Samarra Requiem

Short version: Mideast Youth is a student-owned independent network dedicated to eliminate extremist ideologies and ignorance from the Middle East.
Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, and Israelis post side-by-side to prove the fact that moderation, interfaith understanding, and sanity does exist in the region.

This post appeared this morning. The writer is identified as being from Iran. He is commenting on the most recent attack on the historic Samarra mosque in Iraq.

His words, in sharp contrast to images normally advanced by the media, are more sad and helpless than angry. I was touched by his reference to the "butterfly effect" because I recall how a Ray Bradbury short story captured my fourteen-year-old imagination long ago. My post title is misleading because a requiem is a lamentation for the dead and the site is anything but dead. If anything it is more important than any time in its history.
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Once upon a time, an Arab Caliph got out of Baghdad. Riding here and there, he finally arrived at a very beautiful suburban area of Baghdad.

The beauty of the place was really amazing. He ordered to make a palace and a small town there, and named it: ‘everybody who saw this place, got happy’.

*****

A history teacher in high school told us this story.

Right now, I wonder how ‘Chaos Theory‘ is able to predict the ‘Butterfly Effect‘ of that decision (the decision of Caliph to build a city right there).

If that king were sick that day, if his horse were not riding that way, if that day were within winter not spring, and too many more IFs, we might never see that city on the map.Indeed, if one of these IFs had come true, that city would have been wiped off the map before its appearance!

One more question: if the Caliph were still alive in these days, would he name the city ‘everybody who saw this place, got happy’ again?

I’m not sure. Yesterday, this city saw again one of the most… sorry! I can’t find a proper adjective to describe my feeling. Check news headlines for yesterday attacks on Samarra, in Iraq. The holy shrine of 2 Shia Imams got exploded again.

Waiting for a time to see peace brought back to Iraq, and see that ‘everybody who sees this place, gets happy’.

God Willing