Samer Iskandar, FT correspondent, 1967-2024

Samer Iskandar, a former FT correspondent, passed away on August 13, 2024 in Paris. He was 57. He remained accompanied throughout his illness by his loving wife Isabelle and daughter Violette.

To be writing this obituary for him today is difficult. Samer was my mentor and, without the steadying rhythm of our conversations, I struggle to find my footing. Nevertheless I will follow the advice he always gave me when I stalled before a sentence: keep your foot on the gas and write.

Samer was a financier, teacher, researcher and journalist. To try to sum up his career across so many industries, roles and locations is a challenge perhaps only he could have risen to. He was a board member at the Banque Libano-Française, a senior commentator at the BBC, an executive director at Euronext and a journalist at this very newspaper, where from 1996 to 2001 he served as an International Capital Markets reporter, the Brussels correspondent, the Paris correspondent and the editor-in-chief of the magazine Connectis.

Sam was passionate about economics, and his skill with numbers was perhaps matched only by his skill with stories. This was a man who, when I asked him what year he’d met his wife Isabelle, put it to me like this: “Our first date was in Francs; by our second, we’d already switched to the euro.” 

But one of the roles Sam cherished most was being a professor. From 2010 until he fell ill, he taught finance at the ESCP Business School. As one of his students, albeit in another discipline, I felt in good company the day I read the hundreds of testimonials of other young people whose intellectual, personal and professional lives Sam had so profoundly impacted.

I wrote about Sam’s illness in the FT Weekend Magazine earlier this year, after which he and I continued meeting regularly to write, announcing as half-joke half-wish that we were now working on a book. By this summer, when he could no longer speak, we sat in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where we listened to music. Or in the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where we lit candles. Or on his balcony, where we lit cigarillos. The word that all these memories bring to my mind now is simply: courage. Samer was, unfortunately, too witty to be able to use it about himself. (“Have you ever heard anyone say, “died last night after a cowardly battle with his tumour?” he once joked to me in Arabic.) Yet his story is incomplete without it. 

Samer was courageous in the most vital sense of the term. Courage, from the old French corage, from the Latin cor, meaning the heart. Indeed, the heart remained Sam’s anchor even as his brain took the storm. He remained driven by, and geared towards, a single idea: to spend as much time as he could with his wife Isabelle and daughter Violette. Often he seemed so staunch in this conviction that he almost made me forfeit science, discarding his prognosis’s harsh reality in favour of an an old image which he, the statistician, knew better than to indulge: that an unstoppable force, if met with an immovable object, might yet fail. 

As I write this sentence, the bells of the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are tolling behind me. Sam was buried yesterday. Throughout the day, his friends kept saying, to one another or to themselves: Sam would have smiled at this; Sam would have told this joke. I could overhear whispers rippling through the rows of the church, like an echo of Sam’s life cutting through the pain and loss of his absence. One funeral-goer wore a Harley Davidson tee-shirt, fitting for the man who in February of 1998 wrote an FT article succinctly titled: “Get a Life - Get a Harley”. 

Sam’s coffin was carried away to the sound of his favourite song, The Police’s “Can’t Stand Losing You”. The priest seemed confused upon hearing those perky drums start up and, for a moment, he narrowed in on the organ like it was leading a mutiny, which I couldn’t help but think would have made Sam laugh. 

Most of his lifelong friends’ stories, five decades from Beirut to Paris of what Sam euphemistically referred to, to us kids, as “les 400 coups”, could not be told in church. They were shared later that night over the ice cream he loved best. Above all Sam’s daughter, Violette, held close and safe by her mother Isabelle, looked more like him than she ever had before, that same gentleness in the eyes, that same playfulness in the smile.

It reminded me of that sense of an after-image I had so often felt with Sam during our months of writing together. Often when I looked away from him, down towards my notebook to record something he’d said or out towards the city to catch some detail he’d observed, something strange happened. It seemed to me that his smile was possessed of a kind of visual echo, something reserved usually not for people but for bright lights, which, after you’ve looked into them and then closed your eyes, endure.