“Really,” he says, “you are praying to Ansari? This is wonderful! I also pray to him when I have a problem. Many people here do, but I never met a foreigner who did this.”
I am about to confess: “Well, I wasn’t exactly . . . ”
But Abdul Aziz is not to be deterred. “You saw a man with no hair?” he says. “Under the iwan by Ansari’s tomb? He is a thief. You understand? This place is closed; you cannot be arrested if you are with Ansari.”
He places his tea glass on the ground and takes my hand, smiling gently as he tells me how this thousand-year-ago poet has affected his own life:
“Ansari did a miracle for me.”
I’m pretty blasé about miracles by now. In Iran, I was told about paraplegics who were given back the use of their legs through the personal intercession of Imam Ali, while the Professor often laughed about the War Propaganda Office’s claims that tulips had miraculously sprouted from soil irrigated by the blood of “martyrs” in the Iran-Iraq war. Abdul Aziz’s is a less ambitious, smaller scale sort of miracle—and all the more convincing for it.
“Last year,” he says, “I had a car accident. I was working for a construction company and I did not have a good experience with their vehicles. One day I turned onto the road too fast and I hit someone, he didn’t die but he went to hospital and he still has a problem with his legs. Well, I was very nervous about this. The man who I hit, his father wanted to put me in jail. So I came here, I came to the tomb of Ansari. It wasn’t like today, it was late at night, so there were only the men who are always here. I knew the police could not take me if I was with Ansari, but this was not the reason I was here. You see, I wanted to ask Ansari for advice. So I sat down beside his tomb and I prayed for his help. And do you know what happened when I got home? It was a miracle! Because when I got home, I found out that my father had spoken to this man—the man who wanted to put me in jail—and he had agreed to drop the charges.”
Abdul Aziz shakes his head in disbelief, as if it has only just happened and he is still recovering from the shock.
“How could this fortune not shine on me,” he says, “if it is not for the blessing of Ansari?”
“You mean,” I say, “Ansari actually saved you?”
An eleventh-century Sufi poet—credited with keeping a man out of jail. Even if I’m skeptical about the poet’s involvement, I can’t doubt Abdul Aziz’s belief in it. It is this—his unshakeable faith in the Sufi poet’s intercession—that represents such a striking connection with the past. And how typical of Persian culture to produce a poet—a man remembered not for any great political acts but for the verses he wrote—who is also regarded as a saint. If Abdul Aziz was alone, I might put his story down as an intriguing oddity. But what is striking, as he guides me around the compound, is how many others echo his experience.
“Oh yes,” says a robust-looking man on the other side of the hut, laying down his pipe and offering it to us with the nozzle facing away, in accordance with accepted water-pipe etiquette. “I too have benefited through the blessed Ansari. I am a builder, so I have to climb a lot of high walls. Well, two years ago, I fell off a wall and lost consciousness. My family was at the hospital talking to the doctors, and they were sure I was going to die. My sons came here to light some sticks and pray to Ansari, because they knew this was the only chance. And now look at me! I am in good health and I have seen the birth of three grandchildren.”
There is more. Outside one of the tombs, we meet a man who works for the Catholic Relief Services—a job he insists he wouldn’t have secured “if Ansari did not make this happen.” And there is a middle-aged man in a suit, quietly reading The Intimate Conversations , who tells us his house was set on fire by the Taliban.
“It was at night,” he explains. “None of us could have survived. But the day before, my wife prayed here to Ansari, and because of this we lived.”
“I think you don’t believe these people,” says Abdul Aziz, squeezing alongside me in the bus back to the city.
The women are at the front and the men at the back—dozens of us, squashed so tightly together we can feel each other’s hipbones.
“But tell me,” says Abdul Aziz, “you saw some bullet holes in Ansari’s tomb place?”
“Well, no . . . ”
“You see? This place is protected. We have had so much fighting in the last few years and all the places in Herat were destroyed, but not this place. God was protecting it.”50
I’m fascinated by people’s willingness to attribute their good luck to Ansari—there’s something deeply self-effacing about it. Whereas in the West we are inclined to claim credit for ourselves, many of the people I’ve met are eager to put it all down to a man from the past.
But it isn’t only Ansari who helped people—during the Taliban era, the Sufis were helping themselves—as I learn the next day when Abdul Aziz takes me to a caravanserai in the city center—an old merchants’ rest house converted into a school. One of the teachers, who has been instructing Abdul Aziz in English, is also a Sufi poet.
“The Taliban didn’t like us at all,” he says.
His name is Hamid. Tall and bearded, he has a moon-shaped face, beaming out as he pours black tea in the staff room.
“One day when they were in power,” he continues, “they broke up our assembly at the Friday Mosque. But after this, hundreds of Sufis came together at the mosque and we said if the Taliban act against us we will withstand them. The Taliban knew they could not defeat us, so they backed down and didn’t give us any trouble again. You see—in Herat the Sufis are very powerful.”
I think of Ali Hujwiri, who wrote the first Persian treatise on Sufism in the eleventh century. “The sun of love and the fortune of the Sufi path,” he declared, “is in the ascendant in Khorasan.” Judging from what I have seen and heard in Herat, it still is.
My encounter with Abdul Aziz turns out to be one of those chances on which a visit to a new city often depends. Over the next few days, he takes me on a tour of Herat’s most famous mausolea. We stand under the shade of an ancient pistachio tree, listening to an old “white-beard” reciting stories of kings and beggars by the marble slab where the fifteenth-century poet Abdur-Rahman Jami lies. It’s said the city’s ruler of the time, Sultan Hussain, spent hours shedding tears of grief over the grave—a hint of the close relationship between artists and the authorities of the time, which recent history has been so far from emulating.
In another corner of the city, we chat with a French diplomat under a dome the color of the sky, which crowns the resting place of Jami’s sponsor Gowhar Shad—the Happy Jewel, whose patronage was such a spur to the city’s fifteenth-century artists. And one afternoon we end up on our backs at the “Rolling Tomb,” where men spin across the pebbles in imitation of Baba Qaltan, a medieval Sufi who, on setting out to visit Jami, decided to roll rather than walk. You place your head on a gravestone, close your eyes, and recite a prayer about the oneness of God; if you roll a good distance, it’s deemed to be proof that your prayers will be well-received. Unfortunately, my own effort is both stilted and short, prompting one of the onlookers to announce, “This is because he is an unbeliever”—which isn’t especially reassuring in light of my coming journey.
In between the tombs, we stroll around the bazaar, under wooden domes and high vaults where grit and plaster pour onto the tracks, loosened by a wheelbarrow of beans or a donkey cart carrying a sack of peanuts. The smell of hot freshly baked bread oozes out of the bakeries, where teenage boys are using long wooden paddles to scoop the flats of dough from the underground ovens, distracted from their work by the sight of a brightly dressed girl whose exceptional deportment is being tested by the water jug on her head.
There’s noise all around us—a chapan seller is calling out the prices for his rainbow-colored gowns; the metalworkers are hammering at their aluminum sheets; there are cobblers with horseshoes and a cheerful swordsmith, his gold tooth gleaming, chiseling a gazelle-horn scabbard over a mound of
chippings the same ashen color as his beard. In between advice about the steel (when it’s clean it smells like an onion, he explains, and “if it’s good, it becomes soft like wax and the dirt skims off it just like a dry onion”), he recites from the Shahnameh : “Not lion nor dragon nor div can evade/ The terrible edge of my well-sharpened blade.” The verse, he tells me, reminds him of the importance of swordmaking “for our people for thousands of years.”
One evening, when I’ve just woken from a nap after my excursions with Abdul Aziz, he turns up at the Hotel Successful in a cauliflower of dust.
“Again, come on!” he shouts, leaning forward on the hemp saddlebag of his Honda motorcycle. “My father invites you for dinner.”
Behind a high adobe wall is the first Afghan house I’ve visited. We step inside a metal gate, passing a satellite dish impaled in the concrete of the courtyard.
“We couldn’t put the dish on our roof,” says Abdul Aziz, “because the Taliban would have seen it.”
Ahead of us, a frayed brown rug stretches across the concrete floor of a large unfurnished room. There’s a pile of mattresses in a corner, presumably for guests to sleep on, and a picture of the Ka’aba of Mecca is hanging on the wall, under a clock.
“God is kind,” says Abdul Aziz’s thin, scraggly bearded father, as he offers me his hand.
God, I will soon be told, is also wise, powerful, and clement—the reason not only for my being here but also for the meal we are about to be served. His instruments in this instance are Abdul Aziz’s mother and sisters, who are hard at work in the kitchen. When I ask if I can meet them, it’s suggested that I eat more of the rice, which is slithered with carrot and dripped in sheep’s fat, served on a single platter into which we all dig. Having been prepared by their hands, it is the closest I will come to an encounter with the women themselves.
The meal is conducted mostly in silence—every time I’m about to open my mouth to speak, Abdul Aziz’s father gestures for me to eat more. But with the dish wiped almost clean, he starts pouring out his questions.
“You know our poetry?” he asks.
I tell him I’m especially interested in the Shahnameh, which prompts a warm smile.
“Agar juz bikam-e man ayaad javaab,” he recites, “man u gurz u maidan u Afrasiyaab.” And should this reply with my wish not accord, / Then Afrasiyab’s field, the mace and the sword.
“This is Rostam,” he announces, one hand swiping the air, as if the warrior has just entered the room and needs to be introduced. “It is when he is fighting against the Turanians. Would you not agree he is the greatest of the heroes in Shahnameh?”
I wonder if he’s a scholar; but when he tells me he runs a shop (one of a row of metal shipping containers on the road to the musalla minarets), it’s no surprise. This is another example of how the Shahnameh resonates among ordinary Persian speakers. Listening to him, I’m sure the scholars I’ve met are right—that the same literary Persian culture survives on both sides of the border.
There is a creak behind me. I turn to see two thin black-clad arms stretching through the door. A tray is held between them, which is taken by Abdul Aziz and set on the rug. The tea is lemon-scented, served in tapering tulip-shaped glasses with silver rims. Beside it is a bowl of fresh fruit—grapes of several different colors, a couple of burst pomegranates, their seeds glistening like rubies in a cave, and a pair of blush apples, which Abdul Aziz peels with a knife, forming spirals out of the paper-white flesh and the shiny green rind.
“Ismail Khan was good for us,” says his father—we have moved on to politics now. “He fought against the Taliban; they were our enemy.”
“Because of their repressions?” I ask.
“Because they are Pashtun.”
He strokes his beard, greasing it with the sheep’s fat dripping off his fingers.
“We are not Pashtun, so why must they rule us? [President Hamid] Karzai is the same. You know our poetry, so you understand. We are a cultured people, but what did the Pashtuns ever create? What poetry did they write?”
Given what he thinks of the Pashtuns, I’m not surprised when he advises me to change my travel plans. He spits a grape seed into his hand and lets out a grunt as he shifts his belly over his crossed legs.
“You must not go south of Herat,” he says. “If you want to see Kabul you must take an airplane. But you must not go south, because you will meet the Pashtuns. And you do not need me to tell you how foolish that would be.”
I play it Persian: nodding to what he has said, agreeing that he has given me excellent advice (to do anything else would be to cause offense—especially in front of his son) and making up my mind to go ahead with my plans anyway.
“Wisdom is a gift from God,” he declares.
He’s smiling, even though I’m sure I can see in his eyes that he knows what I’m thinking: The code of Persian etiquette has designated a role for both of us, and we’re acting to the script.
He pushes the fruit bowl toward me, gesturing with an expansive palm. “Have a pomegranate. According to our great scientist Ibn Sina, it is good for the digestion.”
The next day, Abdul Aziz turns up at the Hotel Successful once again.
“My father was very interested to meet you,” he says. “He invites you to come for supper any time you wish.”
“Thank you!” I reply. But I know this is the politeness code I’ve come across so many times in recent months. One meal is enough—the worst kind of guest is the one who keeps turning up.
This morning we have a particular mission, and having a local like Abdul Aziz is going to be an enormous help. He escorts me a few minutes from the city center, to a broad metal gate set between marble-tiled columns. Stocks rattle as a group of sentinels raise their Kalashnikovs.
“No journalists!” one of them shouts.
“I’m not a journalist,” I reply. “I’m a—well, I’m writing a book about history. The history of Herat. And if I can’t include—er—Governor Khan—well, it won’t look very good. I mean, people might think he’s not very important.”
The soldier takes a moment to flex his brow, then he leads us inside the gate, where we stand in front of enough Toyota Land Cruisers to set up a showroom.
“Stay here!” he barks, before disappearing into a rose garden.
Just to meet Ismail Khan would be exciting enough. Not only is he the most famous man in Herat—he’s an icon of modern Afghanistan, his biography an illustration of how topsy-turvy political life here can be. As a major in the Afghan army in 1979, he refused to fire on the local rebels when they massacred the Soviet advisers and their families—instead he took his men to the hills. A ten-year war between Khan and the Russians had begun.51
Within three years of its conclusion, after the Russian withdrawal in 1989, Khan declared himself “amir of Western Afghanistan.” But he was weakened when Herat was bombed by General Dostum, a rival mujahid, and a later Taliban assault forced him back into the hills. Dostum continued to be a thorn in Khan’s side: A year on, his deputy lured him into a Taliban trap. He was chained to a pipe in Kandahar, and for three years he lived on a single piece of bread a day. Even when a sympathetic guard helped him escape, he was still haunted by bad luck: His getaway car hit an anti-tank mine and his legs were broken. But he kept going, thanks to a rescue mission by his own loyalists, and was smuggled into the safe haven of Iran.
He didn’t take back Herat until 2001, assisted by the US bombing campaign. As governor, he rebuilt schools, roads, and parks, establishing the city as the safest and most prosperous in the whole country, and held public meetings where his subjects could petition him for favors, like the best of the ancient shahs. But Khan is no longer in charge. Accused of treating the province as his personal fiefdom, of arbitrary arrests, illegal detentions, and a moral code not much more lenient than the Taliban’s52 (and—more crucially for President Karzai’s central government—of failing to hand over tax and customs revenues, along with refusing to grant the U.S. an air base)
, he has lost his job amid mayhem on the streets. UN offices were set on fire and demonstrators chanted “Death to Karzai” (although conversations in Herat show Khan has plenty of opponents too, hoping his removal will bring them greater freedom). But even though he’s lost his handle on power, I imagine he has kept some of the trappings—and I’m eager to glimpse what is left of his court.
“Come!”
The soldier whisks us into the rose garden. Grape branches tunnel over our heads, while pink tiles slide under our feet and more pink appears in the stuccoed columns on either side of us. This I certainly didn’t expect: an Afghan warlord’s lair, looking like it’s been done up by Dame Barbara Cartland.
Men with waistcoats over their shalwar qameez are sitting on benches between the columns. A line of them gives way to a stocky man dressed entirely in white: skullcap, sleeveless shirt, trousers, beard, and even his prayer beads—as if he’s the guardian of a tacky TV version of heaven. Only the arch of Khan’s eyebrows betrays a more devious side. Others are keen to talk to him, so we’re nudged farther along to mingle with the mujahideen. We sit down at the end of a bench, next to a glum-looking man who shows us the stitches on his calf.
“Gunshot wounds,” he says nonchalantly. “Fighting against the Soviets.”
I ask him about his experiences with Khan: the “how do you know the host” question you ask at a party when you can’t think of anything else.
“We were in Kandahar together,” he says, his lips rising for a nostalgic smile, as if he’s about to set off on a fond trip down memory lane. “In a Taliban jail,” he adds, “chained to the pipes.”
More mujahideen sit around us, with turbans, long beards, and the obligatory Kalashnikovs, cross-legged on the carpet since there is no more space on the benches. Glasses of tea are proffered on a silver tray, and as they are being drained, a man stands up to recite a speech in praise of Khan. He has a deep, bombastic voice, which he hurls at his audience like he’s trying to knock us off the benches. Although he is speaking in Persian, I find his words difficult to understand, so I turn to Abdul Aziz for help.
Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard Page 14