Nine hundred miles east of the Qarabagh, a great landmark soared up from the desert fastness like a homage to the heavens. The veterans of Temur’s campaigns pointed it out excitedly to their younger colleagues, who had never set eyes on such a prodigious monument, and scarcely believed it could be a minaret. The reason for the older men’s pleasure was simple. The tower meant that their marathon five-year journey was over. They had reached Mawarannahr safely. This was Bukhara the Noble, Dome of Islam, second city of the empire.
The Kalon Minaret which so cheered Temur’s soldiers in 1404 still presides spectacularly over Bukhara today. Looming 150 feet into the sky, it is visible from most parts of this labyrinthine city of secrets.
On a cool, clear, autumnal evening, my first in Bukhara, I sat in a chaikhana in Lyab-i-Hauz Square, soul and centre of the old town, contemplating the twin pleasures of a steaming bowl of green tea and the reflected glory of the seventeenth-century Nadir Divanbegi khanaqah, a mosque and hostel providing accommodation for travelling holy men. I was planning a visit to the Kalon Minaret, but had been waylaid by the charms of the prettiest town square in Central Asia. Here, at last, was serenity. The hauz, built in 1620 as the city’s largest reservoir, was a square pool of green water beneath a dimming sky. Bevelled steps ran down from street level to its surface. Mulberry trees lined the square, the most gnarled and crooked among them dating from 1477. On the top of the tallest was a derelict storks’ nest.
It was a still night beneath the stars, a perfect time for exploration. I took myself away from the murmurs of the Lyab-i-Hauz into the dark streets of the old town. Men played cards in pools of light in their doorways. Figures hove into view in tiny alleys then were swallowed up instantly by the night. Children raced through the streets. Above them bats circled around the flickering lights of a disused fountain, paper-thin wings fluttering madly. The domed carpet markets were closed, and footsteps echoed in their chambers. Here and there loomed grand portals flanked with corner towers. There were mosques and madrassahs, some illuminated, others, more remotely located, hidden in darkness. But the most striking monument was the largest minaret I had ever seen, a huge golden tower that pierced the night, one of Bukhara’s most fabulous symbols. Drawn inexorably towards it, I threaded through the streets, past the Magok-i-Attari Mosque, into the cap-makers’ bazaar, around the Bazar-i-Kord Mosque, alongside the Amir Alim Khan Madrassah, until there it stood: Bukhara’s greatest survivor.
Built in 1127, the Kalon Minaret had escaped even the razing wrath of Genghis Khan when a mere stripling of a hundred. The warlord of the steppes was so overawed by this triumph of verticality that he ordered his men to spare it as they scythed their way through the city. (The rest of Bukhara was not so fortunate. By the time Genghis’s hordes had finished their murderous mission, it was said: ‘From the reflection of the sun the plain seemed to be a tray filled with blood.’) A minaret unlike any other, it has served muaddin, merchant and the military alike for the best part of a thousand years. This was the tower craved by shattered camel caravans traversing the Qara Qum desert, the first trace of civilisation for travellers tormented by thirst and racked with hunger. Burning beacons at its summit guided the stragglers through raging sandstorms. The minaret was also a watchtower. From a window in the ornate rotunda gallery soldiers scanned the horizon for enemy armies approaching Bukhara. And for the dispensers of Bukhara-style justice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Kalon Minaret was also the ‘Tower of Death’, where the most violent criminals stumbled up its 105 steps prior to their destruction. The ceremonies were carefully choreographed, designed to inculcate fear, revulsion and macabre fascination in the crowds that gathered to watch. The offender’s crime was read out from the top of the minaret. A hush fell over the spectators. Then, after a dreadful pause, tied up inside a sack, he was pushed, screaming in blind panic, to his death.
For all its practical uses, the Kalon Minaret is an exquisite feat of architecture. From its octagonal base, thirty feet in diameter, it tapers smoothly into the heavens through ten bands of carved brick and delicate majolica tilework. At the summit, above its sixteen windows, there is more fine detail as the bricks flare outwards slightly before retreating to form a horizontal roof crowned by a rocket-like protuberance that marks the lines of an older extension.
Though the minaret avoided the levelling traditionally inflicted on conquered cities by Genghis and his Mongols, the Kalon Mosque from which it sprang did not. Such was its size and splendour that the warlord falsely believed he had ridden into the sultan’s palace. On discovering that this was Bukhara’s most magnificent mosque, he contemptuously ordered his men to use the Koran-holders as mangers for his horses. Here, in the house of God, Genghis gave his men carte blanche to destroy the city, and within minutes the mosque was in flames. It burnt to the ground.
‘Of course, they used to call Bukhara the “Dome of Islam” or “Heart of Islam” even before Temur. This was the city that produced great religious scholars like Bakhauddin Nakhshbandi – his name means “The Decoration of Religion” – and Imam al Bukhari. Their books are still studied in Bukhara, so I think we can still say Bukhara is the “Dome of Islam”.’
I had returned to the Kalon Mosque the following morning to meet its imam, Abdul Gafur Razzaq, the most important religious figure in Bukhara. He resembled a middle-aged sloth, with a goatee beard and heavy eyelids, and was so relaxed he seemed to move in slow motion, when he moved at all. On my arrival, an eyebrow twitched almost imperceptibly and a young assistant rushed off at once to prepare tea. His master remained, languidly reclining on cushions.
Imam al Bukhari was one of the greatest sages of Islam, the ninth-century author of Sahih al Bukhari, regarded by Muslims worldwide as the most authentic book after the Koran, a comprehensive collection of hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. Famed for his superhuman memory, as a child he could recite two thousand hadith. He collected and examined more than six hundred thousand in the course of his researches, selecting only 7,275 of them as sahih, or genuine. These he authenticated with full genealogies of those who had communicated them, harking back to the Prophet himself.
Together with al Bukhari, Khazreti Mohammed Bakhauddin Nakhshbandi was one of the city’s most illustrious sons, a contemporary of Temur and the greatest Sufi leader of Central Asia. Among his followers he emphasised contemplation, self-purification, peace, tolerance and moral excellence, as well as a withdrawal from authority. The complex of school, mosque, khanaqah and Nakhshbandi’s grave, ten minutes outside Bukhara, was recently restored with Turkish aid. It was reopened in 1993 to commemorate the 675th anniversary of his birth in a ceremony that marked the renaissance of Islam in Central Asia. Visitors today will find pilgrims from across the Muslim world circling the holy man’s heavy black tombstone, pausing occasionally to bestow reverent kisses upon it. Some exchange a few words with a priest shaded by an awning beneath a plane tree – said to have sprouted from Nakhshbandi’s staff – and hand him a few banknotes in exchange for a prayer. Others tie rags and wishes in the tree. Elsewhere in the complex, pilgrims cook offerings in thanks for the fulfilment of their wishes.
Temur’s Dome of Islam had come under attack in the first half of the twentieth century. The imam had been brought up by his grandparents during the Soviet era, when religious instruction was prohibited. Secretly they had found him teachers who had worked in the madrassahs before the Soviets’ arrival, and it was under their tutelage that he had started to study the Koran and Arabic calligraphy. When he was eighteen, he won a place in the prestigious sixteenth-century Mir-i-Arab Madrassah in Bukhara, a blue-domed masterpiece directly opposite the Kalon Mosque: ‘Temur would never have believed what happened here in those times. During the Soviet period the madrassah didn’t accept any student from Bukhara because the city’s communist leaders wanted to show what good communists they were. They told their bosses that no one in the city wanted to study religion because they were so progressive. I was only admitted because of
my knowledge of calligraphy.’
He had studied at the madrassah for seven years, including a two-year secondment to the Imam al Bukhari Madrassah in Tashkent. After two years in the army, he returned to the world of Islam as a teacher in the Mir-i-Arab Madrassah. At the age of fifty, after a distinguished career, he had reached the top of his profession. ‘We only had three mosques and one madrassah that took eighty students during the Soviet time. Now we have one hundred mosques just in the Bukhara region, and eleven madrassahs nationwide.’
It would have pleased Temur to find that, in keeping with Bukhara’s religious heritage, Sufism was at the forefront of this religious revival. ‘This is what we try to introduce to the people. It’s mystic teaching, helping people to perfect themselves and get closer to Allah. Sufis are against fighting and for development. You probably already know how much Temur respected Sufi scholars. He brought many of them to Samarkand and constructed mausoleums for them when they died. Sufism developed a great deal under him.’
Bukhara, Uzbekistan and Central Asia are re-engaging with Islam. But what is most fascinating is that Bukhara is reacquainting itself with its long-standing Sufic tradition, perhaps the first serious revival since Temur’s dedicated sponsorship six centuries earlier.
How far it had to go was revealed by an exploration of the Kalon Mosque. Designed to accommodate up to twelve thousand of the faithful at Friday prayers, it encompassed a vast open-air quadrangle bordered by a colonnaded, multi-domed arcade. It was the second-biggest mosque in Central Asia, built in 795 in what had been, for a brief period at least, more auspicious times for Islam. The mosque one sees today, immense in scope and peerless in ambition, dates from the early sixteenth century.
The enormous area of worship is superfluous these days. A small area at the back of the arcade, an inconsequential fraction of the mosque, is all that has been set aside for prayers. Its size contrasts tellingly with the vast western portal and mihrab niche that faces Mecca beneath the glittering blue bubble of the Kok Gumbaz (Blue Dome). ‘Immortality belongs to God’, reads a white Kufic inscription around it.
Today, the minaret of the Kalon Mosque, like those throughout Bukhara, lies strangely silent. The haunting sounds of the adhan, the call to prayer, are nowhere to be heard. Once more, Islam is under watch from the authorities, fearful of an upsurge in fundamentalism. Like his colleagues in the rest of the city, the imam was appointed by the state and his sermons are monitored.
What a decline from Islam’s golden era in Bukhara, from the ninth century, when it emerged as a bastion of the faith, until the nineteenth, when depravity and fanaticism started to take over. But then, state religion had been manipulated before. Temur’s subservient priests upheld his authority and gave their blessing to his numerous campaigns against Muslims and infidels alike. And in any case, such a reversal of fortunes was nothing new. The Dome of Islam did not thrive uninterrupted from the ninth century.
Bukhara took over a century to recover from the devastation wrought by Genghis in 1219. When Ibn Battutah passed through in 1366, he reported: ‘All but a few of its mosques, academies and bazaars are lying in ruins.’ The wandering man of letters was unimpressed. ‘I found no one in it who knew any thing of science.’ The city had to wait for Temur to regain its glory.
Noila, director of the department for the protection of mosques and monuments in Bukhara, was a courteous lady of about fifty with a scholarly, lined face. We were sitting together one evening over a glass of green tea in Lyab-i-Hauz, overlooking the square from the first-floor veranda of a small chaikhana.
‘People say Amir Temur had no connection with Bukhara, but that’s just not true,’ she began.
Around a long table next to us, a large family, including several army officers, was celebrating some happy event with the help of endless rounds of beer and vodka. I loved returning to this small square, the Kaaba of Bukhara, around which swirled an absorbing cross-section of Bukharzis night and day. It had a life of its own and an eclectic population of old men, shrieking boys, romantically inclined couples, ducks, geese, a persistent kingfisher and a prowling cat. In the festering heat of midday, it reflected the lethargy of the city. The elderly backgammon players were nowhere to be seen, the boys diving from the mulberry trees vanished, and the ducks kept a low profile in the shadows. Even the diehard shashlik cook retreated altogether. And then, as evening approached and the temperature cooled, the underground vitality that simmered beneath the surface bubbled up once more. Fountains burst forth on cue, ducks and geese celebrated raucously, fairy lights winked in the trees, lovers returned from the shadows for a candlelit dinner alongside the pool, the shashlik cook sharpened his knife and was soon lost to sight beneath the wreaths of smoke from the coals, boys hurled themselves into the water and once again the square echoed to the sound of slamming dominoes and games of backgammon. Lyab-i-Hauz, like the rest of Bukhara, had a rhythm all of its own.
‘To begin with,’ Noila continued, ‘Temur’s mother, the daughter of a sadr [senior religious official], came from Bukhara, so he spent a lot of time here during his childhood. He always respected the city very much, and the main reason for this was its Islamic heritage. In fact, it became the second city of his empire. While Samarkand was his secular capital, Bukhara was his religious centre. You must remember that in those times no leader could carry out his political, military and economic policies without the support of the religious establishment. Temur also restored a lot of important monuments like the mausoleums of Shaykh Sayf ad-din Bukharzi and Chasma Ayub. He also restored the Bakhauddin Nakhshbandi shrine. The man who looked after Temur’s library, Mahmoud Khoja Bukharoi, was also from the city. Temur came here several times during fighting. Bukhara and the surrounding area were always very important to him, particularly when he was collecting forces in the Zarafshan and Qashka Darya valleys to drive off the Moghul invaders.’
In fact, Temur returned periodically to the pastures around Bukhara during his many campaigns. He wintered here with his troops in 1381, after taking Herat. It was fine hunting territory. Two of Genghis’s sons, Chaghatay and Ogedey, used to send their father fifty camel-loads of swans a week while they were here. In 1389, having defeated Khizr Khoja, the khan of Moghulistan, Temur rested his court and troops in Bukhara, celebrating his victory with a grand hunt around the lakes and streams at the foot of the Zarafshan.
In 1392, Temur was back in Bukhara, this time after falling ill at the outset of his Five-Year Campaign in Persia. ‘He was so sick he called all his family from Samarkand, expecting to die. But a doctor from Bukhara, using Avicenna’s methods,* managed to save him, and after one month he was well enough to continue with his campaign,’ Noila told me. ‘Bukhara always supported Temur in his conquests, not like Khorezm and some other places.’
It is fair to say, however, that Bukhara played only a distant second fiddle to Samarkand. Unquestionably, Bukharzis were proud of their rich heritage, but any discussion about Temur brought back memories of how he had slighted their great city by comparison with the munificence he bestowed on his imperial capital.
I asked Noila how the government was managing the restoration of the city. Although Bukhara seemed to have escaped the Disneyfication of Samarkand, many of its historical buildings were crumbling away through neglect.
‘We have 462 mosques and other ancient monuments in the Bukhara region, so of course it’s a problem,’ she answered. ‘But the government and private sponsors are spending lots of money on this. You’ve got to remember the Soviets destroyed much of Bukhara. In the 1920s, there was a map of the city listing a thousand mosques and monuments. This included 360 mosques, 280 madrassahs, eighty-four caravanserais, eighteen hammams, and 118 hauzes, so you can see what they destroyed. Lenin gave an order to the soldiers to burn Islam in the fire. Bukhara was the fire of Islam, so how could they do it? They burnt books, killed imams and forbade people from praying. They burnt down many mosques and madrassahs, too, and turned others into offices, clubs and storage spac
e. They destroyed the Ark [Bukhara’s ancient fortress] and smashed a part of the Kalon Minaret. A Russian engineer ordered the hauzes to be filled in because they had become a health risk, spreading malaria and tapeworm. Mirzoi Sharif Madrassah was turned into a prison. Before the revolution, everyone had written in the Arabic alphabet. Now they introduced the Cyrillic alphabet, so most of us can’t even read our old books any more. Bukhara was a major trade centre on the Silk Road. No more. The Bolsheviks put an end to that. Big businessmen suddenly became enemies of the state. Educated people were thrown into prison, and an uneducated, illiterate man was made mayor of Bukhara under the control of the Russians. This is what happened to our city.
‘Until recently, we weren’t even allowed to talk about what happened in those early Soviet days. We couldn’t even explain to tourists what had happened to some of the monuments. For example, when we showed visitors around the Ark and they asked why it was in such bad condition, we had to say it was wear and tear. We weren’t allowed to say the Soviets bombed much of the building to pieces in 1920. In the museums we had all these pictures showing the terrible executions under the Amir of Bukhara – throat-cuttings, hangings, beatings, live burials. It was all designed to show how primitive life had been here in Islamic times before the Soviets came to our rescue and civilised us.* You need to understand all this. It’s the background behind restoring Amir Temur to the Uzbeks. Some people have said there is a tendency in Uzbekistan to exaggerate Temur’s greatness and so on. Perhaps that’s true, but we’re a young nation, getting up from our knees. We need a new figurehead. Before we had Lenin; he wasn’t even one of our people. If there is exaggeration, I think it’s entirely forgivable.’
One of the things she had said about the monuments was astounding. There had been 118 hauzes before the Russian arrival. What had happened to them? I had seen one or two empty pits in the ground, desolate ruins with broken steps. And, of course there was the Lyab-i-Hauz. But that still left well over a hundred unaccounted for. Gustav Krist, the improbable Austrian carpet-seller and traveller, must have underestimated the destructive power of the Soviets. In 1937 he wrote:
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