Tamerlane

by Justin Marozzi

  The forest of minarets which greeted the fourteenth-century visitor to Herat is no more. Steadily cut back over the centuries, it has dwindled until only the smallest copse remains. From afar, the tapering towers loom from the mountain-bound plain like industrial chimneys. After the rigours of six hundred years, they totter dangerously, alternately silhouetted against the skyline and submerged in the blowing dust that makes the approach to Herat such a dramatic journey. Close to, it is not chimneys they resemble but rather the arthritic fingers of a giantess, petrified in death, clutching at the sky from the bowels of the earth.

  These towers are almost all that is left of the architectural heart of Herat. South of the Injil canal stand the remains of its most outstanding monument. The Musalla complex, a mosque and mausoleum, was built between 1417 and 1437 by Queen Gawhar Shad, wife of Temur’s son Shahrukh. Appropriately, since her name means ‘Joyful Jewel’, this was the high point of Temurid art and architecture, a dazzling fusion of form and colour which paid tribute both to Allah and to His powerful servant on earth. Four minarets, elegant columns of turquoise more than a hundred feet high, shone like bright beacons, marking the corners of the queen’s musalla, or place of worship, dominating a smaller cluster of minarets beside them. Here stood Herat’s first great congregational mosque, a monument which married colossal proportions with the most elegant taste, replete with dancing frescoes and arabesques, its exceptionally fine glazed brickwork a lustrous façade against the dreary desert. Linking the four principal minarets were four galleries, or iwans, looking out onto a central courtyard. Bold Kufic inscriptions ran around marble plaques at the decagonal base of each minaret, giving way, as the eye travelled up towards the sky, to sparkling lozenges of blue flowers and amber petals outlined in white faience. In these arid lands the iridescent blue was a refreshing reference to water and a homage to the heavens. Today, the forlorn minarets retain only a smattering of this polished armour, and among the war-torn debris of the site it requires a truly giant leap of imagination even to begin to picture the monument in its all but vanished glory.

  It was in Herat, and Samarkand, that one of the Temurids’ most remarkable and enduring cultural legacies was bequeathed to future generations. Since Khorasan lacked sufficient supplies of both wood and building stone, the great majority of structures were built from baked brick. This greatly restricted the sculptural possibilities, but did allow for a shining sheath, or revetment, of coloured tiles to enliven the sun-dried surfaces. On this Masjid-i-Jami, the mosque for Friday prayers, the exquisite blue-and-white tile mosaics were laid in such profusion that not a plain terracotta brick was visible on the entire exterior, an astounding achievement in a monument of these dimensions. For once Robert Byron, that most opinionated and least excitable of travel writers, was pulled up short, calling it ‘the most beautiful example in colour in architecture ever designed by man to the glory of his God and himself’. Hyperbole, perhaps, but high praise from a man who wrote that Rembrandt left him with ‘an unremitting sense of disgust’, and who had dismissed Shakespeare’s entire canon as ‘exactly the sort of plays that I would expect a grocer to write’.*

  Next to the minarets, a ribbed dome of azure blue, the defining Temurid architectural signature, topped the squat mausoleum of the queen, murdered in 1457 when she was well into her ninth decade. These glazed blue tiles of Herat became the model throughout much of Asia. The simplicity of the mausoleum’s exterior belied the profusion of decoration in the interior, where floral patterns and bands of white calligraphy ran riot. To this day, the three-dimensional ornamentation is of superb complexity. Arches, squinches, domes and stalactite niches trace their shapes across the walls in harmony, painted in ancient hues of terracotta, gold and the faded blue of crushed lapis lazuli from the mines of Badakhshan, in northern Afghanistan.

  Unlike much of the devastation wrought on the historical monuments of Afghanistan, the desolation of the Musalla complex cannot be blamed on domestic feuding or age-old tribal warfare. Byron was horrified to learn that his own countrymen were responsible for its destruction. At the height of the Great Game in 1885, Russian troops attacked Afghans south-east of the city of Merv. Fearing a subsequent advance on Herat, which would give St Petersburg access to the Kandahar road and allow it to open a railroad right up to the Indian border, British officers ordered the demolition of most of the buildings in the complex, which occupied a site in the north of the city from where the anticipated assault would come. In fact, the Russian advance never materialised, but ‘the most glorious productions of Mohammadan architecture in the XVth century, having survived the barbarism of four centuries, were now rased [sic] to the ground under the eyes, and with the approval, of the English Commissioners’. Only nine minarets were left standing.

  What man had started, nature continued. Earthquakes in 1931 and 1951 accounted for the loss of three more minarets. Then, in 1979, a century late, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Herat’s monuments were in the line of fire once again. One more minaret was felled, another received a direct hit from an artillery shell, the hole now used by nesting birds. The pounding stripped the minarets of more of their colour. Floral mosaics, brilliant lozenges of white and light blue, tumbled to the earth, joining the scattered remnants of sparkling faience prised from the towers by five centuries of sand and wind. The Soviets even laid mines around the minarets to prevent Ismail Khan, the local warlord, retaking the city. Those minarets which escaped the destruction once overlooked the magnificent madrassahs of Gawhar Shad and Sultan Husayn Baiqara, the last of Herat’s Temurid rulers. Today they preside over mostly bare ground, the isolated mausoleum and a handful of shacks and rusting steel containers converted into shops.

  Late one afternoon, I walked through the crowded markets towards the one edifice which still dominates Herat on raised ground in the north of the Old City. Rearing up from the desert earth were the smooth walls of the Qala-i-Ikhtiyaruddin, the citadel beneath which Temur’s armies, and those of Genghis Khan before him, had fought their adversaries. Built in sun-dried bricks in its present form by the fourteenth-century Kart prince Fakhr ud-din, restored by Temur’s son Shahrukh a hundred years later, it has seen empires and dynasties rise and fall. Over the centuries it has been home to the Ghaznavids, the Seljuks, Ghorids, Mongols, Temurids, Safavids, and even the Taliban, who used it as an army base and arsenal.

  Looking at its massive ramparts, buttressed with bulging corner towers and dotted with holes from where the garrison could defend itself, it was not difficult to understand why Ghiyas ad-din had retreated behind them so promptly as he considered his chances of holding out against Temur’s siege. Its elevated position and the imposing strength of its defences give it an air of utter invulnerability. Had the Kart prince not surrendered in a timely fashion to Temur, who knows whether the citadel would have survived to this day. The ruthlessness with which the Tatar crushed resistance from other cities suggests it would have disappeared from the face of the earth.

  A monumental Kufic inscription in mosaic-faience, three feet high, originally dominated the wall beside the north-west tower. ‘AL-MULK LI’LLAH’ (The Kingdom is God’s), it proclaimed in alternating dark-green and amber letters, visible to all high above the city. If the citadel owed its inspiration to the Almighty, it became, in the fourteenth century, a tribute to Temur. When Shahrukh restored it with baked brick and stone, the fifteenth-century panegyrist Hafiz-i-Abru penned the following lines to the founder of the Temurid dynasty, sections of which appeared on the tiles of the citadel.

  Until the day of judgement the world will not be empty of the descendants of Temur Khan

  From that purer lineage, so excellent a race will follow that one conqueror will follow after another

  Where a pearl should be, they will not see other than pearls; they should not look for anything other than gold from a gold mine

  The King of Islam, Shah Rukh Bahadur, the world has become resplendent with his justice

  [He is] so magnificent that
the stars are like his army, he is the commander of his nobility which reaches the summit of the heavens

  The world is trifling compared to his power like the surging sea. The heavens are an atom and his outlook is luminous

  May the world be adorned with his descendants, may the world be perfumed with his race …

  The prosperity of the world comes from his sound rule. Just as one attains heaven by proper devotions

  They laid the foundations of this lofty citadel

  In an auspicious time and a favourable horoscope

  Rabi II 818 hijrat [1415–16] …

  First they assigned a location for Herat

  So that five gateways were fixed in it

  See those five doors of the five towers of its fortress

  And consider them gates of victory

  Know the proof of the permanence of the building

  Regard it well even if you are meticulous

  (Your kingdom) will be increased and it will not be destroyed

  This prosperity will remain until the day of judgement

  The engineer placed within and without it muqarnas, mansions and round towers

  The stars are proud of its architecture

  Its completion has brought glory to the army

  In elegance like the aivan of Kisra

  In solidity like the dam of Sikandar

  In the completeness of its strength like the aivan of Kaivan

  The passage of time will not destroy it

  It will not be subject to the damage of calamities

  Calamities cannot touch the king

  From the top to bottom it is beautiful and decorated

  Its corners are golden and bejewelled

  Its essence is like life in the pillars of the universe

  Its splendours are like light in the eyes of the stars

  A surly Taliban soldier on duty told me that both the citadel and the museum it housed were closed, but after a little encouragement, and the promise of a tip, he agreed to show me around the ramparts, on which nine gun emplacements had been mounted. As we clambered up the steep, dusty track he stopped every few moments to show me another piece of ordnance. There were grenades, bullets live and spent, machine-gun rounds, piles of rockets and mines. He picked up an old grenade, pulled at the ring, and made as if to throw it at me. Then, seeing my horror, he disappeared behind a wall and threw a large stone onto an unexploded landmine. There was, mercifully, no explosion. He sniggered and continued up the path.

  From the ramparts and their jagged towers Herat stretched before us. Women paced through the market, a blue blur of burqas. Children guided goats through the crowds, struggling to avoid the throng of cyclists. Pigeons wheeled in the sunset. Mina birds squawked from treetops in an evening chorus joined by barking dogs below. Peddlers pushed makeshift trolleys along, selling scrap metal and pieces of plastic. Sheep entrails hung over the bicycle handlebars of a mobile butcher like flourishing maroon balloons. A cloth merchant reclined sleepily in the entrance to his shop. Next door a tailor in a coloured skullcap sat cross-legged, busily cutting and sewing. A row of turbaned ‘white-beards’, the elders of Herat, sat on a mosque rooftop talking among themselves while they waited for the call to prayer. On the mud roofs around them, boys of all ages ran here and there, shouting and chasing each other wildly amidst the smoke drifting upwards from the kitchens below. Many were flying home-made kites (in contravention of one of the Taliban’s many bans), and a myriad coloured cut-outs fluttered in the breeze, gathered around the sinking sun like excited moths. In the distance, lights were being turned on in the thirteenth-century Masjid-i-Jami, the principal Friday mosque. Inside, in pride of place, stood the vast bronze cauldron, four feet in diameter, from which worshippers were served sweet drinks during the reign of the Kart princes in the fourteenth century. In the woven light, Herat was a kaleidoscope of beige and green, bursts of trees amid the subdued colours of the desert. The occasional blue dome, testament to the city’s ravishing Temurid legacy, added a flash of azure to the scene. Farther off, hovering over Herat like a dark cloud, was the black-crayon smudge of the Paropamisus mountains.

  Then it came. First a crackling, croaky whirr, an amplified intake of breath and then, rising above the static, the melodious voice of the muaddin calling the faithful to the maghrib, or evening prayer. ‘Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, God is great, God is great,’ he intoned, and the white-beards started to stir. The twin minarets of the Kherqa Mubarak Mosque at the foot of the citadel seemed to stiffen in response. As the call continued, a tide of men, swelling by the minute, flowed across the city towards the mosques. ‘Haya alas-saleh, haya alas-saleh, come to prayer, come to prayer,’ the voice chanted. On the streets the men hurried along dutifully, ‘encouraged’ by the Taliban religious police, the most feared members of the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.*‘La ilaha illa’llah, there is no god but God,’ and the white-beards descended carefully from the roof to pray. Across the city the minarets from various generations loomed like saluting exclamation marks.

  Few cities have suffered such recurrent disasters as Herat. The catalogue of its misfortunes reads like a history of Afghanistan in miniature, doomed by tribal rivalries and foreign interventions which continue to this day. In 667, Arab armies introduced Islam at the point of the sword. The Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud annexed the city in 1000. Two centuries later, in 1206, Herat fell to the Khorezm Shah invading from the north. Scarcely had it recovered from that attack than Genghis Khan and eighty thousand of his Mongols flattened it again in 1221, slaughtering all but sixteen of its inhabitants. In 1381, Herat prudently bowed before Temur’s armies, sparing itself the worst of his outrages, only to rebel two years later with fatal consequences for the Kart dynasty. On behalf of his father, Miranshah duly put the city to the sword. Babur, Temur’s most illustrious descendant, founder of the Mughal empire in India, was unable to save the city from the Uzbek empire-builder Shaibani Khan, who seized it in 1507.

  The eighteenth century was no stranger to war and intrigue in Herat. Ahmed Shah Durrani, known as the Father of Afghanistan, waged war on the city in the late 1740s as he carved out the new country. Another army marched on Herat in the last decade of the century, when the city found itself the centre of a power struggle between rivals within the Sadozai Shah dynasty. In 1818 it was Persian forces, stretching their tentacles east, who assaulted the city. They returned twenty years later and Herat was under siege for ten months, a bitter experience repeated in 1863 when Amir Dost Mohammed captured the city, his final act in unifying Afghanistan before his death a month later. Peace still proved elusive for its westernmost capital, however, as ruling family divisions returned to the fore. In 1881, Amir Abdur Rahman was fighting his cousin Sardar Ayub Khan for its possession. Before the decade had ended, the British were tearing out its historical heart, a harbinger of the damage inflicted by the Soviets when they invaded the following century. Twenty years after that the Taliban held the reins of power and Herat, like the rest of Afghanistan, was on its knees again. In the spring of 2001, as the Taliban – to the horror of the world – were dynamiting the two-thousand-year-old monumental sculptures known as the Buddhas of Bamiyan, officials destroyed any historical artefacts considered sacrilegious. Pre-Islamic sculptures, outstanding examples of their kind, were among the casualties. In late 2002, Herat returned to the rule of local warlord Ismail Khan. Amid the confusion and chaos of war, more ancient relics were plundered from the city’s museum.

  Yet somehow all these centuries of destruction and the horrors of the Taliban regime have failed to subdue this desert city. Staring down on it from the restored citadel, its greatness seemed undiminished. The Taliban were merely the latest and by no means the nastiest scar on its surface, a short-lived experiment that barely merited a mention in the city’s long history. The ancient cultural centre would outlive these philistine warriors of Islam just as she had seen off other invaders before. The bright home-made kites, scraps of paper and plast
ic taut in the wind, careered merrily across the sky like totems of hope.

  Another evening, as dusk started to steal down from the sky, throwing a wonderful honeyed veil over Herat, I arranged to visit some of the city’s shrines with two of its most distinguished elders. Maulavi Said Mohammed Omar Shahid, president of Herat University, and Maulana Khudad, president of the council of mullahs, were both in their sixties. Like many Afghans who had endured the twin evils of war and malnutrition, they looked considerably older, their withered walnut faces peering out from pristine white turbans.

  Together we walked north of the Musalla complex to the shrine of the fifteenth-century Sufi poet Abdur Rahman Jami, the last great classical poet of Persia. It was a mournful, windswept site, as romantic as the poetry which had thrilled, inspired and saddened so many in his lifetime, so many more in the centuries since his death. The tomb itself was of simple design, protected from the sun by an elderly pistachio tree. Overhead, banners, pendants and flags of green, white and yellow flapped like sheets in the streaming wind. A group of teenage boys, strangely silent, had also come to pay their respects. Jami, one of Herat’s most famous sons, was the most celebrated poet of his generation. His literary influence and the beauty of his verses coursed through the continent.

  When your face is hidden from me,

  Like the moon hidden on a dark night,

  I shed stars of tears

  And yet my night remains dark

  In spite of all those shining stars.

  This tomb in a corner of benighted Afghanistan was just one small piece of the vast cultural legacy bequeathed by Temur. Poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture and craftsmanship, all had flowered under his watchful eye, a tradition continued still more lavishly by his descendants. From the blood of his conquests and the cut of his sword had issued a cultural renaissance that bore his name and would never be forgotten. Herat, Shahrukh’s imperial city of the Temurids, was another Samarkand, doted on by his queen, Gawhar Shad, wildly generous patron of the arts. Kindled by Temur, the fires of Temurid culture, one of the most important epochs in Persian history, flamed through Asia. Jami kept these fires alive, but his death in 1492 marked the end of the golden era of classical Persian poetry. In one moment the Temurid cultural blaze was extinguished.*