by Sarah Chayes
But gradually, fertilized by the new sounds of the Arabic language and the elegant curves of its evolving script, by Islam’s leveling piety, by the intellectual challenges of studying the new holy texts and seeking their meaning, of the quest for scientific knowledge and the struggle to hammer out new judicial principles in line with the new ethos, and by the eventual need for the administrative tools of empire, Iranian culture was reborn. Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, it spread eastward so powerfully and took such a hold that it was able to win over the hearts and minds of all the successive waves of later conquerors.4
The poetry that recounted the exploits of mythic heroes like Jamshid was at the forefront of this cultural reawakening. It was infused with a new Iranian consciousness. The Iranians are the good guys, beset on all sides by monstrous foes. And the language of the epics, an oral vernacular that had seldom been transcribed in the past, is defiantly Persian. While different from the old imperial Pahlavi or the Aramaic of the ancient scribes, it contains almost no Arabic neologisms, which were studding spoken Persian by then. The poets, reveling in the invention of their new literary language, took pains to avoid Arabic words.
Yet there is one striking aspect of these stories whose aim is to celebrate Iran—as I was only now discovering. Their heroes, the champions who time and again rescue Iran’s honor and increase her lands or sail out to discover marvels for the shah, do not hail from the heart of the Iranian kingdom, but from its eastern marches. The heroes—Jamshid, Zal, Rustam, Garshasp—come from Kandahar.5
And so, though the actual details I was reading were fancifully ahistorical, I would surely discover some truths about the past of the Kandahar region buried in the epic poetry, like almonds studding a gossamer sweet.
By far the most renowned and influential of the books is the Shahnama, or the Book of Kings, written in the first quarter of the eleventh century by a poet named Abul-Qasim Firdowsi. Its chief hero is Rustam. In the story, his centuries-long life spans the reigns of several Iranian kings.
Born via cesarean-section, Rustam has already accomplished various exploits when the first event really defining his heroic identity takes place. He chooses a horse that will be his lifelong companion. “I need a horse of mountain height,” he declares, “one that no man but myself can take with a lasoo.”6
And so all of the horses in Zabulistan and Kabulistan are driven before him. Rustam places a hand on the back of each, and each one’s spine gives under the pressure. They won’t do. “At last there arrived a troop from Kabul, and a spate of horses of every color rushed before him.” A colt catches his eye, whose “skin was bright and dappled as though flecked with the petals of red roses on saffron.” But the herdsman warns Rustam away, for whenever anyone draws near this colt, his dam “comes forward and fights like a lion.”7
Grasping the sense of the omen, Rustam lassos the mare, overcomes her, and gains his four-footed comrade in arms.
As a backdrop, this episode evokes the importance of the Kabul-to-Kandahar zone in the transcontinental horse trade that was crucial to war making for centuries. Neither Iran, nor especially India, was as suited to raising horses as were the highland plateaus of this region. The animals foaled there, or those driven overland from Central Asia of the grassy steppes, often spent a season near Kandahar to rest and fatten up. Chaman, the name of that Pakistani border-town where my Achekzai friends live, means “grass” or “field.” The sight of those great herds of horses, pasturing in the city’s environs as they awaited the spring and fall fairs, must have punctuated the rhythm of Kandaharis’ lives. As late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Afghans from near Kandahar still dominated the horse trade that provisioned the British army in India.8
Examined more closely, the tale of Rustam and his horse Rakhsh echoes the historical encounter of Alexander the Great and his horse Bucephalas—which had momentous ramifications for Afghanistan.
The fiery steed Bucephalas, when presented at the royal court for inspection, was so aggressive that no one dared approach him, let alone throw a leg across his back. Disgusted, Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, waved at the groom to take him away. But young Alexander instantly perceived the animal’s worth. He made a bet with his father, and, understanding that Bucephalas was afraid, he mastered the creature with kindness and the complicit awareness of a shared destiny. And so was born one of the most profound friendships between a man and a beast in recorded history.9
It was Bucephalas who carried Alexander the Great on an earth-shattering campaign of conquest and discovery across Iran and Central Asia and through the border areas—where he founded a city near Kandahar on his way to India.10 Alexander appears in many of the Persian epics, including the Shahnama. But he is a purely whimsical character who does little more than gallivant around discovering fabulous creatures and strangely garbed humans. It is not surprising that such a telling incident as the gaining of an unrivaled horse should be transposed to Iran’s most emblematic hero, Rustam.
Another animal appears frequently on the field of battle in the Persian epics: the elephant. Rustam himself is often referred to as “elephant bodied,” and his earliest feat was to kill the king’s white elephant, which had gone on a rampage. The colossal elephant, with its utterly improbable nose and curving tusks, appears in the Persian poems not in the catalog of marvelous or mythical animals, as it did in Western medieval texts, but as an ordinary element of the royal household. For example, “The king’s elephant advanced in the midst of the army, with golden bells and cymbals upon it.”11 It is a symbol of strength and courage in battle. The elephant’s unre-markable presence in these stories attests to the cultural proximity, to their audience, of that other great basin of civilization: neighboring India.
In Kandahar, above the north side of town, a ragged chain of hills bars the way to leafy Arghandab and Khakrez beyond. The one on the end, a bit apart from the others, rests its trunk vertically along its front legs till it touches the ground. It is called Elephant Rock.
Kandahar has, age after age, marked the border between Iran and India. The struggle between the Safavis and the Moghuls was just a late chapter in a long tale. After Alexander’s death on the road in 323 B. C.—and a murderous, double-crossing, eye-clawing struggle for his succession—his general Seleucus Nikator gained sway over the part of the far-flung new empire that included the lands of modern Afghanistan. But Seleucus abandoned the region to the first Mauryan emperor of India. In fact, he sold Kandahar to India for the sum of five hundred elephants.12
That delicious fact was lodged in another book I found on my visit to the Kabul library. It was an analysis of some inscriptions cut into a rock face, which archaeologists discovered in Kandahar in 1957.
The Indian ruler who ordered the inscriptions, Ashoka, was a grandson of the emperor who had bought Kandahar. Ashoka reigned from around 270 to 233 B. C.. Inspired by Buddhism, he published a series of edicts encouraging nonviolence and tolerance and giving advice on how to live a happy life. The westernmost of these edicts is carved into the face of a rock wall outside Kandahar. Constant warfare in recent decades has effaced the memory of its location. (In 2002, an official of the UN educational agency, UNESCO, asked me if I could locate it for him. I could not.)
The Ashoka Edict is written in two languages—not the emperor’s native Sanskrit, the language of his Indian heartlands, but Aramaic, the official written language of the Persian people living from Kandahar westward into Iran, and Greek, spoken in the colonies left behind by Alexander.13 Kandahar, then known as Harahuraka or Arachosia (later pronounced by the Muslim Arabs as the Rukhkhaj district of Zabulistan), still marked the very northwestern reaches of the Indian empire.
But in Firdowsi’s much later epic poem, the hero Rustam is not primarily preoccupied with challenges to Iran coming from India. Though his native Zabulistan borders Hindustan, the bulk of his epic struggle is with an enemy from a different quarter: the kingdom of Turan, or Central Asia and China. Rustam is
forever challenging the Turanians, or rescuing his king from defeat at their hands. The poem’s obsessive focus on the lands to the north and east of Iran was to prove prescient. It was from those steppes that, two hundred years after the Shahnama was written, the next wave of devastating conquest would crash down upon Iran: Genghis Khan and his Mongols.
Throughout his long life, Rustam of Zabulistan behaves as a model vassal to the shahs of Iran. He marches all the way to China to rescue one, though agreeing privately with a friend that the shah “had not a brain in his head.”14 To his successor, Rustam proposes a great campaign against Turan with the aim of regaining a wayward territory.15 The heroes always send back a generous portion of the gifts and plunder they win abroad to their liege lords, the rulers of Iran. And whenever Iran is in truly dire straits, it is to these heroes that the rulers dash off a letter of summons. And they always come.
Only once, toward the end of his long life, does Rustam disobey his king’s command. The monarch of that age feared a challenge from one of his own sons, so he sent the disobedient prince on a risky mission to bring Rustam to court in chains.
For it appears that Rustam now “reckons himself no man’s vassal.” He will not raise a finger for the king. When a difficulty befalls his ruler, he is far from the scene. And he never visits anymore. “For such a time as he continues to exist,” the king tells his son, “the lands of Zabulistan, Bost, Ghazni and Kabulistan belong to him.” In other words, the bent tract of southern Afghanistan running from Helmand Province west of Kandahar, turning at the city, and heading northeastward up to Kabul.
The prince does not wish to fight the admired Rustam. So he suggests a ruse to conciliate his father. What if Rustam would just allow himself to be shackled in chains for form. Then, the prince says, “I will intercede with my father and change his heart. I will let no harm come to Rustam.”
But though the hero offers to go humbly to the king, to kiss his head and foot and both his eyes and beg his forgiveness, this is one concession he cannot make. “Shame would overwhelm me…shame that would never be blotted out. No man will ever see me alive and in fetters.” The two fight, and Rustam kills the prince.16
Thus, in the Persian epic poetry, Zabulistan—Kandahar—remains outside the royal power, an ungovernable yaghestan.
This theme—the incorrigible independence of Zabulistan—does indeed reflect reality. For, four hundred years before the epic authors penned their works, what is now southern and eastern Afghanistan did withstand the most important conquest of the age: the seventh-century onslaught of the Muslim Arabs, which swept one empire before it and rocked another, which within eighty years reached all the way across Africa to the shores of Spain. C. E. Bosworth’s monograph confirmed the legend for me. For decades on end, the Muslims launched sterile border raids against that yaghestan, without being able to add it to their empire. When they hungered for India, they had to sidestep Kandahar, a few times even taking to their boats to attack the subcontinent by sea.
Thinking back over what I knew about the Bedouin Arabs, I realized that the original audience for the Prophet Muhammad’s revelation resembled in many ways a bunch of Kandaharis. The Arabs’ social structure was relentlessly tribal; they inhabited a trackless wilderness that supported little agriculture, so they lived off commerce arriving along the caravan routes, tolls collected on those same routes, and, of course, plunder and “protection” from plunder. For years, Arab tribes spent their leisure time raiding one another. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is full of the exploits of the ghazis, bold warriors who would lead sorties against neighboring tribes, driving away rustled camels and horses—much the way the Achekzais were forever stealing their neighbors’ sheep for ransom.
The very first achievement of Islam was to federate these rival Arab tribes, to unite the Bedouin and offer them a focus of allegiance other than tribe. Battles following Muhammad’s death in 632 were fought against groups that broke away from the nascent Muslim community. Called the Ridda wars, the wars of apostasy, they probably had little to do with apostasy in the sense of a rejection of faith or dogma—since the content of Muslim faith and dogma had yet to be fully defined, and since many members of these recalcitrant tribes had never even put aside their own religions. They had joined the Muslims in the traditional fashion of forging a temporary alliance. The Ridda wars were aimed at countering this traditional perfidy, at enforcing a new unity of the Arabs under the leadership of Muhammad’s community in Medina.
But once this unity was achieved, once it was established that Muslims should not kill Muslims—that Muslim tribes should not indulge in raids against each other—what was to be done with the energies of the ghazis? And where were these desert dwellers, who produced only milk and meat and rough woolen cloth and some dates, to get the surplus they needed for a decent life?
It was largely to answer these questions, as well as to carry the teaching of Muhammad to other Bedouin living outside the Arabian Peninsula, that the great campaigns of Arab conquest were launched. As one leading scholar of early Islam, Hugh Kennedy, analyzes it, “Only by directing the energies of the tribesmen against an outside enemy could the unity of the Muslim state be preserved.”17
These Bedouin Arabs, like Kandaharis, were famously unruly. To keep them under control, a tight discipline was enforced on the military campaigns. Tribesmen were sent out under a commander, and a garrison city was usually founded to house them as they subdued the land around, or to serve as a base for further expansion. Kufa and Basra in today’s Iraq were the most famous. There the Bedouin lived apart from the local population, their unity and distinctiveness reinforced by the practice of their new religion, Islam.
It was Umar, the second caliph to lead the community after Muhammad’s death, who instituted a code for religious practice in the garrisons. He promoted officials on the basis of seniority: those who had converted first to Islam. He sent out Qur’an readers, men who could recite the entire revelation of Muhammad from memory and instruct their listeners in its significance. He fixed the times of the five daily prayers and upheld the ascetic simplicity of the desert as a pious standard for men sorely tempted by the riches of the lands they conquered—was intransigent, for example, on drunkenness, that scourge of soldiers everywhere. Like U.S. army bases in the Balkans or Afghanistan, the Muslim garrison towns were strictly dry. This may be the origin of one of Islam’s most distinguishing obligations.18
By the mid-650s, just twenty or so years after the death of Muhammad, the Muslim Arabs had established a foothold in the town of Zaranj, clear across the Iranian plateau from their Arabian heartland. It stands at the far eastern fringes of Iran, on modern Afghanistan’s border, where it is now the capital of Nimruz Province. In another of the Persian epic poems, The Book of Garshasp, the hero discovers its oasis after traversing a windy desert “that lion and devil fled from; its soft earth was sand, its hard earth was salt.”19 Garshasp brings back famous engineers and astrologers from Byzantium and India and founds the town, erecting earthen ramparts around it, building the fort inside high as the moon, and diverting springs from the Helmand River to provide water.20
When the Arabs reached it, Zaranj was indeed a sturdy city, swept by the same wind that whips dust through Kandahar some four hundred miles to the east of it. Its battlements were probably designed to hold back the gale-driven encroachments of the desert as much as the attacks of enemies. Captured with difficulty, it rebelled several times against the Muslim garrison commanders appointed to rule over it.
As Zaranj was being subdued and turned into a Muslim garrison town, the first campaigns to push yet farther eastward clashed against the ruler of the land of legend: Zabulistan. That was the name of the region from Kandahar to Kabul in truth as well as in fable, and the title of its ruler apparently sounded something like “Zunbil.”
Very little is known about this line of local princes, who spent their summers in Ghazni and their winters near Kandahar, or their subjects, except that they “inhibited the
advance of Islam here for a long time to come.”21 Politically and ethnically, they seem to have been the flotsam of the Hephthalite kingdom, which took over the area in the mid-fifth century in one of the innumerable southward migrations of steppe peoples. By the end of the sixth century, the kingdom’s glory days were over, but some of its provincial leaders clung to the rocks around Kandahar. As was the case in this region during the Soviet invasion, it appears that it was the dissolution of government into small units with tenacious local roots that allowed it to avert conquest by a foreign empire.
For the Muslim expansion ground to a halt here for some two hundred years.
As for the pre-Islamic religion of Zabulistan, it has aroused much unsatisfied curiosity. It does not seem to have been Buddhism, which had a rich history and a continuing presence in those parts. One story has a troop of Arabs entering the main shrine to the god Zun, in 654, where they broke off the votive statue’s hand and put out its ruby eyes to prove its impotence.22 Some scholars suggest a cult of sun worship. Another evokes a deity whose traces have come down to us in the Persian epic cycle: Rustam’s father, Zal, a variant reading of whose name matches a variant reading of Zun.23
At times the Muslims enjoyed victories against the zunbils of Zabulistan, as in the late 660s. Commanders under orders from Basra fought in Zabulistan and finally secured the zunbil’s surrender. The region was supposed to pay tribute to the Muslims ever after.