Of several fishermen on the bank, I see an older man who has more than one pole with him. I ask him if I can borrow one for a while, and I hold out a few dinars in my hand. The fisherman waves away my offer and readily hands me his extra pole, scratched and burnished as though Abraham himself might have used it. Maybe he, our forefather, fished just like this in Ur, south of here, on the other river that demarcated what we were from what we were not. Between here, the Tigris, and there, the Euphrates, we became a Mesopotamian people, probably the world’s first civilization. We built cities and languages and towers. Wrote tales of Gilgamesh and codes of Hammurabi. Founded mathematics. Forged religions. Hosted prophets. Discovered God, or let God discover us. No defeat from afar can take that away from us, can shame us from the love and pride for Iraq that we carry in our hearts.
I move down the sloping stones, closer to the river. From here I can see the silhouette of the statue of Scheherazade, just a little further down the bank. Maybe instead of trying to tell Sam about the hand of Fatima, I should have told her about the mind of Scheherazade. She saved her life from a murderous king by her ability to tell him a new story every night. Until then, the king had a habit of marrying a beautiful woman every day, enjoying her for the night, and then having her beheaded in the morning, sure she had betrayed him. Through her great knowledge of history and literature, through her ability to weave stories together, Scheherazade told the king enchanting tales that kept him on tenterhooks each night until it was almost daybreak. After a thousand nights of this, he fell in love with her and made her queen. The writer Ibn al-Nadim mentions it as already having been famous in his tenth-century catalogue of books in Baghdad. So we have known for at least a thousand years that a storyteller - a female one, at that — can change the course of history.
Our stories are our strength. They have the power to keep us alive.
The odd thing about the bend in the Tigris in this part of Baghdad is that it is sometimes hard to tell which way the river is flowing. Logic says it must be moving downstream, but right now, I am quite sure it is flowing up. Sometimes you must simply trust that things will flow exactly as they are meant to, and when they don’t seem to flow in ways that make sense, to believe that the hand of God is behind it.
Al Mu’eed
— the seventy-fifth of God’s ninety-nine names — is the Restorer. Though I hope it is not blasphemy to say so, I should like to create the hundredth: the Fixer.
I tie my bait with a flimsy knot that I know will never hold. I like the liberating feeling of the
khamsa
as it flies off my pole, waving to me just before it hits the water.
Nihaya
— The End