Читать книгу Come from the Shadows - Terry Glavin - Страница 10
ОглавлениеCAIN SLEW ABEL. On that much the Torah and the Bible and the Quran agree, though in the Quran, these first sons of Adam and Eve are called Qabeel and Habeel. Qabeel wandered eastwards from Eden to the Land of Nod with a mark of some kind on him, a curse. His lineage came to nought, so it fell to his younger brother Shiith, known in the Bible as Seth, to be the settler, the farmer, the builder. Allah bestowed psalms upon Shiith, and Adam taught him the hours of prayer, bequeathed to him the duties of prophethood and further burdened him with the knowledge of the Great Flood that was to come. It is from Shiith Ibn Adam that all humankind today is said to descend. It is also said that Balkh, the “Mother of All Cities,” as the first Arabs called it, a city once greater than Babylon and lovelier than Nineveh, is where Shiith died and was buried.
Balkh is now little more than a sleepy northern Afghan town of overgrown ruins, forgotten by the world. On market day, down lanes that wind through apple orchards and cherry orchards, merchants slowly make their way to the central bazaar, their wares teetering on donkey carts. The alleyways they follow traverse vine-covered tombs and shrines and zigzag across a series of mysterious, concentric roads that radiate outwards from the centre of town, just as much of the long, joyful and sorrowful story of human civilization radiates outwards from Balkh. It is a story sometimes celebrated and sometimes mourned, but always contested. It is not at that tomb near Babylon but here in Balkh that the prophet Ezekiel was buried, the locals will tell you. There are also Islamic scholars who insist that it was to Balkh, and not to Egypt, that the prophet Jeremiah fled.
What is without controversy is that the metropolis, which once sprawled across a fertile floodplain of the Oxus River, was one of the world’s first cities. About 3,500 years ago, when a patriarch called Moses is said to have led a tribe of Seth’s descendants out of the deserts of the Sinai Peninsula, another tribe of shepherds and pastoralists had already established a small kingdom at Balkh. We know that this tribe had crossed the Oxus River—the Amu Darya—from the north, centuries before. We know the language they spoke bloomed into dozens of languages from the Ganges to the Danube. About a billion people speak those tongues today, in an orchestral echo of Scythians, Hittites, Persians and scores of empires and dynasties forged down through time. Among these were the Timurids, the Mughals who ruled India before the British came, and the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great.
The hybrid Greco-Bactrian Kingdom that arose from the death of Alexander, the conquering Macedonian, was called the Kingdom of a Thousand Cities. Its capital was the city of Bactrus, also called Paktria, also called Balkh. The world’s first emperor to be called sultan was Mahmud of Ghazni, grandson of a slave keeper from Balkh, conqueror of all of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, most of Iran and great swathes of northwestern India. It was here in Balkh in 1370 that Tamerlane crowned himself before setting off as the Sword of Islam to slaughter and conquer from the Tigris to the Volga. It was in Balkh that Aurangzeb, Conqueror of the World, first held court. “In its heyday, Balkh was larger than Paris, Rome, Beijing, or Delhi,” says S. Frederick Starr, a research professor with Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “Like all the great regional centers, it had running water, baths, and majestic palaces.”
The heart of Balkh nowadays is a jumble of pleasantly unkempt gardens where old men sit on park benches or lounge under trees on ratty blankets playing chess. Women haggle with spice vendors in the shadow of the towering, blue-domed mausoleum of the Sufi philosopher-prince Khwaja Abu Nasr Parsa, whose shrine was built in the late fifteenth century by the sultan Husayn Bayqarah, Tamerlane’s great-great-grandson. But there is nothing of Tamerlane’s bloody glory here now. Balkh is one of the world’s great cradles of empire, but there are no interpretive centres, no splendid museums and no fleets of tour buses. There aren’t even any stores that sell garish souvenirs.
In the older Persian epics, the first man was not Adam, but Kayumars, who built his kingdom at Bakhdhi, which is the name for Balkh in the Hymns of Zarathustra. It was in Balkh, they say, that Zarathustra, the Zoroastrian Moses, first preached his revelations. It was here that some say he died, about 2,700 years ago. Seven centuries later, during the reign of the Kushan kings, Balkh was second only to Rajagriha as Buddhism’s most holy place on earth. Monks from as far away as Ceylon made pilgrimages here. Sombre historians and Muslim scholars still quarrel about the dynastic Barmakids of Balkh, who went on to become courtiers, viziers and warriors for the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad. Khalid ibn Barmak even ended up as the governor of Mesopotamia. But were the Barmakids Muslim converts from Zoroastrianism or from Buddhism? It’s hard to say.
Within the remnants of an old ring of walls that encloses Balkh and its surroundings to a length of about ten kilometres, the scatterings of Zoroastrian fire temples clutter gardens and pastures amid the detritus of Buddhist stupas, convents and monasteries. The townspeople sometimes engage in spirited quarrels over tea at the bazaar about which ruin is Zoroastrian and which is Buddhist, and in those debates, both sides can be right. Down through time, Zoroastrians and Buddhists took converts from each other and stole or traded temples and shrines. When Islam came along, the custom carried on. It’s rare to come across a Muslim shrine here that cannot claim a pedigree dating back to some earlier holy site.
From the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, Balkh was also an epicentre of the Nestorian Church. Its schismatics had been driven east after Rome declared them heretics at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Nestorian missionaries from Balkh travelled far and wide, and it was the Nestorian Church that introduced Christianity to China during the enlightened years of the Tang Dynasty. Their churches flourished as far east as Canton until the fourteenth century, when the Ming Dynasty chose to purge “foreign influences” and even to erase their legacy from China’s memory. But history is not so easily disappeared. The story of how the Chinese Nestorian Church was founded is inscribed upon a massive eighth-century stone tablet that was buried near the Chongren Buddhist monastery at the Silk Road’s eastern terminus at what is now Xi’an, the resting place of the famous Terracotta Army. The tablet was lost to the world until the seventeenth century. At the base of the monument, the identity of the man who commissioned the work in 781 is revealed, in Syriac script: “The Lord Jazedbuzid, Priest and Vicar-episcopal of Cumdan, the royal city, son of the enlightened Mailas, Priest of Balkh.”
Long before the European Enlightenment, there was Hiwi al-Balkhi, also known as Hiwi the Heretic. He was a ninth-century Jewish contrarian who busied himself composing more than two hundred rationalist objections to the miracles of Hebrew scripture. Little remains of his effort except some fragments of text and the rousing controversies he set off in the writings of Jewish scholars from Babylon to Andalusia. Hiwi was also a poet—Balkh is renowned for its poets—and his work may have been the first to employ Hebrew verse for purposes beyond its sacred function in the synagogue. Balkh’s Jewish quarter persisted for ten centuries after Hiwi. The people were weavers, gardeners and merchants. After the Arabs came, the Jews were obliged to pay a special tax, like all non-Muslims, but they were outwardly much like everybody else, except that they were wine-drinking monogamists who liked to wear conical fur hats. The Jews were gone by the 1930s, but the Jewish quarter is still remembered in Balkh by the name of the neighbourhood Jehodanak: the Town of the Jews.
A century after Hiwi there was Ibn Sina, the Prince of Physicians. A polymathic genius from a Balkh Ismaili family, Ibn Sina was known to medieval Europe as Avicenna, and is still known to modern scientists as “the father of modern medicine.” Among Roman Catholic historians, Ibn Sina is known for his profound influence on Catholicism’s foundational theologian, Thomas Aquinas. Among philosophers, Ibn Sina is perhaps best remembered for his critique of Aristotelian metaphysics. Otherwise forgotten are Ibn Sina’s numerous pioneering texts on geology, paleontology, astronomy and physics.
A century after Ibn Sina, Balkh was a teeming city of perhaps 200,000 people when the eleventh-century poet Omar Khayyam was a schoolboy here. His classic Rubaiyat was unknown to the English-speaking world until the 1800s. In Khayyam’s day, Balkh was still a city of Persians, Turks and Chinese, who practised Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and Zoroastrianism. Their leavings are a muddle, and it doesn’t help that no one has ever undertaken a systematic archaeological survey of the place. UNESCO scientists have placed Balkh on their wish list of world heritage sites. It easily ranks with Angkor Wat or Tenochtitlán or Petra. You’ve probably heard of those places. Chances are you’ve never heard of Balkh. Don’t be hard on yourself.
In the frightening country called Afghanistan that we hear about in the West, Balkh cannot exist. That country is the “graveyard of empires.” The real Afghanistan is the womb of empires. Even in its blighted twenty-first-century form, Afghanistan is a concoction of at least a half-dozen major ethnic groups and more than thirty languages from long-lost civilizations loosely contained within the shrivelled remnant of the Durrani Empire, the eighteenth-century Pashtun imperialism that supplanted the ancient Turk, Mongol and Persian dynasties. The Durrani Pashtuns came from Kandahar, and it was they who first imposed “Afghanistan” upon the maps of the world. The Durrani Empire once covered a vast realm, from the Amu Darya to the Arabian Sea, and from the Iranian Khorasan to Delhi. In the upheavals of the Durranis’ long and grisly history of conquest, the child’s-play imperialism of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Afghan wars barely rates as a footnote.
But Balkh does exist. It is situated in the real country of Afghanistan. It is a small town in a big province that is also called Balkh, and in the summer of 2010, in the place where the Taliban throat slitters are supposed to be, children lead flocks of goats through groves of pistachio. Instead of the vast plantations of opium we always hear about, there’s wheat, barley, flax and cow pasture, though here and there, you might notice a plot of cannabis. Eccentric, long-haired malangs, decked out in garlands of plastic flowers, amuse passersby with their poems and their hashish-induced visions of Islam’s elysian afterlife. Stroll through Balkh around noon, and you come upon families gathered in copses of mulberry and Oriental plane trees for their midday meals of cherries and naan and melons. They will notice straight away that you are some sort of kafir from a faraway country. They smile and wave hello. Salaam. The word does not mean “war.”
For some reason, there is neither a tomb of Zarathustra in Balkh, nor a grand shrine of Kayumars, the Persian Adam, but there is a particular tumulus that everyone swears is the tomb of Seth, Shiith Ibn Adam. It is situated on the outskirts of town, embedded within a strange outcropping of clay and surrounded by a cheek-by-jowl amalgam of derelict mud-walled huts. The little tomb complex is painted sky blue and adorned with tattered green flags that flutter in the breeze. The crypt itself is open to the heavens, but it is covered by an unlikely shroud of green tarpaulin. Under a thatched roof at the entrance, an old man with a long white beard sits cross-legged behind a low bench, and he will take coins in exchange for holy cards, mementos and verses from the Quran written on little scraps of paper. Saddled horses doze in a grove of great-crowned chenar trees nearby.
Across an open field, arising from a hardscrabble plain, there is what appears to be a long ridge of steep cliffs climbing to a plateau. But once you’ve made your way through a ravine, you see that you’ve come through one of the ancient gates of the old city’s fortress, the Bala Hissar, and the cliffs are in fact the old fortress walls. Inside the fortress, a hollow expanse of goat pasture forms a nearly perfect circle more than a kilometre across. The Bala Hissar was sacked and ruined by Genghis Khan in 1220. The walls were built up again by the Timurids, who also built a grand citadel and a splendid mosque within. But there’s nothing left now except scattered shards of pottery and the sad little tomb of some long-forgotten warrior where a family of nomadic Kuchis has made a home, with a small garden, in the shade of some scrubby trees around a burbling spring.
From atop the Bala Hissar’s northern walls, six storeys high, you can look out on a prairie that fades into the horizon. A chaotic eruption of ragged clay hills in the middle distance is all that remains of the Buddhist monastery and university of Nava Vihara. It had been flourishing for dozens of generations by the time the Henan scholar and traveller Xuanzang visited in the seventh century. He arrived in Balkh at the close of an epoch, just a few short years before the Arab conquest brought Bactria within the Muslim orbit of the Umayyad caliphate of Damascus. Centuries before the Arabs came, camel trains were making their way to and from Balkh carrying furs and silks and precious gems from China, spices and perfumes from India, curiosities from Byzantium, frankincense and silver from Persia and wine from the Roman Empire. Down through the years, the Silk Road also brought ideas, slaves, arguments, discoveries and pilgrims from Isfahan and Lhasa, Samarkand and Athens, Xinjiang and Persepolis. Xuanzang found Nava Vihara teeming with scholars and pilgrims, its grand statues of the Buddha glittering with jewels. A dome-topped stupa stood twenty storeys high. Centuries after Islam laid its late-seventh-century foundations in Balkh, Nava Vihara was still thriving as Navbahar, a place of Buddhist worship and study.
That summer of 2010, I was standing on the Bala Hissar’s crumbling walls with Abdulrahim Parwani. We were looking out on the sad remnants of Navbahar, when he turned to me with a melancholy look. “There was even a barbershop,” he said. I noticed a bit of a gleam in his eye. Earlier, back in the town, Abdulrahim had been fondly remembering a barbershop from his boyhood days here. He couldn’t seem to recall where it was exactly, no matter how much he racked his brains. “I guess it’s gone, too,” he said sadly. Then he laughed out loud.
One of the most important things Abdulrahim taught me about Afghanistan is that it helps to keep your sense of humour. When I stepped into a slurry-filled ditch one day in Kabul after I mistook its dust-thick surface for the hard ground of a footpath, I was left with septic goo up to my knees. He laughed. Then he somehow got me to laugh along with him. The next day, it was my turn. A bright blue bruise had erupted right in the middle of his forehead. He’d been kneeling and bowing in the Muslim way of praying, except his head had missed the prayer mat and hit the cement floor a few times. I laughed at him, and he laughed with me.
We’d come to Balkh together almost as an afterthought, and mostly by luck. It had been three years since the two of us had signed on as founding members of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, and Canada was still showing every willingness to wash its hands of Afghanistan. We’d been invited to Mazar-e Sharif, the boisterous capital of Balkh province, to look into an idea that had been making the rounds of Toronto’s Afghan-Canadian community. Babur Mawladin, the Solidarity Committee’s Toronto president, was especially enlivened by it. He’d already talked about it with Balkh’s no-nonsense governor, Mohammad Atta Noor, who was just as enthusiastic.
The idea was fairly straightforward. After the parliamentary paralysis that brought Canada within a few votes of entirely withdrawing its troops from the UN’s ISAF coalition in Afghanistan in 2007, Canada’s minority Conservative government handed off the file to an independent panel headed up by former Liberal foreign minister John Manley. The Manley panel recommended extending the Canadian Forces’ battle group duties in Kandahar to the summer of 2011, after which the soldiers were to be pulled from Kandahar. The Solidarity Committee had few objections to that. Barack Obama had ascended to the White House partly on his pledge to take Afghanistan seriously, and he’d promised a major troop “surge” in the south. He’d come through. Canadian soldiers had spent four years doing brave work rousting brigands in Kandahar’s treacherous Taliban strongholds. We could let the Americans worry about that now. Maybe Canada could set up a new provincial reconstruction team in Balkh instead. The Canadian Forces could make use of itself, too, training up the local military and police.
Go north. It was a faint hope, all things considered, but worth looking into. Abdulrahim and I had arranged to meet various provincial officials, academics, human rights activists and journalists in Mazar-e Sharif. We were curious to hear what they had to say.
I’d told Abdulrahim that if we had a bit of spare time, I wanted to see something of the fabled city of Balkh. It was the hometown of the great Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet known to the English-speaking world as Rumi and commonly described as the greatest poet Islam has ever produced. I’d heard that the school Rumi first attended was still standing. Balkh was only a short drive from Mazar, the roads were mostly paved and we could hire a rattletrap cab for the morning. We really should see the place, I’d said. It was only then that I learned Abdulrahim had spent some of his early childhood in Balkh. He remembered playing in the shadow of the ancient walls. When the rains came, the children of Balkh would carefully reconnoitre the ground along the base of the walls, because a good downpour would sometimes dislodge old coins from some ancient realm. A handful had come into Abdulrahim’s possession this way. So yes, of course, we must try to get to Balkh, he’d said.
We’d intended to meet Governor Noor, but he’d been called away on some last-minute emergency shortly before we arrived at Mazar’s desolate and decrepit airport. So we had an opening in our schedule, and instead of having to hire a motor rickshaw or something to take us out to the fabled capital of the Kingdom of a Thousand Cities, we ended up travelling in the company of Colonel Asif Brumand, a bald, stocky and always beaming professor of medicine, a confidant of the governor. The colonel greeted us in Mazar in camouflage fatigues, packing a heavy sidearm. He introduced us to his friend Farid Ahmad, a tall and somewhat distracted mujahideen veteran who appeared to have been conscripted to our service because he owned a functioning Toyota Land Cruiser. Colonel Brumand informed us that the district police chief in Balkh happened to be an old acquaintance, who would be pleased to have us in for tea at the Balkh police station.
We piled into Farid’s Land Cruiser and headed out of town escorted by two Ford Rangers, one carrying four heavily armed members of the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the other carrying an equal number of similarly equipped members of the Afghan National Army (ANA). Farid himself sported a brace of pistols underneath his loose-fitting kameez. This was not the way that Abdulrahim and I usually got around, and it certainly wasn’t necessary for our security, but the governor’s office apparently considered it necessary to Afghan hospitality. The young police officers and soldiers in our escort seemed perfectly happy to have the lark of a morning out in the country, besides. “They are good men,” Farid confided on the drive out to Balkh, “but if the people around here see any Taliban, they will just attack them and kill them themselves.”
When we got to Balkh, Police Chief Wahdood treated us to the customary and affectionately solicitous Afghan ritual of tea, almonds, apples, melons and toffees. Actually, there is not always much police work to do, Wahdood confessed. With a staff of 90 and a sprawling district of only 150,000 people, his biggest headaches were disputes over title deeds, water rights, property lines and all the other minor tumults you’d expect from the steady trickle of families returning after long years of exile in Iran and Pakistan. I mentioned that the bucolic scenery on the road to Balkh seemed punctuated by an exceptional quantity of the rusting hulks of broken Russian tanks that you see elsewhere in Afghanistan. This caused Colonel Brumand and Chief Wahdood to fall into reveries about the old times. As the conversation turned to politics and pleasant gossip about provincial affairs, Abdulrahim and I wandered off in the company of Sali Mohammad, chief of the Balkh District Criminal Investigations Division, who seemed to have some time on his hands.
A smiling and slightly built man in civilian clothes, Sali ambled along with us through Balkh’s central gardens until we came to a nondescript rectangular stone edifice, a shrine of some kind. “Yes, this is Rabi’a Balkhi,” Abdulrahim said happily. The locals say this is the very place where the ninth-century princess-poet was cruelly imprisoned and died, Abdulrahim explained. The poems attributed to Rabi’a are of a distinctly erotic tone, inspired by her lovemaking with a palace slave named Baktash. As the story goes, when Rabi’a’s courtings came to light, her enraged brother imprisoned her in this dungeon. Heartbroken but defiant, she slashed her wrists and wrote poems to her beloved Baktash in her own blood, and thus the dungeon became her tomb. For more than a thousand years, the lovestruck young women of Bactria, Persia, Khorasan and all the other empires and nation-states that have come and gone in their places have offered up their devotions to Rabi’a, entrusting her with their sighs and their longings.
Sali took a key from a caretaker and unlocked a low barred window that opened into a subterranean crypt. We peered inside a dark chamber containing a grand blue-tiled sarcophagus covered in a tattered green blanket. After Abdulrahim and I had squeezed through the window’s narrow opening and stepped down into the tomb, two young women descended into the darkness, paid their whispered respects to Rabi’a, covered their shy smiles behind their veils and climbed quickly back out into the light. “There was a tunnel,” Abdulrahim said, dimly remembering a story from his childhood about a tunnel that led from the tomb to the Bala Hissar, two kilometres distant. He shrugged and laughed.
We were soon on our rounds of Balkh in Farid’s white Land Cruiser, with the ANA and the ANP in their green Ford Rangers and children running along the dusty roads behind us. After only a few minutes, we were winding our way through a hive of narrow orchard lanes, and then there it was, like some giant, forlorn sandcastle, abandoned to the tides and falling apart: the khanaqa where the young Rumi had studied as a boy. It was the same Sufi madrassa where Rumi’s renowned father, Baha al-Din Walad, had taught, eight centuries ago, in the last days before the Mongol armies swept through and the shadows fell again.
The original structure was still evident in some high arches and collapsed domes, but other than that, it was just a mound. There was some evidence of a recent and rudimentary archaeological inventory. Kabul had little enthusiasm and less in the way of resources to take care of the place. Ankara and Tehran were squabbling over the rights to restore, protect and interpret Rumi’s ruin, but because of some arcane disagreement, work had stalled. It was probably just as well.
Some boys were tending a herd of goats nearby, and we managed to coax one of the boys to approach us. From Farid, I learned that his name was Sher Khan and he was seven years old. He was shy at first, but then he took me by a sleeve and guided me up into the mound, instructing me with words and gesticulations I couldn’t comprehend. Some of the other boys joined us. They scrambled up and down through collapsed passageways and alcoves and then stood silently with me, gazing up at the gently curved and half-vanished arches as though they were as astonished by the marvel of the place as I was.
As the story goes, the splendid Sufi boys’ school of Rumi’s childhood was destroyed by Genghis Khan. At that moment in history, the splendour of Balkh is said to have begun its long eclipse. A malaria epidemic that swept through the countryside and a flood that caused the Amu Darya to change its course away from Balkh are said to account for the city’s final withering at the close of the nineteenth century. By then, Mazar-e Sharif had displaced Balkh as the provincial administrative centre and locus of commerce and livelihood. But there was more to Balkh’s death than that.
There is also much more to the burial of Balkh’s great palaces and the forgetting of certain ancient Persian shrines. That story, too, involves an empire, one that was supposed to last a thousand years. It’s what those concentric rings of roadwork radiating outwards from the centre of town were all about. They weren’t ancient at all.
Go grubbing around in Quranic texts or CIA plots for the origins of Talibanism, and you come up empty. Look to the evidence of history, and you come across a network of well-worn roads that run back through time. Most of them peter out in the deserts and the mountains, but one of them forms a straight line back to a virulent Pashtun chauvinism that erupted in the years when the Pashtun royalty was propping itself up with military, financial, cultural and ideological support from the Third Reich. The lash of ethnic cleansing and cultural obliteration that the Taliban wielded to scourge Afghans in the 1990s was first put to the backs of the people of Balkh sixty years before, with Nazi Germany providing the guns, money, technical wherewithal and revisionist propaganda that Pakistan’s ISI would so generously provide the Taliban all those years later.
For the past 175 years or so, Afghanistan’s emirs, kings, shahs, mullahs and presidents have always had to rely on foreign stipends, subsidies, tributes or other such financial life supports from some foreign power, somewhere. By the early 1930s, the German colony in Kabul was the largest foreign enclave in Afghanistan, and German master-race theorists had convinced themselves and their Afghan hosts that they had discovered in Balkh the ancient Germanic “cradle of Aryanism.” The Afghan government’s Almanac of Kabul of 1933 begins with an essay entitled “The Race of the Afghans,” which claims Balkh as “the cradle where our nation was nurtured, even more, of the Aryan race.” The ring roads radiating from the city were laid down according to Nazi inspiration and an imagined Aryan history that required Balkh province to be cleansed of its Jews by an edict of the kingdom and the ancient city of Balkh to be emptied of its non-Pashtun inhabitants by decree of the king’s interior minister, Mohammad Gul Khan Momand. The young British art critic and historian Robert Byron happened to have lunch with Momand during a visit to Balkh in 1934. Although he did not know it at the time, Byron had already encountered Momand’s handiwork, several days earlier. On the road to Balkh, Byron had seen a caravan of hundreds of Balkhi Jews, travelling in the opposite direction, fleeing to Herat.
The ring roadwork, the purgings and the deportations began in earnest that year. The destruction did not require obliteration on the scale of the Taliban bombing of the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas during the late 1990s. But anything in Balkh that stood too obviously as a rebuke to the new Aryan version of ancient Afghan history was bulldozed or reinvented to represent the ruins of something else.
During the 1930s, Momand was known to British intelligence as a fanatical devotee of “Pashtunization”—the imposition of the Pashto language in all government transactions, the erasure of non-Pashtun cultural influences from the affairs of state, the marginalization of non-Pashtun Afghans and the mass resettlement of Pashtuns in the Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek and Turkmen regions of the country’s north. To the people of Balkh, Momand was known as “the second Genghis Khan.” According to Tajik historian Akhror Mukhtarov, author of Balkh in the Late Middle Ages, “The last significant changes in the fortunes of the city were tied to the uprooting of the indigenous inhabitants of Balkh and the influx of a Pashto-speaking population . . . simultaneously, he [Momand] took steps to ensure that existing monuments and grave markers provided no reminder that anyone other than Pashtuns had ever lived in the city.”
Historian Robert D. McChesney of New York University’s Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies has paid close attention to “the susceptibility of monumental commemorative structures to reinterpretation and consequent renovation.” The stories accounting for the origins of Balkh’s monuments proved acutely vulnerable to revisionism during the tenure of Momand, McChesney observes. Momand was a principal figure among the Pashtun elite, with whom the notion of a German-Pashtun kinship arising from a shared, imaginary Aryan origin found a particularly “warm reception.” Their affections did not go unrequited. “In those years, the idea of a superior Aryan race was growing out of the anti-semitism at the heart of the National-Socialist movement in post-war Germany, and because of it, German diplomats and scholars had come to see a kinship between themselves and the Afghans as Aryans,” McChesney writes. “Promoting Aryanism literally took a more concrete form in the decision to build a new Balkh.”
The Abu Nasr Parsa shrine and its surrounding gardens were to form the epicentre of a grand new city, with straight roads leading from its heart and circular roads emanating outwards as well, reminiscent of Washington, D.C., or Paris. The Abu Nasr Parsa shrine had served generations of Balkhis as a necropolis, surrounded by the precincts of a lively and welcoming Sufi madrassa. Momand obliterated everything but the shrine’s core and re-imagined it as an exemplary artifact of Aryan architecture, “the focal point of Aryan dreams,” as McChesney puts it.
The Afghan-Nazi relationship was sufficiently cozy that by 1936, the Reich had agreed to provide Afghanistan’s twenty-two-year-old Pashtun king, Zahir Shah, with military supplies worth 15 million deutsche marks. German military specialists took on a mentoring role for the Afghan army. By 1937, Lufthansa was running regular flights between Berlin and Kabul, and it wasn’t just Afghanistan that got swept up in the Nazi orbit. In February 1941, the German consulate in Tehran was pleased to report: “Throughout the country spiritual leaders are coming out and saying that ‘the twelfth imam [akin to the Judeo-Christian notion of the messiah] has been sent into the world by God in the form of Adolf Hitler’ . . . One way to promote this trend is sharply to emphasize Muhammed’s struggle against the Jews in the olden days and that of the Führer today.”
The Second World War brought an end to direct Nazi influence in Afghanistan and to Balkh’s reinvention as the birthplace of the Aryan race. At least two thousand Afghan Jews had managed to evade the deportations of 1934, and many of Balkh’s original families eventually managed to return to their homes and their farms. Still, the 1930s-era effort to manufacture an Aryan Absurdistan can explain why the people of Balkh differ among themselves about the provenance of so many of the ruins, shrines and tombs that distinguish their little town.
Interior Minister Mohammad Gul Khan Momand is still remembered in some Afghan circles as a great statesman and Afghan patriot. The Pashtun chauvinism he nurtured during his tenure has unambiguously lived on. It is impossible to be certain in the absence of a proper census, but Pashtuns appear to make up somewhere between a third and a half of the Afghan population. Even so, Pashtun master-race delusions persist in the commonplace, reactionary notion that the Pashtuns are the only “pure” Afghans and are consequently entitled by their ethnicity to govern the country. Pashtun chauvinists educated in Nazi universities remained in the most intimate corridors of power in Afghanistan well into the 1960s. Afghan journalist Soraab Balkhi takes the point further, pointing to the “crypto-fascist” Afghan Mellat Party, which purports to be a kind of Afghan social-democratic party. The Afghan Mellat, founded in 1966 by the Nazi-educated Pashtun chauvinist Ghulam Farhad, persisted into the twenty-first century as a force in President Hamid Karzai’s Pashtun-dominated inner circle. “The party itself had gone through many changes, but has always kept the same imperious, self-serving goals,” Balkhi writes.
The Taliban are a Pashtun phenomenon, though to leave it at that would be woefully imprecise and invite slander against the Pashtun people. Neither are the Taliban merely a function of the Pashtun elite’s encounters with the Nazis—Talibanism is sufficiently grotesque without having to bring European fascists into it. But it does warrant attention that the Taliban and their Islamist contemporaries—Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Khomeinists and so on—have antecedents distinguished by an admiration for and often open collaboration with European fascism. North Americans may recoil from “clerical fascists” as a descriptive term for the Taliban. For many Afghans, however, it is completely without controversy that the Taliban years resembled nothing so much as the state-sanctioned purges, pogroms and expulsions visited upon Afghanistan’s Shia Muslims, Hazaras, Tajiks and Jews during the 1930s.
When the Taliban swept through Balkh in the 1990s, it was as though Mohammad Gul Khan Momand had returned a second time and Genghis Khan a third time. As always with the bloodletting Afghanistan’s various late-twentieth-century militias and armed groups exacted from each other, it is worthwhile noting that “atrocities were committed on all sides.” The Northern Alliance carried out at least one mass execution of captured Taliban soldiers. But nothing was equivalent to the genocidal bloodshed the Taliban visited upon the non-Pashtun civilians of the country’s north during the years and months leading up to September 11, 2001.
One bloodbath, the subject of a Human Rights Watch investigation, was the August 1998 Taliban takeover of Mazar-e Sharif. The Human Rights Watch preliminary report, gleaned from the accounts of witnesses who fled the slaughter, describes a “killing frenzy” that began with the Taliban (comprising Pashtun, Arab, Pakistani and Chechen fighters) shooting “anything that moved.” The Taliban next turned their attention to the city’s Shia Muslims; men who could not recite Sunni prayers on demand were either shot or rounded up for transportation to concentration camps. Taliban commander Maulawi Hanif then declared that the time had come to “exterminate” the city’s Hazaras. “During the house-to-house searches, scores and perhaps hundreds of Hazara men and boys were summarily executed,” the initial report found. A later UN investigation estimated that eight thousand people were murdered in this way over a two-month period. The Hazaras tried to flee the city, but thousands were caught. Men and boys had their throats slit like sheep in front of their families. The Hazara women and girls who were allowed to live were raped and enslaved.
Just as Momand had set about the work of obliterating Balkh’s rich cultural legacy and replacing it with an invented history, the Taliban banned the ancient Nowruz celebrations that had made Mazar famous throughout the former Persian realms. The same obscene “peace” that prevailed under Taliban rule elsewhere in Afghanistan fell like a dark shadow upon Mazar. Ride a bicycle with your husband or wife: a beating. If you’re a woman, and your footsteps can be heard when you walk down the street: a beating. If your husband says you are an adulteress: burial up to the waist, stoning to death by a crowd. You are said to be a homosexual: death by having a wall toppled over on you. The keeping of caged birds is against Islam because a bird might sing. No television sets allowed, no photography allowed, no card games, no chess playing, no music, no kite flying, no movies. Beards must be regulation length. No Western-style trousers permitted. If a woman lives in your house, you must paint over your windows. Shia Islam is apostasy. Debate is heresy. Doubt is sin.
History was repeating itself, and while it is sometimes said that history’s tragedies are repeated as farce, they do recur now and again as tragedy. But history is shadows and light, too. Sometimes its course is determined by dreams, and it is a dream that explains the breathtaking, heart-stopping beauty of the Shrine of Hezrat Ali in Mazar-e Sharif. The dream came to a Balkhi imam in the twelfth century, during the time of the Seljuk Empire, a Europe-sized Sunni domain that reached at its apogee from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea and from the Aral Sea to the Aegean Sea. There was a legend that the body of Hezrat Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, did not lie in glorious repose at Najaf, near Baghdad, but rather in some distant place. As the story went, Ali’s corpse had been spirited away from Najaf by his followers, who were concerned that it would be desecrated there. Ali’s remains were carried for weeks on the back of a white camel until the beast came to rest. The Balkhi imam dreamed that an old crypt on the plains to the east of Balkh was not a Zoroastrian tomb at all—and so not merely a fitting place for pre-Islamic Nowruz rituals—but rather the final resting place of Ali himself.
The Seljuk sultan Sanjar took the dream as divine direction and built a grand shrine around the crypt. The shrine was destroyed by Genghis Khan, but three centuries later, the Timurids restored it in the most extravagant style. That’s how it came to pass that Mazar is now Afghanistan’s third-largest city, a pilgrimage place for Sunni and Shia Muslims during the annual Nowruz festival. The city’s heart is a splendid blue-tiled, twin-domed mosque, the Tomb of the Exalted, enlivened by the flurries of hundreds of white doves.
It was only a few blocks from the Shrine of Hezrat Ali that Abdulrahim Parwani and I ended up meeting with several “civil society” leaders from Balkh. We wanted to know what they thought about the talk of shifting Canada’s efforts in Afghanistan from Kandahar province to Balkh province and its capital city. We heard from Nasima Azkiwa of the Balkh Civil Society and Human Rights Network; Ayatollah Jawed of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission; Rajab Ibrahimi of the Afghanistan Civil Society Organization; Arzoo Aby, the coordinator of the Mazar-e Sharif Youth Cultural Network; and some Mazar journalists. It was as though the question didn’t even need to be asked. Of course Canada should come north, everyone said.
The Swedes were running the Balkh Provincial Reconstruction Team, and while they were appreciated, they were regarded as parsimonious, timid and bureaucratic. The Germans were handling most of Balkh’s International Security Assistance Force duties, and they were all right. But Canada was seen as a particularly significant and aggressive ISAF contributor. Unlike the Germans or the British, Canada had no imperialist history. Unlike the United States, Canada didn’t carry all that Pakistan-ally baggage around. We didn’t bring any baggage at all. It was Canadians who would have to be convinced of the idea’s merits, everyone said, not the people or the government of Balkh.
In the cool of an evening, our hosts joined Abdulrahim and me on a stroll around the grand plaza of the Shrine of Hezrat Ali. Accompanying us was a young journalist who asked that I not mention his name. “There are still Zoroastrian families here, you know,” he said. “They changed their names to Muslim names a long time ago. I have been to their ceremonies, and they are very beautiful.” In the first years after the Taliban were driven from Mazar, the Zoroastrian families had thought about coming out into the light. “But not anymore, not now, anyway,” the young journalist said. “I can’t write this for the newspapers here. I can’t write about religious things.”
The subject had come up as we were talking about Mazar’s strengths and its vulnerabilities. Both the government and the people were committed to social and economic progress. The city’s Shia and Sunni Muslims coexisted and prayed together in traditions inflected by Sufism, Islam’s mystical cosmopolitanism. Women were not expected to closet themselves away in kitchens or hide themselves underneath burqas. But by standing out as a rebuke to the religious fanaticism that had for so long stultified civilized life from Persepolis to Peshawar, Mazar was being targeted for jihadist subversion. Among the radical mullahs who were quickly growing in influence in the city was the Sunni reactionary Mawlawi Abdul Qahir Zadran. He’d spent time in Pakistan, he was a powerful orator and he seemed to have a lot of money. You could buy his CDs and tapes in the markets. In Zadran’s sermons, Muslims who failed to cleave to Deobandist discipline were apostates. Americans were invaders and crusaders. Schoolgirls were prostitutes.
The young journalist and I talked about Iran, about the colleges the Tehran regime was opening on the outskirts of Mazar and the propaganda the Khomeinists were finding ways to get into the Afghan news media. As the “war-weary” Western world was losing interest in the cause of Afghan democracy, Iran’s shadow was looming over everything. Khomeinist Iran was the empire to contend with now.
At the entrance to Mazar’s grand Blue Mosque, the shrine guard took me accurately to be a kafir. He gently refused me entry, with obvious embarrassment to himself and to my hosts. The new rules say kafirs can’t come in, he said. I wandered around outside and mingled with the pilgrims happily enough, but the guard noticed me later and called me over to have tea with him, as a gesture of cordiality. He told me he was sorry. But the insult had been given. He knew it. I’d seen that it had offended him more than me, and he seemed to know that, too.
As it happens, I’d discreetly slipped into the mosque anyway, or at least into a chamber accessed by a back entrance, where the Sufis still had a secure place for themselves. I joined them for a few moments as they engaged in their euphoric and hypnotic ritual chantings. In the song they were singing, the refrain was from a poem by Rumi: “My life is going to end, but I hope to join with God.”
Afterwards, my hosts told me that the way things were going, even the Sufis’ days of liberty at the mosque were rumoured to be numbered. The Iranian-influenced Shia imams considered the Sufis dangerously unorthodox. The Deobandi-influenced Sunni imams had started calling them heretics.
Only the day before, on the plaza where we were walking, Mazar’s Khomeinists had gathered in an angry demonstration. “Death to America,” they chanted. “Death to Israel. Death to the Jews.”
