The following is a description of Samarra as recollected by Gavin Young from his book "IRAQ Land of Two Rivers."

Entrance of the Samarra Friday mosque (click to enlarge)

Duk, duk, duk, bong duk . . . bong duk duk duk bong . . . I had hardly expected to hear the get-up-and-dance summons of an Arab hand-drum at the entrance of Samarra's Friday Mosque. It was being played in fine finger-flicking style, too. After all, in religious theory, the twelfth Imam of Islam may suddenly return to the sinful world from a shrine-covered cave nearby- and his return may not prove to be a laughing matter. At any rate, a mosque surely demands respect.

The spiralling minaret(malawiya) (click to enlarge)

But, as a matter of fact, the gay dumbuk sound seemed most appropriate in Samarra. The Friday Mosque is not at all solemn- that spiraling minaret, called the Malawiya, is possibly the most light-hearted monument in Iraq. It has a carnival look about it. It reminds me of those towers in old-fashioned fairgrounds, barley-sugar-shaped structures called helter-skelters down which one slid, gleefully shrieking, on a mat, accelerating with every twist, to the leveling-out part at the bottom. The Samarra minaret, a French traveler noted in 1638, is 'made twirling like a Periwinkle'. And so it is.

No doubt the students also knew that the name Samarra means 'Happy is he who sees it', and caught their mood from that. At any rate, they were enjoying their day out, helped by the energetic ministrations of a Pepsi-Cola vendor under the Malawiya.

The great courtyard of bastioned walls (click to enlarge)

Of the Friday Mosque proper nothing remains except the great courtyard of bastioned wails- damaged once more in the First World War as the British army pursued the Turks northwards. But even damaged those wails stand up imposingly, glowing with light that can seem at sunset to come from within them. The sheer emptiness of the rectangular space between those wails is pleasing- everything is in perfect proportion. In the modern town a little way off, you find a small museum with interesting aerial photographs of Samarra. You will find, too, a model of the old City of the Caliphs. And this is worth taking a good look at because although the history of Samarra under the Abbasid Caliphs is short, only sixty years, the fashion of its rise and decline was dramatic.

The third son of Harun al Rashid (by a Turkish slave) was called Mutasim and, partly because of his mother's origins and partly to offset a dangerous preponderance of Persians in the Baghdad court, he imported battalions of Turkish slaves. Soon his Turks with their arrogant ways became too much for the Baghdadis to put up with. But Mutasim did not stay to insist on their acceptance- he simply uprooted his court, lock, stock and barrel, and shifted it to Samarra. Mutasim himself was a soldier, but better than that he was also a man with a keen interest in gardening and architecture. He threw every effort- his men, his treasure and his own ingenuity-into creating the most fantastic of all Islamic cities. From 833-892, Samarra was the luxuriant capital of the Abbasid Empire under eight Caliphs, who came and went, it has to be admitted, with shameful rapidity- religious mystique was evidently no defense against murder.

(click to enlarge)

'Probably the most spectacular and magnificently planned city of antiquity,' says one writer of the city's twenty-mile long boulevards, its long, geometrically planned streets, its green residential quarters, its stadium, shops, racecourse, palaces, gardens, mosques, barracks and swimming pools. The vast extent and the careful shape of the city stand out very clearly in those aerial photographs in the Samarra museum. It is almost like looking at a rather fuzzy carbon-copy of Mutasim's blueprint. What cannot be seen, of course, are the meticulous decorations that graced the mansions, villas and mosques, the carvings in stone and wood, the marble painstakingly carried from Latakia and Antioch in Syria. Nor can we see, except in the mind's eye, the acres of fruit trees and the flower gardens Mutasim created on the bank of the Tigris. Gone to dust, too, are the improvements and additions to Mutasim's miracle that his successors carried out, sparing no expense to outshine Baghdad. One of them, for instance, spent one million dinars in a futile attempt to irrigate the region. The heady air of Samarra seemed to have spurred the Caliphs on to unusual extravagance. But, alas for them, the Samarra adventure was glorious, brutish and short. The Turkish mercenary commanders refused to be satisfied with presents of beautiful slave-girls from the Caliphs, and regularly launched murderous assaults on them and on each other to achieve supreme imperial power.

Thus most of the eight Caliphs were assassinated by one faction or another before the Caliph Mutamid called off the whole affair. Ruthlessly curbing the terrible Turks Mutasim had introduced to court, he shunted the capital back to Baghdad once and for all. And with that, Samarra, the flower of cities, folded its petals and withered away.

Murder and Turkish tyranny must have been far from the great Mutasim's fertile mind when he built his Palace of the Caliphs. You can walk through it today and still be impressed. There, the palace's triple-gate of marble overlooks the river- you gaze at bulrushes where once the swimming pool was, and a bridge arched across to another palace a mile away. There, the prison; a deep, gloomy hole full of dust. In all directions, thick walls hump up among scattered bricks. The stadium plunges down like an inverted limpet-shell.

(click to enlarge)

Samarra, said Freya Stark, is the most Arab and least Persian of the four Holy Cities of Iraq. You can bear witness to that before the mosque which dominates the little town and is the shrine to the tenth and eleventh Imams, Ali al Hadi and Hasan al Askari. It is a sort of memorial also to the twelfth Imam, about whom a superstition lingers that he will return as the Mahdi to establish peace on earth. It has quite a different 'feel' from the shrine-mosques at Nejefor Kerbela or Kadhimain. Looking in at the main gate you see a wonderfully light facade of uncluttered white and blue and turquoise patterns, and the dome, golden-scaled, grows out of it like a tree. The minaret is gold all the way up, and there is also a gold-painted clock tower. The courtyard is wide and its white walls- not over-decorated- are framed with small sea-blue tiles. The whole effect of this mosque is unfussy and fresh. And even outside it there is as yet hardly anything to confuse the eye. Most of the old houses are coming down as I write. A new school is going up, factories are due. The modern world has not passed Samarra by- it is on the main highway north from Baghdad, after all- nor do cheerful students with their dumbuks. An appointment in Samarra. The old story, made famous by Somerset Maugham and later by the American writer, John O'Hara, is a powerful one and should always be retold- in the words, if possible of, Mr. Maugham, which cannot be improved:

Bibliography:

• Young, Gavin. IRAQ Land of Two Rivers Collins St. James Place, London, 1980.