he has been a good servant, and now he is so shaken that he wouldn’t be able to do much anyway. Off the servant gallops toward Samarra.
Then the rich man goes to the marketplace to see if there is any truth to what his servant said. Sure enough, there is Death, waiting in the shadows and watching.
The rich man comes to him and says, “O Death, my servant says that when he came here, you looked at him very strangely, for a long time. Is this true?
“Yes,” says Death, “but only because he was here. I have an appointment with him tomorrow in Samarra.”
The same Middle Eastern view of fate’s inescapable dictates can be seen in the film “Lawrence of Arabia.” T. H. Lawrence and his Arab partner fence verbally with each other over whether fate can be altered; when Lawrence saves a young thief from execution and takes him as a servant, only to see the young man disappear in quicksand, his interlocutor is quick to point out that the man’s death WAS “written.” The pen of fate and its writing appears in the “Rubaiyat” as well.
Our national leadership went into Iraq with classic American optimism, believing that if only the people there would realize the advantages of our way of life (such as having international corporations run most of their oil fields, the main provision of the new law the Iraqi parliament is told it must pass dividing the oil resources) they could will their way out of thousands of years (remember the Babylonians and the Assyrians in the Bible?) of struggles for supremacy. When it didn’t quite work out that way, our Commander in Chief (who either is The Decider or listens to his Generals, depending) sent in the Surge, which succeeded in flushing the Mahdi Army out of Baghdad and into the surrounding provinces.
Now it looks as if we have an appointment with them, either in or because of Samarra.
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