Shadow of the Silk Road

by Colin Thubron

  In front of us, outside the Azadi gate, a circle of some hundred men were smiting their chests in rhythm, shouting, ‘Ah Ali! Yah Ali!’, bandying the cries between them in a broken martial dirge. Hussein saw my face. ‘They love Ali,’ he said, ‘and they are expecting the Mahdi.’ We walked beyond them, and found an alcove under a wall. ‘He may come at any time. People are awaiting him now, especially on his birthday…’

  I met his gaze, tried to smile. In the Anglican tradition of my childhood, the Messiah had been postponed indefinitely. Perhaps there was something weary in my voice when I said: ‘And then there will be judgement…’

  Hussein nodded: it might happen soon. ‘Our scriptures are like yours. We believe in the same prophets.’ He touched my arm. ‘I think good Christians go to heaven. We are the same people.’

  Some tension in me leaked away, so that I wondered what the last years had done to my sense of his faith. There were many Islams, as there were many Christianities. Hussein’s required that I join him in heaven. His smile spread in a beard fringed with white, then flickered out. ‘But your scriptures…are imperfect. Sometimes even they are a blasphemy to the Creator.’ There were things that were unbearable. His shoulders straightened with urgency. ‘Listen. Your Bible says Adam and Eve were naked in the garden, and God did not see them at first because they hid. How can that be? God sees everything. In your scriptures God tells Adam and Eve that if they eat of the fruit of the tree they will die. The serpent says they will not. And the serpent is right. The Bible says that Jacob wrestled with God, and won. That is absurd…’

  A hundred more literalisms, I could tell, were banking up in his head. I answered wanly that the Bible was not the verbatim word of God, like the Koran, but a record of sacred history. Yet I felt vulnerable, as if I were talking across centuries. His eyes, very focused and grave, never left my face. Sometimes I flinched from them. His piety was active: he had abandoned teaching to help in the upkeep of the shrine. Doubt would have shocked him silent. To him the patriarchs and prophets–Abraham, Noah, Moses–were not actors in a complex human chronicle, but the flawless messengers of God. The Koran was the purification of Jewish and Christian scripture, the last revelation. It absolved the prophets from the human mire of history. Jesus above all, said Hussein. Islam did not repudiate Jesus but the biblical version of him. How could a God be crucified?

  Out of my faded faith I said: ‘He was human among humans.’ But a gulf yawned between us, and seemed to widen.

  Hussein said: ‘It never happened. Or it happened to someone else.’ He hurried on: ‘And in your scriptures, God purposely makes the prophets lie. He makes them…’

  I said: ‘Your own Koran says often that God leads astray.’ In the distance, the echoing thwack of fists on chests deepened, flat and angry, like blows on a too-taut drum. Yah Ali! Yah Ali! ‘How do you trust God?’

  Hussein said: ‘In the Sunni tradition, you can go only to the Koran. But we Shia have the lives of the holy imams as our guide. If I have a question, I pray to our Eighth Imam in the tomb.’ His eyes lifted to the golden dome. ‘And the answer arrives…’

  This communing, I thought, came close to conscience. Its authority rose disordered, from within. Orthodox Islam, I knew, was wary of it, and fell back on law and the Koran. Moral choice could not be left to instinct. When I asked Hussein about this, he became troubled. Yes, he said, the Koran was first. Always. The tongue of God.

  He said: ‘I’ve always wanted to memorise our Holy Koran, and I know a little part of it now.’ But his soft surety had disappeared. He closed his eyes. ‘I want to keep these verses in my heart, so that when I am in the tomb I will not be alone.’ He looked suddenly abashed, but said again: ‘When I am lying in my grave, these holy words will be with me.’ He drew a hand down his body, then seemed to be ashamed. ‘More lately I have thought it better to forget this…’

  I asked uncertainly: ‘You’ve been near death?’

  ‘Yes, in the war, our war against Iraq. I volunteered four times. I’d done military service in the Shah years, and knew how to fire a rifle.’

  So he had joined the Revolutionary Guard, whose fanatic waves had been scythed down, ill-armed and fearless. I asked: ‘Were you wounded?’

  ‘Unfortunately not.’ I thought I had misheard, but he went on: ‘I wanted martyrdom. If I’d been killed, I’d have been killed for God. I wasn’t afraid. I only didn’t want to be captured. My older brother spent eleven years in one of Saddam Hussein’s jails. Now time is not there for him. He still thinks he’s twenty-five, far younger than me. But many of my friends were killed, glorious martyrs, or maimed’–he severed his thigh with one hand. ‘And you know it was the Americans behind it? They forced Saddam Hussein into it. When I was in the front line we saw American helicopters helping the Iraqis. A friend of mine went up to a hill with a rocket-launcher and hit one. It didn’t come down on our side. But it was the Americans. They were in it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  He was suddenly unsmiling. ‘We know. And we know about the World Trade Center attack too. It was the Americans who did it to themselves. And the Israelis. It was done on a Tuesday, the Jewish holy day, so none of them were there. Then the Americans made it an excuse to attack Afghanistan and Iraq.’

  I said stonily: ‘The Jewish holy day is a Saturday. There were many Jews killed. The names were published.’ But his fantasy was common currency, I learnt, all through the Middle East, and although Hussein looked momentarily bemused by what I said, it could not shake his certainty. When I looked at him now, I saw another person, far away.

  ‘The Americans are pouring in propaganda, trying to undermine our culture from inside. Ten years ago we had a bomb even in this shrine. It killed twenty-six faithful. It was done by hypocrites, Communists, supported by America. They have an office in your country too, the Mujahidin-e Khalq.’ He was bitterly angry, but looked away from me. It was anger with my government, not myself, and when his gaze returned, he smiled again. ‘Where will you go now?’

  ‘I’m crossing to Tehran and Tabriz, then into Turkey.’

  He searched my face. ‘But why are you alone? Only God goes alone.’

  I said: ‘It’s better.’

  For another minute we listened in silence to the rhythmic shouts for Ali, fading now, and the murmur of worshippers through the gates where I had trespassed on his holy ground.

  I slipped back that evening into the mosque of Gawhar Shad, hoping to find it quieter, but its courtyard in the dusk was black with pilgrims. Through its walls, from deep inside the tomb-chamber, came the muffled commotion of ritual grief. All along the arcades families were settling to sleep under blankets and heaped clothes, and from these a small, lean man cried in broken English that I go with him into the tomb.

  I could not, I said. I murmured I was not a Muslim. I was already afraid. But the man did not understand. He urged: ‘No…guest…follow…’ He was beaming, innocent. He lifted the carpet where his family was seated, and I hid my shoes beneath. I felt vaguely sick. I started to follow him. I knew this was wrong–I think so still–but I followed like a shadow.

  He did not go directly, but cut down a side passage. I padded close behind him, my eyes on the ground. I was aware of light flooding over crimson carpets, and a gauntlet of kneeling men, rocking above their Korans. My feet threaded prostrate worshippers. Then we were in the chamber, and the press of bodies enclosed us. Everywhere chandeliers blazed low under vaults of faceted mirror-work. A murmur of prayer rose all around. Suddenly we were swept up in a moving crush of worshippers. Staccato groans and cries broke out, and I looked up to see, beyond a black ocean of heads, the huge, gilded casket of the grave. Its canopy surged above the devotees like a golden bedstead. The man whispered, ‘Follow, follow.’ My hands were clamped to his shoulders, my head sunk out of sight between my own. I looked down on champagne-coloured marble. Somewhere under our feet was the lost grave of Haroun al-Rashid. My heart was flailing. Every time I dared lift my head I expect
ed a shout of incendiary outrage. The world became flashing lantern-slides. I glimpsed the beaten silver panels on the cenotaph, and the spinach-green cloth that draped it, woven with golden flowers. A forest of hands was massed against its grille, hirsute arms bare to the elbow. The sound now was a roar of tears and anger. On the far side, entered by another court, women were wailing.

  Even now, as I shrank into the millrace of the faithful, this hysteria for a man dead twelve hundred years struck me with wonder. A deep, maudlin well of grief, it seemed, was waiting always to overflow, born of imagined helplessness and loss. By this enacted suffering, perhaps, some disorder at the heart of things was being healed.

  Then a swarthy, tattooed hand fell on my shoulder. I twisted round, shaking. But it was only the random clasp of the man pinned against me. His stare flashed on and off my face. As we were forced toward the grave, the press grew terrible. Under the double glare of chandeliers and mirrors, every head was turned toward the cenotaph. Several times I looked up to see what beauty of mosaic tiles survived, but I glimpsed only our own fractured violence in the mirror-studded ceiling. Drowning hands tore at the casket’s bars and men were clambering on to others’ shoulders, caressing its filigree, kissing its gold, smearing their palms over their faces.

  For an instant it seemed we would be swept against the tomb. Then the slipstream carried us away.

  I had been inside barely quarter of an hour, but in the courtyard the cold was setting in and the sun had gone. Fairy lights garlanded the shrine with a pantomime gaiety. I crossed the still-forbidden courtyards, and out at last on to the road. Behind me the multicoloured bulbs swung down on cables from the tips of the minarets and over the quietening courts, as if a great ship with lit rigging were setting sail into the dark.

  North of Meshed the little town of Tus is still threaded by the sunken walls ruined by Tamerlane in 1390. Its lonely tomb–named perversely for Haroun al-Rashid–is probably the grave of the great mystic al-Ghazali, who died in the twelfth century. In a strange, intense autobiography, Ghazali recorded his hunt for enlightenment even through the byways of heresy, until he suffered a nervous collapse and took to the road as a Sufi, returning years later to write classic works of mystic piety.

  Through the portal you walk into a space of naked serenity, under a beehive dome. Traces of carving fret the ceilings of the mortuary chapel. Misted hills stand in its windows. And in the dust and silence the resolved calm of the chamber seems to echo its dead: the greatest Muslim sage, it is said, after Muhammad.

  But a mile farther on you come to an older place, a site of other pilgrims, where a long pool fringed with canna lilies leads to a stone cenotaph. This is the sepulchre of the poet Firdausi, the laureate of Iran. Couples are walking hand in hand beside the water. A crowd of cheery women poses for a photograph, their chadors eased back on their heads. There is a faint sound of music. A man and woman rest on a bench, her face tilted to his.

  Firdausi died here impoverished around 1020, and was buried in his garden. Now his mausoleum, built in 1933, ascends fifty feet, echoing the tomb of Cyrus, greatest of the early Persian kings, at Pasargadae. It is ringed by columns supporting Mithraic bulls, and is blazoned with the symbol of Ahuramazda, god of ancient Persia. Iranian flags flutter round it. It bears no sign of Islam.

  Out of oral legends, sung histories and narratives now lost, Firdausi, after thirty-five years’ toil, completed in his Shahnama, the Book of Kings, the epic of the Iranian peoples. It ended with the last of Persia’s Sassanian dynasty, just before the Arab conquest, and its sixty thousand verses were as purified of Arabic loan-words as the poet could achieve. It handed to Iranians a resplendent identity. Soon its words and images illumined books and inscribed themselves on pottery and palace walls. Like the Kyrgyz Manas, its verses became the property of the humble. They were recited round caravan fires, and by mothers to their children. Illiterate farmers still know their stories.

  This is the other Iran: the culture not of grievance, but of heroes. It is a triumph of legend over history. In the twentieth century the Pahlavi shahs stoked it into a national cult, reaching back beyond Islam to a world they imagined theirs. Among a nation of dissonant identities, the Shahnama popularises the idea of an ancient and proud race, born of a single line. Sometimes it dramatises the antipathy between Iran and Turan, the Persian and the Turk; and obliquely it appeals to a subtle Iranian despisal of Arab culture, so that the people wandering these gardens, calling greetings, taking snapshots, grew gently paradoxical. Arabs say the Iranians love poetry more than faith. It has even been proposed that they are not deeply religious at all. For years after the 1979 revolution the Shahnama was banned from school curricula as un-Islamic, and fanatics attacked Firdausi’s tomb.

  Its doors open on a subterranean chamber of polished marble. Around its walls the Shahnama moves in stone-carved relief: the hero Rustam skewering a dragon or catching a witch. People circle it with murmurs of affectionate recognition. In the centre, the poet’s dust lies under a cube of marble, red-veined, as if leaking blood.

  Firdausi knew what he had done. When his patron, the sultan Mahmoud of Gazni, paid him in silver instead of the gold he had been promised, the poet retired to the local bath-house and contemptuously divided the sum between the bath attendant and a sherbet-seller, then fled for his life. He was by then an old man. After he penned a satire on Mahmoud’s stinginess, the sultan relented, it is said, and sent him a camel-train loaded with precious indigo. But as the royal caravan entered Tus, it encountered Firdausi’s funeral cortège leaving the other way. His only daughter spent the money building a handsome bridge, which is still used.

  My bus to Nishapur jostles shopkeepers and farmers together among sacks of vegetables, bales of clothes and a pair of trussedup sheep. The week before, it had carried pilgrims; it is blazoned ‘Islam is Victorie’. To our north a familiar parched plain ruffles around grey and orange hills; to the south it corrugates into wheatfields, already harvested, and grasslands desolate to the horizon.

  The passengers around me talk quietly or sleep. I long to understand them. Their language has lost the fierce glottal stops and starts of Turkic, and teases me with sounds I think I know. I stare covertly at its speakers, hunting for clues. Who are they? Who is the aquiline young woman with the long-lashed eyes of her people: why is she alone? Her hands–you notice the women’s hands here–are fine-boned like harp strings, and glimmer with a trace of nail varnish. In front sits an old man in a worn-out suit, his white hair swept back from the sensitised face of a conductor. But his hands will never hold a baton: they are thick, and callused from work in the fields. Behind him perches a snow-turbaned mullah with anxious eyes and sunken cheeks, his brown cloak folded in his hands The plump young man beside me, in pressed blazer and jeans, is flicking through a business diary with no appointments. I pull out my Farsi phrasebook, and try to engage him. It’s hopeless. I learn only that he’s twenty-seven and a civil engineer. What does he think or dream? I cannot know.

  An hour later the oasis of Nishapur gathers round us. I have seen it many times before, I feel, all through Central Asia, and will see it again: the motley procession of low-built shops and offices, bordered by open drains and screened in poplars and chenars; the same octagonal or foliated paving-stones; overhead, the tangle of half-redundant wires (some crawling away to illicit satellite dishes), or the lean of a casement window. The women, wrapped against the wind, are walking absences. Yet the world has changed. Intangibly, it has become more urbane, sensuous, perhaps more deceiving. The young men in their pirated Nike and Adidas tracksuits look barbered and self-conscious. In my hotel the suave owner summons a friend who speaks some English.

  But Ali is remorselessly himself. He is perhaps a little mad: a government statistician who seems to have no work. In his chaotic gait his body looks dragged forward by his craning head. He speaks fast, half comprehensibly. After my fear of not conversing, words are now poured over me in a hectic gabble. Ali is practising his vocabula
ry (‘utopia’ and ‘hypothesis’ are his favourites), and as we go his commentary becomes a farrago of archaic politesse and modern pieties:

  ‘You are very kind, sir. I will help you everywhere. Where you go, I will take you. You are free. Look at these old women. That is the old culture. It is wrong. Out, out! Never mind. In the Shah’s time you could speak what you liked. [You couldn’t.] But now, if you are truthful, you are a terrorist. There was not this bigotry, bogarty. That is my hypothesis. Look, these young women are good. The chador pressed back to show the hair. That is culture. A utopia of the mind. Thinking is the future. I hate the Sunni, more free is the Shia. You are very kind, sir. Utopia! That is my favourite word. Never mind. What do you think of my ideas?…’

  He rushes me from place to place, showing me off to friends, officials, nearly anyone who crosses our path. He is greeted everywhere with affectionate bewilderment. In a brief hour he cures me of all my yearning for talk.

  ‘…Look at those women. They are veiled, dangerous. It is the old culture, very peril to the mind…’ We circle back at last to my hotel. ‘Tomorrow I will take you everywhere. Tomorrow we will see the tomb of Attar, the tomb of Omar Khayyám. A utopian hypothesis, sir! I am at your service, never mind. Tomorrow…’

  Tomorrow, to my relief, he is not there, and I make my way alone to the grave of Omar Khayyám, in silence. Omar is an old friend, indulged in adolescence, when I found his Rubáiyát–in the translation of Edward Fitzgerald–ravishingly meaningful and sad; and as I walk through the shabby town, a whiff of that nostalgia lingers. Out beyond the southern suburbs, where the lines and hummocks of old ramparts are, the city of Nishapur, capital of the first, great Seljuk Turks, has all but vanished. Early in the twelfth century, in Omar Khayyám’s day, it was a sanctum of learning, magnificent for libraries, and seat of a sultanate that stretched into Anatolia. And Omar’s patron was the Seljuk grand vizier Nizam al-Mulk himself, the premier statesman of his age.