Short Story

A short story I am quite fond of, I think it is from 1001 nights, it is narrated by Death:

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to the market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said: “Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.”

The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said: “Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning?” “That was not a threatening gesture,” I said, “it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

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Yeah we can’t really escape her.

I have read this story somewhere earlier, maybe it was here on the forum.

I heard that at one time the Islamic world was the intellectual center of gravity for the west - from about 800 AD to 1100 AD. Then some really fundamentalist cleric imposed a very fundamentalist interpretation of Islam on the muslim world, and they have been a cultural backwater ever since.

You may be right, personally I like also zoroastrians, ‘good thoughts, good words and good deeds’.