The Sewing Circles of Herat

by Christina Lamb

  The mausoleum obviously did not often get foreign visitors for the keeper was determined to show me everything and bounded up some crumbling steps, beckoning me to follow. We came out on a flat platform in front of the dome. Its turquoise ribbing seemed to be pulled up into the centre like the waist of a lady’s crinoline and there was a marvellous view of the citadel which I would liked to have sat and enjoyed. But the keeper had already disappeared inside through a hole in the roof to show me the brick inner skin of the dome. The space between the inner and outer roofs was so low that I had to crouch uncomfortably as I followed him round, stumbling occasionally on a loosened brick in the near dark, expecting eventually to be shown something marvellous that would reward this effort. Instead we just came back out on the roof so I sat down and peeled a mandarin. The keeper refused one, lighting up a cigarette instead, and he was wise for it was so sour it brought tears to my eyes.

  In my pocket were two pieces of faience, one of the dark grape blue and one of the bright Persian blue that I had picked from the earth. When the keeper wandered off to one side, I took them out and held them in my palm, moving it around so they glittered in the November sunlight. The deep blue was made from crushed lapis lazuli from the mountains of Badakshan and more intense than any colour I had ever seen.

  MARRI’S DIARY

  10 December 2001

  They have chosen us a government in Bonn we heard on the radio and Karzai is to be its leader! My father and our family are very happy and we hope now his majesty Zahir Shah will come back and there will be peace again.

  It is odd for our leaders to be chosen so far away. Most people here have never heard of Karzai they say he is too young and never fought in the jihad. My friends say this is a good thing for we have had enough of those who got themselves dollar accounts and Pajeros.

  We hope he comes soon. The Northern Alliance commanders are driving round town with all their gunmen and posters of Ahmad Shah Massoud on their windscreens. Some like General Fahim fought with the Russians. We know they don’t like us Pashtuns, they will try and punish us for all that went before, and we do not know if they will accept this government. My father says this Rabbani is like a snake and we remember what happened last time when he would not give up power as he was supposed to.

  My brother tells us shopkeepers are putting up Massoud posters so they do not have problems with the Northern Alliance.

  Many of our neighbours are going to the graves of their sons to pray. We have been lucky in all these years of war, we lost just one uncle murdered by the Russians when he was farming. They thought he was a mujahid and chopped up his body and put it in the well. Also one of my cousins lost his mind after going to the hospital and seeing so many terrible things there.

  Today I talked with Farishta and Najeba about the burqas. We are waiting to see what happens. It’s funny before the Taliban I had never worn one and I hated them, I couldn’t see where I was going, the sound was all muffled. But now we have got used to them and ín these cold days they give some warmth as we don’t have coats. We decided the difference is we feel free – we’re not wearing them by law. I think once we go back to work I will stop wearing it. How I pray for that day!

  1 Christie claimed to have been only the second European to enter Herat. He was killed two years later in a Russian attack while seconded as a military advisor to the crown prince of Persia, Abbas Mirza.

  2 Written in Chagatai Turkish, the language of the Timurids, rather than Persian, the lingua franca of Central Asia at that time, it became a sort of handbook for Moghul rulers and was widely copied, but the original version was last seen during the reign of Emperor Shah Jahan.

  3 This is also the Persian name for the constellation Ursa Major.

  4 The bible of Persian nationalists, the Shahnama took thirty-five years to write. Firdosi was seventy-five years old in 1010 when it was complete and he presented it to Mahmud, the ruler of Khurasan, expecting a handsome reward. Instead the sum was so paltry that he gave it to a bath-house attendant in contempt and went into hiding, writing satirical verses about Mahmud. Years later Mahmud repented his shabby treatment of the poet and sent 60,000 dinars – one for each verse – on camels to his home town. As the camels entered one gate, the poet’s body was carried out of another.

  6

  The Secret of Glass

  The sand of the desert is lightly blown away by a breath;

  still more lightly is the future of man destroyed.

  Turkoman proverb

  WHICH IS BEST, Inglistan or Afghanistan?’

  The question came as I was standing in one of the turrets of the citadel contemplating the plains across which Genghis Khan’s hordes of wild horsemen had once come ‘roaring like an ocean’ and the massive walls that had been besieged so many times in their seven centuries of existence and imagining them impaled with the severed heads of Persian attackers. It was in Afghanistan that I had seen my first dead body, three Soviet soldiers lying in a pool of blood in a field near Jalalabad, on their backs with legs bent as if flung there. I had found myself strangely curious. Growing up in England, death had been something kept from me, our only encounters strictly sanitised. In Afghanistan the dead were impossible to avoid – I had seen people with their brains blown out, killed by tank-shells, blown up by land-mines, shivering with malaria or dying from tuberculosis. A couple of days before, in the vast Maslakh camp outside Herat, I had witnessed the burials of tiny children, their bodies stiff and doll-like, dead of starvation and cold. I was not surprised to read a Unicef report which said two thirds of Afghan children had seen someone killed, in many cases someone they knew. On one page was a child’s drawing in black pencil of a little girl with fuzzy hair and one arm under which the child had written ‘I hate the rockets because children have lost arms and legs’. On the ground next to the girl was her other arm.

  Few places in this land of ghosts had seen as much death as the Herat citadel. We had bluffed our way in by showing a letter of permission for the prison, taking a likely chance that the guards on the gate would not be able to read. The citadel’s latest occupants were Ismael Khan’s men, instantly identifiable by their black and white Palestinian-style chequered keffiyehs over their heads like that worn by their leader, and though they had let us in, six of them were following us round, clearly suspicious that we were on some kind of British intelligence-gathering mission. We stopped by a large machine gun with a bunch of pink and white plastic flowers tied to the barrel.

  ‘Which is best, Inglistan or Afghanistan?’

  The question came again and the guard who had asked it had a jagged scar on his right cheek pulling down his eye.

  ‘Well, Afghanistan is very beautiful and the people are very hospitable. You have beautiful mountains. Also the weather is very nice. But, England has roads, electricity, schools, hospitals, libraries, running water, trains, lots of food …’

  The mujahid looked unimpressed. ‘And how much fighting do you have in Inglistan?’

  ‘Well, we don’t really. I mean we had a civil war but that was more than 350 years ago and since then people in England have pretty much lived together peacefully.’

  ‘What if someone was to steal your husband’s gun? By Allah, then he would fight!’

  He nodded towards Justin who was down below taking photographs they had said were not permitted. I could see it would be impossible to explain that Justin wasn’t my husband.

  ‘He doesn’t have a gun.’

  The men looked shocked, shaking their heads and repeating ‘no gun’ to each other. They all had standard-issue Kalashnikovs slung across their shoulders and wide belts of brass bullets on their waists except for one with a Russian army cap and a loopy grin who was carrying a hand-held rocket-launcher, which to my horror he kept dropping on the hard ground.

  ‘How does he protect you then?’ asked the grinning man.

  ‘I don’t need protecting,’ I replied, trying to look fierce. ‘Besides, my husband knows I am under the protect
ion of Tora Ismael.’ It was partly true. We had been brought to Herat by one of his emissaries.

  The men looked suitably impressed and drew back a little allowing me to descend from the turret and explore.

  The citadel was a strange building that seemed much bigger from the inside with the full width of the walls visible, than from the outside, where we had come across the entrance unexpectedly after wandering through narrow yellow-dust lanes of the bazaar in the Old City cluttered with shops selling smuggled electronics goods with unfamiliar brand-names, and crowded with men on donkeys or bicycles. On the dry mud verges just beneath the walls of the citadel by the fetid trickle of a moat in which a man was squatting, trousers down, were mounds of second-hand clothes. I had been told that one could pick up bargains of beautiful Italian wool overcoats and Russian fur hats and Red Army belt-buckles in Herat but all I could see were pink and purple Lycra tracksuits, Pakistani polyester shalwar kamiz and plastic sandals. One merchant had a pile of odd single shoes and I asked him what they were for. ‘Those with one leg,’ he replied.

  Once inside the citadel, the walls were so thick I began to see how Tamerlane’s son Shah Rukh could have employed 7000 men to strengthen them when he rebuilt it in 1405. Yet it had not been enough to save the Timurid empire from marauding Uzbeks or Persians, and in 1837 one of the oddest episodes in Anglo-Afghan history took place here. A young British player in the Great Game, twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger of the Bengal Artillery, found himself organising the citadel’s defence. Pottinger had dyed his skin and slipped into Herat in the guise of a holy man to find frantic repair works underway on the crumbling ramparts and the city buzzing with news of a Persian army, led by the Shah himself, marching from Tehran. Presenting himself and his expertise in modern siege-craft to the ruler Yar Mohammed, he was immediately put in charge of fortifying the citadel against the onslaught of the Persian army and their Russian advisors led by a general called Count Simonich. The siege went on for ten months until September 1838. Supplies ran so short that the Heratis slaughtered all their horses for food and tore down their houses to burn for fuel and only Pottinger’s constant encouragement prevented them from giving up. By the time the Persian invaders desisted, apparently in the belief that British troops were arriving, the stench from the refuse and unburied dead piled up inside the citadel could be smelled from ten miles away.

  The stench was still bad, but for all the carnage that had taken place there, the citadel seemed in better shape than most buildings in Afghanistan. Only the central area was in ruins, a jumble of bricks which looked like the foundations of houses and the guards said was mined. I walked down a lane along one side of which were a series of arched alcoves stacked with boxes of ammunition, suggesting the Taliban really had departed in a hurry, and then back up onto a rampart looking down to a square in which a noisy crowd had gathered.

  ‘What are they doing?’ I asked the guards.

  ‘Fighting with eggs. It used to be banned under the Taliban.’

  ‘What do you mean, fighting with eggs?’ I had never heard of such a thing.

  ‘You boil the eggs then hit each other’s egg to see whose smashes first. People bet on which egg will be strongest. It is much entertainment.’

  From what I could make out the egg-game was a messier variant of playing conkers. It seemed a waste of food in a city with so little.

  ‘This game is banned in Inglistan?’

  ‘Not banned. I just don’t think anyone has thought of playing it.’

  The man with the scarred cheek could not contain his curiosity any longer.

  ‘So in Inglistan, men don’t fight each other even for fun?’

  I thought about football hooligans or people coming out of the pubs on Saturday nights. Did they fight for fun? In Afghanistan, warfare was part of life even when the country was not at war, particularly among the Pashtun. One of their sayings was, ‘Be tame in the city and rebellious in the mountains’. The Afghan scholar Louis Dupree wrote of visiting a village in the southeastern province of Paktia in 1962 and witnessing attempts by one tribe to steal some trees of another, sparking off a long-dormant feud. Within a week ten of the hundred men in the village had been killed.

  ‘Fighting is our problem,’ said one of the other men. ‘We fight with everything. Afghans are world champions in fighting.’

  It was hard to disagree. All the Afghans I had spoken to said they were fed up with war yet as a people there was no doubt they often fought for the enjoyment. All their legends revolved around fighting and so did their hobbies. It wasn’t just the obvious ones such as bird-fighting, cockfighting and wrestling or buzkashi, the Afghan version of polo and pre-cursor to the western game, with a live goat (or sometimes heads of Russian prisoners) used as a ball. Even activities that seemed peaceful, like boiling eggs, in Afghanistan involved some form of warfare.

  Kite-flying was another unexpectedly martial sport. The ban on kite-flying had come to symbolise the lunacy of the Taliban and since they had fled the sky seemed to be awash with plastic or paper kites flown by small boys running on the flat roofs of houses. I had wondered why the kites had no tails and why so many ended up trapped in trees and powerlines. Then it was explained to me that the point of kites was not to watch them soar and dive in the sky but to use them to fight other children’s kites. Warrior kites. This was done by coating the string with a mixture of powdered glass and rice flour, and then flying the kite towards an opponent’s to try to slash his string.

  For children growing up in Afghanistan or for the four million born in refugee camps, war was not a vague concept but part of everyday life – even primary school textbooks used pictures of hand grenades and bullets instead of apples and oranges to teach five-year-olds how to count. In a way it started from birth – when it was known that the arrival of a baby was imminent, men with guns would gather at the house ready to fire off bursts of five or seven shots for a girl and fourteen or more for a boy. In Pashtun custom the first thing the father of a newborn boy does is hang a rifle over his cot. I had never seen Afghan children playing a local version of cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers as they do in the West, and as I had seen in Palestinian and African refugee camps, because at the age when boys elsewhere might get a toy gun, Afghan boys got real ones and were taught by their fathers how to use them. There were always plenty of guns but the combination of US aid to the mujaheddin and Soviet assistance to the regime had made Afghanistan the world’s foremost recipient of personal weapons by the mid-1980s. Those that could not obtain guns had slingshots or catapults which they learnt to use with deadly accuracy.

  Inside the citadel, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by death and killing. Large stretches of the city below were still in rubble from Soviet carpet-bombing, first to wreak revenge on the city then to prevent shelter being given to the mujaheddin. Some houses had been rebuilt using the ancient bricks from Queen Gowhar Shad’s musalla but much of it still looked like pictures of Hiroshima. Towards the military encampment there were some new ruins from the recent American bombing. Out on the plains, entire villages had been flattened by the Soviets, virtually unreported, and beyond that were the hills where Ismael Khan’s valiant men had played deadly cat and mouse with the Red Army. From our vantage point we could look right down into the small houses of the Old City with their walled courtyards, and after all that had happened it was odd to see normal life continuing. Children were pumping water from a well, a group of old men were on their knees on a flat roof scrubbing carpets with stones to make them look older and toddlers were throwing pebbles at a dog. Some men were just standing in that way people in Central Asia often do, as if waiting for something when there was nothing to wait for.

  The card for Sultan Hamidy’s famous glass factory described it as ‘Handicrafts & Historical thinhgs Shop’ and carried a small blue diagram which pictured it on the corner of ‘North St. of the Big Mosque’.

  It was not hard to find. Big Mosque was a literal but accurate description of
the Masjid-i-Juma or Friday Mosque where for eight centuries the people of Herat had gathered for prayers and important events in the city such as declaring a new ruler or motivating soldiers before they went off for war. Every inch of the walls was covered with stunning blue tiles decorated with golden arabesques and white-petalled flowers; the entrance was through an impressive archway with three tiers of pointed arched windows. We left our shoes with the old man sitting with his pile of sandals and tin of coins outside and stepped into a vast courtyard open to the sky with a marble floor which was icy cold underfoot even through thermal socks. Only the rich wear socks in Afghanistan, and I grimaced to see the worshippers walking barefeet. Near the entrance in a plastic case was a bronze cauldron at least three feet tall and wide, engraved with black markings, that had been commissioned by Tamerlane, and just off to the left a room which contained the tomb of Ghiyas-ad-Din, king of the Ghorids, who founded the mosque in 1200. A small marble shelf ran all the way along the west wall at about knee height and on it, in one of the prayer niches, a man had taken off his prosthetic leg and laid it by his side with his Kalashnikov while he prostrated himself. It seemed an odd place of worship where men leave their shoes at the entrance but not their guns.

  It was too cold to linger long in the mosque so I scurried across the road to find sanctuary in Sultan Hamidy’s shop. From the outside the windows were so encrusted with dust that it was hard to see what it sold. I supposed it was a long time since a foreign tourist passed this way. But inside, once one adjusted to the dim light, was an Aladdin’s cave. Old British muskets hung from the ceiling along with wooden lute-like instruments called tamburs inlaid with ivory, as well as long Uzbek coats and antique silk scarves in bright pinks and emeralds. Glass cabinets contained a jumble of Bactrian lion heads, small limestone tablets covered with squiggly writing, flat squarish coins that looked like they dated from Greek or Roman times, Buddhist-style walnuts covered with ivory fashioned into dragon designs, Kandahari whistle-flutes, Persian seals and miniatures, and Russian pocket watches in silver cases carved with bears or trains. It was an inventory of Afghanistan’s invaders.