I first heard the name Khafash at the Literary Circle dinner. He wasn’t there but everyone kept asking me if I had met him. He was a poet, they said, and from the way they spoke of him some kind of hero of the anti-Taliban resistance and he had an intriguing address. ‘Go to Camel Stable Lane and everybody there knows him.’
Following directions for Camel Stable Lane the next afternoon, I found myself lost in a maze of mud alleys and dried-up canals behind the main road to the military base. It had been further to walk than I had imagined and the winter sun was already blotting into the horizon as I started asking for his house. A man installing a television aerial on a mud roof pointed me in one direction while a toothless fellow pulling a donkey bearing such a huge pile of grass that only its hooves and a small portion of its head was visible, pointed the opposite way.
Finally, after I was convinced we were walking in circles, a group of children who had been following me screeched to a halt in front of a red-painted door, chanting, ‘Khafash! Khafash!’ There was a gruff shout from somewhere upstairs and the children ran away. A small boy opened the door and summoned me up some outside stairs. At the top I was shown into a long room with plate glass at one end looking out to the minarets. At the other end was a plywood wall with a plastic gilt clock of the kind one often sees in Chinese restaurants while the in-between walls were lined from floor to ceiling with shelves of books, mostly in Persian, including Sadi’s Rose Garden, Firdosi’s epic Shahnama, Book of Kings4 and the verses of Rumi and Hafiz. In the centre a paraffin stove was clanking and billowing out smoke, and seated cross-legged on a cushion next to it was Naser Khafash.
My first reaction was disappointment. He was a short squat man with a long grey beard and a bald head too large for his body and did not look at all heroic, more like a holy man one might find chanting at a Sufi shrine. I later found out he was fifty-five but he looked much older. Waving away my apologies for arriving unannounced, he gestured to me to sit down then taking my business card with his left hand, frowned at it, while his right hand clicked a long chain of amber worry beads back and forth between his thumb and index finger. ‘Ninety-nine,’ he suddenly said, gesturing at the beads, ‘one for every name of Allah.’
I took that as a cue that my audience had begun so I asked him how difficult it had been to work as a poet during the Taliban. His answer was similar to that of Mr Haghighi though I sensed there was little love lost between the two men. ‘It was not just the Taliban,’ he replied. ‘We have had years of suffering in this city. Only in the Timurid era did our poetry have a one hundred and fifty years of peace to blossom and tell tales of love and beauty. Since then it has reflected only pain. But until the Russians came we did have theatres and libraries and poets in the city. I would say we had about a thousand intellectuals. Many of the enlightened ones then left. For the twenty years after the Russian invasion poetry was limited to verses created for consumption on the battlefield. Then for the past six or seven years of Taliban it became hidden literature and if they found one of those poems they would execute the writer. So most of our poets left the country and those who stayed were scared.’
Why hadn’t he left, I asked. ‘My father had gone to Iraq so I spent my childhood there. Then from 1979 for about seven years I lived in Iran. So I’m fed up with migrating and besides I felt responsibility to help those here.’
There was a knock on the door and Khafash stiffened then relaxed at the sound of his son’s voice. ‘He likes foreigners coming here,’ he said as his son came in barefoot on the carpet carefully carrying a silver tray of black tea and glass dishes of sugary fudge.
His jumpiness was understandable. By electing to stay in Herat he was arrested seven times. For not only was he a poet but, like his hero Firdosi, also a prominent member of Herat’s sizeable Shiite community and taught at a Shia school. The Taliban considered Shias as infidels and it was commonly believed that to be accepted into their inner group one had to have killed ten Shias. In 1999 Khafash was among the many people rounded up after an attempted Shia uprising in the city. ‘They hanged the twenty-five people they thought were ringleaders and for forty-eight hours they left their bodies hanging upside down from the feet all round the city, near the old cinema and the hotel. Do you have children? The children of Herat have all seen bodies hanging. They took another hundred and twenty Shias to Kandahar prison and kept them there for sixteen months and they burnt our school and schoolbus and twenty-six Shia mosques. I didn’t take part in the uprising but I did help raise money and find weapons and also culturally through my poems. Had the Taliban known this they would have treated me more harshly. Because I am an old man I was only held here for seven months.’
Khafash in his room overlooking the minarets of Herat.
His real weapon against the Taliban had been his poetry. ‘I am not strong physically. I am small and my heart not good. My poems were my only way to fight. I would come home from the school around 3 p.m. and sit up here every afternoon writing poems while there was still light and sometimes by lamp when we had kerosene.’
He was lucky to have his own room to write in, away from the living quarters down below. In most Afghan houses, the same room would be used for eating, sleeping and entertaining.
‘When a poem was finished friends would help me copy them by hand or sometimes we could Xerox them. Then they would be circulated.’ The most popular, he said, was one about the Amar bil Marouf, the much-hated moral police. ‘These were the men who would go to streets at prayer-time and force shopkeepers to close their shops and herd them into the mosques with sticks, and would beat men whose beards were not longer than a fist or little boys if their hair was too long. To me this was a kind of Islam the Prophet Mohammed would not recognise so I wrote a poem that went like this:
I told you to say your beard is long
And under it are the plans of a Saudi
You moral policeman in the middle of the bazaar
Are as greedy as a long-tailed donkey in a trough.
‘Little children would memorise the last two lines and when they caught sight of the bil Marouf, they would recite it behind their backs in Persian and run away and the police would get mad but they didn’t know who was writing these things. It became a sort of anti-Taliban anthem.
‘Often they suspected me but they never caught me with any of my poems. Look!’ Laughing, he got up and went to the plywood wall at the end of the room. ‘It’s a false wall!’ He pulled it open to reveal shelves stuffed with papers, all his poems, as well as a large television. ‘And this is what I did with the most sensitive ones.’ He took a torch from the shelf and unscrewed the battery compartment to reveal some rolled-up pages.
‘Taliban have come to this place and never found anything. I always told them I was spending all my time on my book Khatab which is a translation of the prayers of Imam Sajjad in verse that I have been working on for the last fifteen years.
‘Unfortunately not many of our people can read so I thought up different ways to get my poems to them. When Mullah Omar took the Sacred Cloak of the Prophet Mohammed from its shrine in Kandahar and crowned himself Amir-ul Momineem, I wrote a poem which had a kind of chorus line, “Congratulations for cloaking a pile of dung with an ass’s skin”. Then I had the idea to commission four busts of Mullah Omar, caricatures with a patch on one eye and beards made from sheep’s wool, with this line inscribed underneath. At exactly 10 p.m. one evening, one hour after curfew, we placed them at four different corners of the city. They arrested all the poets in the city that night, as well as the dentists because it was such a good cast.
‘They came for me at about 2 a.m. I had to swear I hadn’t written the poem – it was either that or be killed – but even so I was kept under house arrest for five months and they beat my knuckles with sticks to stop me writing.’
He showed me his fingers. They were stubby and swollen.
‘I am not by nature a brave man,’ he added. ‘For the last six years I never had a proper night’s
sleep and if I heard a car on the road I would break into a cold sweat and think it was the Taliban coming to get me.’
As we were talking the sky had grown dark outside and it was becoming hard to take notes. Khafash shouted for his son who came running with a kerosene lamp which he placed on the floor near me. The lamp gave out a gentle hiss and the room looked different in the flickering light, more sinister. In the shadows the poet’s large head and eyes gave him the appearance of an owl on the lookout for prey. While in most cultures owls are regarded as wise creatures, in Afghanistan they have the opposite connotation and one of the worst things one could do to an enemy was to feed him owlflesh. There was a burst of automatic gunfire in a nearby street and I began to wonder about the wisdom of walking back to the hotel in the dark.
‘I am very happy that the spell of the Taliban is broken,’ he said as I got up to leave, ‘I wrote this to celebrate.’ He gave me a copy of the poem called The Godly Sword that he had written the day after they had left Herat. ‘Begin taking out the ruthless and break the butterflies free’ was one of the lines.
The city of Herat is dominated by the presence of the minarets but I had been there almost a week before I awoke to another dawn as clear as that first one and set off to see them. The sprawl of the city ended abruptly in wide open space and then there they were. As I walked towards them, my step quickening, I suddenly understood what Byron meant when he wrote; ‘Strolling up the road towards the minarets, I feel as one might who has lighted on the lost books of Livy or an unknown Botticelli. It is impossible I suppose to communicate such a feeling.’
For me part of that was loss. I felt as I had when stumbling upon places in the Amazon where centuries-old forest had been burnt down for mining or ranching, leaving just a few stumps sticking up awkwardly from the scorched earth. The five minarets were as I had seen from a distance – leaning at awkward angles, one on its own with a jagged hole two thirds of the way up, then four forming a square some way away. Apart from a small square building with a ribbed dome near the first minaret there was absolutely nothing in between.
This was all that was left of the centrepiece of the Timurid renaissance, the vast complex of religious college, mosque and mausoleum that once had some twenty or thirty minarets all covered in brilliant mosaic joined by walls and arches and bridges with heavy bronze doors, founded by Queen Gowhar Shad in 1417. Everyone who passed through, from Babur to the British Great Game players, wrote of their ‘extraordinary beauty’. Yet of the prayer halls, libraries and colleges there were no ruins to suggest what had been there, not a single brick. Only the five minarets remained, soaring skywards out of bare fields of powdery earth like lone witnesses to the scene of some great tragedy. In the field of the domed building there had been a vain attempt at planting rows of trees but the seedlings had withered and died and there were signs either side of the path warning of land-mines.
As Byron wrote, things of that scale do not just disappear so completely. The House of Timur collapsed largely because after Shah Rukh’s death in 1447, his many sons and grandsons, who had been brought up to value beauty above anything, were far too intent on the pleasures of wine and women to worry about anything as mundane as running the empire or keeping out marauding Uzbeks. Visiting his Timurid cousins in 1506, Babur explained their failure to meet him as ‘probably due to a hangover after having indulged in revelry and pleasure’. A year later the Uzbeks stormed the citadel of Herat, though they quickly lost it to the Persians who ruled until 1749 when it was captured by Ahmad Shah Abdali, the first of the Pashtun kings, after a nine-month siege.
Yet although the Uzbeks and Persians plundered the buildings, it was actually the British who destroyed them. In 1885, the Russians had attacked the Afghans south east of Merv and occupied northern Afghanistan and a Russian attack on Herat was expected any day to open the way to India, the great prize. The British, who were advising the Afghan king Abdur Rahman, insisted that all buildings on the north of town which could give cover to the expected invaders should be demolished. Hence, wrote Byron, ‘the most glorious productions of Mohammedan architecture in the XVth century, having survived the barbarism of four centuries were now razed to the ground under the eyes and with the approval of the English Commissioners.’
The Russian attack never happened and just nine minarets and a mausoleum escaped the British demolition. Two later fell in an earthquake before Byron visited Herat in 1933. But he rhapsodised about the maze of flowers and arabesques in coloured mosaic decorating the remaining seven, which he likened to the fine patterning on a china teacup. There had been people too, Heratis picnicking or taking walks in their shadow, often carrying caged songbirds. Now the fields were eerily deserted, just a small donkey rolling in the dust, and the minarets had been so blasted by wind and sun, shaken by shelling and pockmarked by gunfire, that the only sign that there had ever been glazed tiling was the thousands of tiny pieces of faience in pale yellow, jade green, bright turquoise and cobalt blue scattered among the dry earth.
The first, solitary minaret, which had been one of a pair at the main gate of the path leading to the mausoleum, was the fattest and had two balconies supported by scalloped stonework beneath what had been the tower. The hole was about two thirds of the way up and two white doves were chasing each other in and out. Close to, I could see that the brickwork was diamond-patterned. When Byron saw it the diamonds were edged with Persian blue and filled with flowers and the bases of the minaret had white marble panels with inscriptions, but all that had gone. Instead at the bottom there was a white-painted skull and crossbones from Omar, the anti-land-mine agency.
Yet according to Byron this was the least beautiful of the minarets. He had seen two more in this first field that were far more exquisite and were all that remained of the four corners of the mosque or madrassa of Gowhar Shad. One of these fell in an earthquake in 1951 and the other was destroyed in 1979 in the Soviet bombing. The small domed building in the field was the queen’s mausoleum and was situated in the centre of the great quadrangle of the college.
The other four minarets still standing were part of a second madrassa built by Sultan Hussein Baiqara, the last Timurid ruler. To get to them I had to cross a small bridge over a dried-up canal, past a man selling mandarins, piled in a pyramid on a table in front of one of those rusted shipping containers used to bring in arms and later by the Taliban to ship prisoners. For less than a dollar I bought a large bag to supplement our diet. A few opal tiles up the sides of these minarets were all that remained of the white network that Byron had written made it seem ‘that one saw the sky as if through a net of shining hair’.
After Byron’s visit, the minarets had not only endured another earthquake but also the Soviet invasion. This part of town had swung back and forth between mujaheddin control and Soviet control, the Green Line sometimes passing right through the centre of the minarets, and at some point the Russians had mined the whole area to try and stop Ismael Khan’s men coming back into the city. When I had come to Herat in 1989 the ruined musalla was a battlefield and I couldn’t get anywhere near. Although the Russians had only destroyed one minaret, the constant shelling had caused them to shed their tiling to the ground almost like tears.
I crossed back over the bridge to the top field where Gowhar Shad’s madrassa had stood. It had obviously been a very different kind of madrassa to Haqqania. The queen is said to have once visited with her two hundred ladies-in-waiting on a tour of inspection and the students had all been told to vacate their rooms. But one had fallen asleep and woke to see a beautiful ruby-lipped woman in front of him. When this lady-in-waiting returned to the others, the ‘irregularity of her dress and manners’ gave away what had happened so Gowhar Shad immediately ordered all two hundred to marry the students and provided each with a bed, clothes and an allowance.
‘In the past people could only speak in rhyme here,’ said a white-bearded man who suddenly appeared beside me and turned out to be the keeper of the mausoleum, the large
key on a string round his neck magically fitting the padlock to the domed building. ‘Students came from Turkey, Iran, India, all over.’
There were four tombs inside the mausoleum, all in strange dark green marble and I wondered where it had come from. The largest one in the centre was that of Gowhar Shad. Having outlived her husband and, after years of trying, manoeuvred her favourite grandson on to the throne, she was over eighty when she was murdered by one of Tamerlane’s great-grandsons. On her tombstone was inscribed The Bilquis of her time. Bilquis means Queen of Sheba. The others were three of her sons, including her favourite Prince Baisanghor who added a famous library to her college and hired the best illuminators and bookbinders, then died from alcohol long before his mother, and her least favourite Mohammed Juki to whom she was so unpleasant that he is said to have died of ‘mortification’.
Above the window in one wall of the mausoleum was a large hole. ‘A Russian bomb,’ said the keeper, ‘these people need to rest after all they went through but nobody respects the dead anymore in my country.’ He shook his head despairingly and I realised he was one of the very few Afghan men I had met that was not wearing a gun. ‘And nobody respects beauty,’ he added. Along another wall were piles of fragments of mosaic sorted by colour – cobalt blue, turquoise, jade, opal white, scarlet, yellow. ‘Every day I collect more pieces,’ he said, ‘so one day this can all be rebuilt and Herat can get back its history. But I am afraid I am an old man and this is an endless task.’
Most of the pieces were no bigger than my thumbnail. Even the simplest flower designs comprising turquoise hexagons with cobalt blue petals around a scarlet centre on an opal background would surely be impossible to reconstruct from these tiny fragments.
The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 16