by Rory Stewart
In 1141, however, the Ghaznavid Turks, one of the neighboring nomadic dynasties, killed a Ghorid chief. In revenge the chief's brother attacked Ghazni. According to Babur, who visited Ghazni four hundred years later:
Alauddin the "World-incendiary" Ghorid [brother of the murdered chieftain] burned and destroyed the royal tombs, ruined and burned the city of Ghazni and plundered and massacred the inhabitants ... there was no act of desolation and destruction from which he refrained. Ever since that time the mound of Ghazni has remained in a state of ruin.
The Ghorid chieftain forced the inhabitants of Ghazni to carry every mud brick of their city up to the mountains of Ghor. There the Ghorids executed their captives and mixed their blood with the mud to make more bricks for their highland capital, the Turquoise Mountain. The Ghorids went on to conquer much of Asia from Baghdad to the east of India, and took control of the Silk Road to China. The Turquoise Mountain was described by Juzjani as including an enormous Friday Mosque filled with the wealth of India and dominated by two giant golden birds on the castle battlements. It was in the center of the mountains, in such an inaccessible place that no other dynasty ever attempted to occupy it and in such an unlikely location that archaeologists have since been unable to find it. The Ghorids continued to rule from this mountain city in defiance of all economic and administrative conventions of their time, and for the next half century this obscure mountain province of Ghor became the seat of one of the most powerful dynasties in the world. In 1216, however, Genghis Khan invaded and the already declining Ghorid Empire was destroyed. The city was lost and with it all details of this strange mountain civilization. Apart from the last flowering that Babur witnessed in Herat, Afghanistan was never to experience such a civilization again. As Muslim ruler of India, Babur saw himself as the Ghorids' successor.17
The domes of Chist were one legacy of the Ghorids' improbable success. Looking at them that morning, I realized they were unlike any Islamic mausoleum I had seen. The nomadic Turks and Mongols often built their domes as though they were pitching yurt tents. Their buildings in Tabriz, Sultanijeh, Maragheh, and Samarkand seem dropped at random on the plain, as though all that mattered for a site was that it be level and cool and have pasture and water for the animals.
But the mausoleum at Chist had been placed more carefully. The domes were positioned in the center of a symmetrical plateau, which was lower than the western approach ridge. From above they had no silhouette, and from the bottom of the slope they were invisible. Only for a moment, halfway down the slope, did they rise above the skyline. Then they were lost again until the summit of the final climb when the curved roof slowly reappeared framed by the mountain range beyond, with the shape of the arches mimicking the shape of the peaks.
The domes were decorated with pale mud bricks the color of the earth, cut to imitate a pattern of brambles or thorns that spelled out a Koranic text.18 The Seljuks of the period covered their domes with blue tiles, but the Ghorids had not used colored tiles here.19 The shape of the dome, the pale color of the brick, and the script had all apparently been chosen to echo and enhance the landscape.20
Perhaps it was their attachment to the mountains and their pride in being the only highland people to found a pan-Asian empire21 that led the Ghorids to mark the gateway to Ghor with these domes and to position them in a way that emphasized their mountain setting. But why did they dedicate them to the Chistiyah dervishes?
THE MISSIONARY DANCE
As I turned away from the domes an old man rode up on a white horse decorated with a finely woven saddlecloth colored with soft vegetable dyes. The horse was bony and lame and he rode it timidly. He looked as though he was wearing not a turban but a barber's basin on his head.
"I," he said, "am Khalife Seyyed Agha, son of Haji Khalife Seyyed Ahmed, direct heir and descendant of Hazrat Maulana Sultan Maududi, the saint of Chist who died in 1132. My ancestor is buried beneath that dome. I am the lord of all the land that you can see."
"So you are the head of the Chistiyah dervishes?"
"I am but there are no dervishes living here anymore. Can you draw a picture of my horse?"
"I'll try." It was cold in the snow and my hands were stiff, but my drawing looked like a horse. A younger man joined us and stood silently watching.
"Can I keep your drawing?" asked the old man.
"Okay." I ripped it out of my notebook and gave it to him.
"I like your sunglasses. Can I try them on?"
I handed them over and he hung them on his long nose. "Excellent. Can I keep them?"
"No, I'm sorry, I need them. I am walking through the snows of Bamiyan—I need them for the glare."
"Please."
"I am sorry."
"Just the sunglasses..."
"I'm sorry."
"A pity; I might have offered you hospitality." The patriarch turned and rode off. The Chistiyah dervishes were once famous for refusing gifts.
The young man laughed. "He is nothing now. His ancestors were great Chistiyah teachers, men of mystical power and great lords. There are no Chistiyah here today. He was too scared to fight the Russians, too scared to fight the Northern Alliance, too scared to fight the Taliban. He has done nothing in twenty-four years; I had almost forgotten that he existed. He is lucky that we haven't taken all his land."
Only hints remained of why this local Sufi sect (called Chistiyah because they came from Chist) had been one of the four most powerful dervish orders in the world. Surviving descriptions suggest they had a great deal in common with other mystics, even non-Muslim mystics. They repeated sacred phrases and used rosaries like Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians, who may have encountered Sufis during the Crusades. Their saints talked of being able to see the ultimate oneness of God and they drowned details of religious doctrine in a transcendental fervor, seemingly intoxicated with an almost erotic love of the deity.
But they also differed from other mystics in very particular ways. It was not just that one of their saints, Baba Farid, prayed suspended by his feet for forty days, or that, with the distinguished exception of Amir Khosrow, the Chistiyah wrote little poetry. Nor was it their theological views on walaya (the spiritual authority of the Prophet) and welaya (divine love). Nor was it that they carried a toothbrush attached to their turban and wore four-cornered conical hats. What made the Chistiyah most famous was their music. Whereas some dervishes achieved mystical union by praying and others by walking or whirling, the Chistiyah did so by playing instruments and dancing.
The Ghorids brought their local sect with them when they invaded India, adding some legitimacy to a military action presented as a jihad. They may have built the domes to honor this association. But Juzjani, who chronicled the Ghorid dynasty, suggests that the dervishes were not acceptable to all Muslims. As a judge, he presided over a complaint made about a ceremony called Sama, in which the Chist-iyah brought on religious ecstasy by dancing and playing music. Juzjani found in favor of the Chistiyah saint,22 who died in ecstasy during one of these performances a little later. A Chistiyah saint23 born in the thirteenth century records that these Sama sessions lasted throughout the night. They were led by male singers reciting Persian poetry and accompanied by drums, timbales, and tambourines, but not string or wooden instruments because these "blocked the taste and pain of the mystic." Hindus were allowed to attend and everyone was encouraged to dance and sing. Later descriptions showed how disturbing these practices must have been to the orthodox.
The disciple of this saint24 stressed that the visitation of the unseen in the Sama dance ceremony should be considered a form of love-making. Sama must happen at night, not in a mosque but in a closed hall, perfumed with sandalwood. Garments may be torn or thrown off in ecstasy. The dancing could overcome you as a feeling of uncontrollable agitation, it could develop into a feeling of total harmony, or it could be assimilated by conforming to the other dancers:
The Sufi may go round in circles in ecstasy, leap about, beat the ground in his place with his f
eet or lift his hands over his head, twisting them together and rotating them before bringing them down again.
The lavish domes make clear that the Ghorids had a particular affection for this dancing sect.25 It was a relationship they advertised by placing the domes so visibly at the entrance to their lands and engraving them with long passages from the Koran. Was this their answer to the Arabs and Seljuks who had mocked the obscure province of Ghor as one of the last pagan enclaves in the Persian world? Once again I was looking at evidence of a very different society and a very different Islam from what existed on the same site today.
The police chief at Chist had a generator, a VCR, and a black-and-white television. Twenty of us gathered to watch filmed dancing. He handed me the cassette sleeve, which showed a girl in a red sequined minidress with thigh-high boots. But when he switched on the video, the star was an overweight middle-aged woman in a puffy ballgown dancing in a tent in Peshawar. To the delight of rows of Afghan men seated on the floor, she had released her hair and bared her forearms. The film was shot in the dark by a man with unsteady hands, but he had captured most of her scowls. She danced by hopping stiffly up and down with her hands on her hips. Disappointed perhaps with her sloppy footwork, the cameraman zoomed in on her enormous breasts, which lurched from side to side as they filled the frame.
"Was there dancing here before?" I asked.
"Not in Chist, but we used to have it in Herat and Kabul when the king was in power," replied the police chief. "There was less with Najib because of the war. The Mujahidin stopped it completely."
"The Taliban?"
"No. Ismail Khan and the Northern Alliance stopped it as well. It is forbidden in Islam."
"Do you like dancing?"
"Me?" said the police chief. "I like it very much." Everyone laughed.
I sat down and wrote a long letter to my parents, in case I was killed. In the past sixteen months I had bribed, flattered, pried, bullied, begged, and wheedled in order to continue my walk. I was more of a tramp than a mystic, but as I wrote I felt at peace. I described to my parents the moments on the way that seemed to have a deep, unified relation to my past. I wondered if walking was not a form of dancing.
I was happy then and I slept well.
Carved marble from Jam, in Ghor
MIRRORED CAT'S-EYE SHADES
Abdul Haq behaved in his last hours with me much as he had the previous week. In a three-hour period he got lost, said we were almost there, changed his mind and decided we were still a night away, laughed, said he was a mule, and shot at a mud house. Then he turned to me and asked, "How much does it cost to buy a wife in England?"
"But you are already married."
"I want a second wife."
"Nothing. You don't have to pay in England."
"Then why don't I just go to England and get one for free instead of paying five thousand dollars here?"
"No reason," I said.
Abdul Haq looked at me suspiciously.
If you couldn't get around the system by agreeing to marry your sister to your wife's brother, you had to pay far more for a wife than most men could earn in a decade of work inside Afghanistan. In some villages you had to give your father-in-law two horses and fifty sheep in addition to cash. Everyone seemed to think the sums were ridiculously high but no one seemed able to get around the custom. Abdul Haq said most of his friends had to leave Afghanistan and work for three years in Iran to earn the money to pay the bride-price.
Someone fired three shots behind us. We ran a little, then stopped. They fired again. We ran on. Abdul Haq had no idea who was shooting but he thought they were aiming at us. The shooting stopped.
At about midday we came into Darai-e-Takht, a large village nestled in a gorge of the Hari Rud River. Darai-e-Takht formed the modern frontier of Ghor province and of Ismail Khan's formal territory. From now on Ismail Khan's authority was indirect, although he had appointed the governor of Ghor. Abdul Haq said this was where he was stopping. We sat in an inn. I was used to the greeting ritual that took place in private houses. Here everyone ignored us. I was conscious of not having washed for eight days, the stink of my socks and walking boots, and the dust on my pack.
A slender thirty-year-old entered and everyone suddenly stood up. He was wearing gold-rimmed, mirrored cat's-eye shades and a silver turban over his gold cap. Followed by thirty armed men, all older than him, he moved up the line, shaking hands in a steady, smooth glide to the most senior position in the room. He did not urge anyone to sit down or try to put someone else in the senior position. It would have been difficult for him to stop because of the men behind him carrying bandoliers and machine guns that, designed to be mounted on vehicles, must have been almost too heavy to lift. One of his retainers wore a Russian tank commander's cap with earflaps beneath his turban; another wore a blue naval jacket with brass buttons.
This was Mustafa, the commandant of Obey, who had apparently tried to kill me on the road near Obey and who, it transpired, had just shot at us. I never found out why. Perhaps he was asserting his anti-American credentials. Someone told me later that Mustafa's cousin had bet him that he couldn't hit me. Once seated he began speaking in a soft, high-pitched voice. His conversation had none of the solemn grandiloquence of Persian oratory.
"At last the walking foreigner, I see. Welcome. And where are you wandering—you must be cold ... Have you eaten?" He spoke quickly and did not give me time to answer; he seemed to be very amused by something—perhaps by having just shot at us.
As he spoke a gray-bearded secretary wrote down every word. The commander took off his turban and cap and ruffled his gleaming black, newly washed hair. His followers gazed at him.
"You are lucky to have me," he continued. "I will provide you with an honor guard of five men."
I smiled. "Please excuse us for a moment," I said, and took Abdul Haq outside. I did not want to lose one group of armed men only to be given another. I told him to tell the commandant that I needed to travel alone.
When we reentered, Abdul Haq sat down and talked to the young commander. "His Excellency Rory is traveling alone for his book. He should remain alone." He talked about the Emperor Babur, about anthropology, about my close friendship with Ismail Khan, about my travels in other countries. I had assumed Abdul Haq had little knowledge and less interest in what I was doing. But he had apparently remembered almost everything I had said along the way. He spoke convincingly and fluently and the audience listened attentively.
When he had finished Mustafa laughed out loud at me and Abdul Haq. "Then you will walk on, Englishman, and I will give you a letter of introduction, which my secretary will write. And you," he said to Abdul Haq, "can travel with me to Herat. I am sorry I don't have more time." He stood and walked down the line, shaking hands, and left, followed by his men. Abdul Haq embraced me, kissed me three times, and hurried after them. I walked outside to watch him go. He was the only bareheaded and clean-shaven man. He had his shoes only half on and he was stumbling through the mud with his rifle on his shoulder. I stood ready to wave a final time but he didn't look back. I was a quarter of the way through my journey.
MARRYING A MUSLIM
A man called Gul Agha Karimi had written letters to introduce me to people in Ghor. Gul Agha was a wealthy businessman, originally from this district, who owned a pizza restaurant and a shop in Kabul. I was very grateful for the letters, but I did not know how he was perceived in Ghor or how his introductions would be received.
He had told me that people from one village would accompany me to the next. This custom was once common throughout Asia. In Iran, Pakistan, and India, city dwellers often said to me, "Don't worry ... someone from the village will always walk with you ... They won't let a visitor walk alone." But such traditions and social structures had, in reality, vanished, and in my eighteen months of walking, no one had ever offered to escort me to a neighboring village.
Gul Agha's first letter was addressed to Dr. Habibullah Sherwal, who owned the inn in Dara
i-e-Takht where I had just met the young commandant. I found Dr. Habibullah; he glanced at the letter and said, "Give me a moment to change my shoes."
He reappeared a minute later in sunglasses with a Kalashnikov on his shoulder. He locked the door, and we set off on a one-night journey.
Dr. Habibullah was a portly man of thirty-six. His rifle kept slipping down his round shoulder, and he took small, quick steps in his brown tasseled loafers. He did not speak to me at all in the first twenty minutes we walked together.
I liked Abdul Haq but I preferred traveling without him. He had dominated my view of the landscape. The dangers and the geography of the country and its villages had been filtered through the mind of a man who was a Mujahid of Ismail Khan, based in Herat. Habibullah was a local. The fields through which we were walking belonged to him. The people on the road recognized him. I was pleased to have finally reached the hills and be moving farther away from vehicles and deeper into Ghor. The valleys were narrow and the Hari Rud River ran through gorges. It had not snowed for two days, but there was still a dusting of white in the hollows and on the upper slopes. Above our path were pillars of sand, and high in the cliff walls were caves used as sheep pens in the winter.
We passed a large round fort by the river. Habibullah waited patiently outside while I wandered among the crumbling walls half buried in snow, and climbed into a round tower to look across the valley. The fort seemed to dominate the path from every direction. I had no way of finding out how old it was—mud bricks could be almost any age. Then, having made sure I couldn't be seen from the path, I squatted down in the snow.
I had had diarrhea for a day. I had tried to avoid it by drinking only tea or purifying my water with chlorine tablets. Breads and soups were relatively safe, but no one washed his hands and we shared bowls. I was surprised I had not developed it three days earlier when Aziz and Abdul Haq complained of stomach cramps. But I had it now and I knew it was dehydrating me. I still felt quite strong but, if it persisted, I would have to try antibiotics.