But by now I am the one feeling crazy: I have no entry stamp in my passport; I have passed illegally through Al-Qaeda’s hideout; I have to decide whether to return the way I came, explain myself at Torkham, or travel back to Afghanistan clandestinely, across a safer stretch of this porous border (through Chitral maybe, or Wakhan). I am still underneath my burqa–I feel it is addling my brain–I have lost all sense of proportion. ‘Come to Miram Shah with me,’ says Abdullah again, ‘I’ll introduce you to the old Taliban fighters. I’ll show you the latest Al-Qaeda recruitment video. We’ll return to Afghanistan the day after tomorrow.’
I am on the verge of agreeing to this plan that will surely get us sent to jail, abducted by Al-Qaeda or blown to pieces by a rogue Waziristani rocket-launcher, when my mobile rings.
In Peshawar there are three brothers: Amir, Suleman and Nizamullah. Amir has the biggest house; Suleman has the fieriest temper; but the youngest and wisest is Nizamullah. ‘Where are you?’ asks Nizamullah now. ‘In Bannu,’ I say. ‘I have a problem.’ ‘Bannu?’ he says, ‘I’m not surprised you have a problem. Come to Peshawar at once.’
So it is with great relief that I say goodbye to Abdullah, take a ‘flying coach’ over the Kohat pass, around the gun factories of Dara Adam Khel (from which the army’s intelligence wing, the ISI–Inter-Services Intelligence–reportedly sourced hundreds of cheap Kalashnikovs to present to the Americans, and convince them that the Taliban were giving up their weapons), and three hours later reach the Frontier capital.
Nizamullah is sitting on his terrace in the sun, sipping lime juice when I arrive. I climb out from under my burqa and tell him the story of my border crossing. He listens in silence. ‘Should I return to Khost?’ I finish. ‘Am I in big trouble?’ Nizamullah puts down the glass, and stares into the distance. Finally he speaks. ‘Alice, you should know better by now,’ he says; and my heart sinks. ‘Why are you worrying?’ he continues. ‘This is Pakistan.’
Suleman of the fiery temper is delegated to look after me. I spend the next morning in his office as he rings three tribal Maliks, two Assistant Political Agents, and a Passport Officer. ‘Have you got your burqa?’ he asks at eleven-thirty. It is the day after the Jalalabad riots: foreigners have been banned from crossing via Torkham; even on a good day they need an armed escort.
Only now do I find out that the day I crossed over the border at Khost, riots broke out in Afghanistan. The country is protesting over Newsweek’s story, which it later retracted, that an American interrogator at Guantánamo Bay flushed a Qur’an down the toilet. In Ghazni, rioters attacked the Governor’s house, and four people were killed. The Newsweek incident also coincides with–or encourages–the resurrection of the Taliban. Today, the road I glibly took to Ghazni has become impassable for foreigners: Taliban checkpoints have sprung up along it like poisonous mushrooms. The Taliban pull out Afghans at gunpoint and flick through their bags. If there are business cards in their wallets, or numbers on their phone, which show they are working with foreigners, they are shot. And the women I met–the ones who dared to show their faces–are once again living as they did under the Taliban. So much for all the ‘democracy’ bombs dropped on the country.
‘You are crazy,’ says Suleman to me now, as I slip into my trusty shuttlecock burqa, climb into his car, and we set off up the Khyber. ‘Even we Pashtuns avoid Afghanistan.’ We sail through the checkpoint at Jamrud, then Suleman turns to me and asks: ‘How did you like Bannu?’ He flicks opens his phone and shows me a picture message. The graphic is a black and red road-sign: two men fucking. The text reads: ‘Bannu 5 km.’
We are now in drug-baron country, and Suleman becomes my tour guide, pointing out the forts of the heroin smugglers as we drive. ‘Inside that one,’ he says, ‘there is a private zoo.’ At one o’clock, he draws up in front of another large fort and beeps his horn. Out comes a man in thick glasses: the Afridi tribal Malik. They joke together in Pashto as we drive into Landi Kotal bazaar to collect the Malik’s cousin, and are in hysterics by the time we reach the tidy hilltop complex owned by the army. (I can pick out enough names from the Pashto to piece together the route of my journey.) They drop in to see the Assistant Political Agent; then we accelerate down into the lively chaos of Torkham.
The Passport Officer is entertaining a roomful of men with green tea when we arrive. He takes my passport and flicks through the pages. His finger stabs my expired Indian journalist visa. ‘Hamaray liey bohut khatarnak,’ he says with a frown: Very dangerous for us. My heart sinks again; I see myself being carted off to the high security jail at Attock. But the Passport Officer laughs. ‘Off you go,’ he says. ‘Tell the Afghans you just came from Kabul.’
So I am led across the border into Afghanistan, where I collect my little stamp of legality, then troop back into Pakistan to receive my entry stamp; and at last the tribal Malik, his cousin, Suleman and I sit down to a huge kebab lunch, courtesy of the Passport Officer. ‘This is Pakistan,’ I sigh, as I rip apart a goat’s thigh with my fingers. The men laugh: ‘Best country in the world. What did we tell you?’
7
Buddha on the Silk Road
3rd century BCE–8th century CE
‘The River Sin-tu [Indus] is pure and clear as a mirror…Poisonous dragons and dangerous spirits live beneath its waters. If a man tries to cross the river carrying valuable gems, rare flowers and fruits, or above all, relics of Buddha, the boat is engulfed by waves.’
Xuanzang, c. 645 CE
IN 1021, WHEN Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni marched north from Peshawar into Swat and Bajaur–tributary valleys of the River Indus–Buddhism had been on the wane for two hundred years. Swat, in particular, had an abundance of Buddhist monasteries in varying states of dilapidation, and Mahmud took the opportunity to convert a few idol-worshippers, break a few statues, and lay siege to the imposing black stone hilltop fortress of Udegram. Then, on a terrace below the castle, he built a mosque big enough to contain his army. The mosque floor is still there, and on the hot April day when I climb the hill towards the castle, Tariq, my Swat host, kneels down to offer his zhuhr–noonday–prayers.
While neither Sultan Mahmud nor his ministers and historians tended to distinguish one idol-worshipper from another, in fact many of the ‘infidels’ of north-west India were Buddhists. The ‘lion-worshippers’ that he ‘subdued and converted’ in Swat and Bajaur, for example, were not Hindus, but devotees of the Sakya-Sinha Buddha in his lion form.
As it happened, the Ghaznavids had long campaigned in Buddhist lands. Ghazni itself had been a Buddhist settlement, and in 994, Mahmud’s father, Sebuktigin, became governor of Buddhist Bamiyan in central Afghanistan. The lovely river valley of green almond trees and gigantic stone Buddhas entered Ghaznavid folklore almost immediately in a poem by Mahmud’s court poet Unsuri.
Sultan Mahmud’s foray into Swat coincided with the very end of Buddhism west of the Indus, a decline begun by the falling off of patronage from central India, where there had been a vigorous Brahmin renaissance. The river itself dealt a fatal blow when catastrophic flooding in the seventh century destroyed many of the monasteries. The men who built the mosque at Udegram thus bore witness to the final decay of the religion that had ruled this region for over one thousand years–from the time of Emperor Ashoka of India in the third century BCE, throughout the long, opulent reign of the Indo-Greek kings, and up until the departure of the Tantric wizard, Padmasambhava, to Tibet in the mid-eighth century CE, where he converted the country to Buddhism.
Like layers of silt from the inundations of its river, Swat preserves its Buddhist past in compact seams. An outlandish array of Buddhist kings ruled here, and the historical roll-call of their varying provenance, ambitions and achievements is dizzying. Still more difficult to comprehend, is how that past gave way to this present. Of all the places in the Indus valley, it is modern Swat that seems most removed from its ancient history.
The Swat river runs parallel with the Indus from the moment it flows out of Kashmir in norther
n Pakistan, through the secluded valleys of Indus Kohistan, to the point where it enters the Punjab. Swat, too, is a secluded, idiosyncratic place. Protected by the Hindu Kush mountains to the north, the Indus to the east, and the scorched straw-gold hills to the south and west, Swat lies between them all like a mirage in the drought. The brash perfection of its indigo-blue river and intensely coloured wooded landscape breeds in its inhabitants a distinct insouciance–they pay no tax, smuggle cars over the mountains from Kabul, and treat the law of the land with casual disregard. Life in Swat clusters around the deep, wide river, which runs from the ice floes of Kalam in the north, through steep hill towns, to the plains east of Peshawar–and thus encapsulates in miniature the three-thousand-kilometre journey of the Indus itself.
Swat is known wistfully today–by government officials and optimistic hoteliers–as the ‘Switzerland of Pakistan’ and until 2001, its kitsch mountain landscape was popular with foreign tourists. After September 11th, tourism fell away, and the only visitors now are frontier smugglers and rich Punjabis. Tariq, who used to own a hotel in Mingora, Swat’s capital, had to start a school instead.
Swat may be pastoral and pretty–Ao sanam, Swat chale (Come lover, let’s go to Swat) reads the tailboard of a truck I follow up the valley–but it is also bursting with madrassahs. In 2001, after the Americans landed in Afghanistan, a radical cleric called Sufi Muhammad led a band of 10,000 angry Muslims (it is reputed) from Swat, west through Bajaur and over the Nawa pass into Afghanistan. Sufi Muhammad is rumoured to have helped Bin Laden escape into Pakistan, before surrendering himself to the authorities.
Near a small madrassah on the outskirts of Mingora, I have an enlightening conversation with a twenty-one-year-old student whose own father joined Sufi Muhammad’s jihad, having being trained ‘for five years in Khost before that’. This man has never spoken to a woman from outside his family before–and he does not intend to look at, or be looked at, by an unveiled woman now. Having left Bannu behind me, I have gladly shed my burqa and am now dressed top to toe in a billowing shalwar kameez and headscarf, but even this is not modest enough. ‘You should be doing purdah,’ he says. Instead it is he who sits turned away throughout the interview, wrapped in a shawl so that I cannot see his face.
In his madrassah it is haram, forbidden, to watch television, or listen to the radio: ‘The media is with the government, and the government is with America.’ Nor does he listen to music. But he enjoys novels about early Islam. ‘I am reading one about the Islamic conquest of Spain,’ he says. ‘This was Islam’s strongest time, when Muslims first spread out from Mecca and Medina.’ What he and his teachers want above all is to re-create the Islamic Golden Age in Pakistan with a Sharia-ruled, Taliban-style government–even the religious party of Sami ul-Huq is not pious enough. ‘There is no good Islamic society anywhere in the world, now that the Taliban have gone,’ he says. ‘That was a time of justice.’ Comments such as these do not necessarily indicate a world-dominating desire in Pakistan’s Muslims; but they do illustrate the extent to which ordinary citizens have been let down by the malfeasance of the state and feel disillusioned, often to the point of desperation, by their leaders’ perverse dalliance with apparently anti-Islamic foreign powers.
Today, Islam and Buddhism appear to be at opposite ends of the religious spectrum: no two religions, perhaps, have such different modern reputations. Yet in north-western India, along the banks of the Indus, the two came into prolonged contact with each other, and it is undeniable that certain features of the older philosophy influenced the way the younger developed locally. In Bamiyan, after Islam came to the region, the monumental Buddhas were absorbed into ‘Shiite popular religious folklore’. Shia devotion may explain the Sunni Taliban’s fervour for destroying the statues–which they did, I am told when I go to Bamiyan, by cruelly forcing local Shias to winch themselves over the side of the towering cliff, in order to fix the dynamite in place. Today the locals still refer affectionately and regretfully to the empty holes in the cliff-face as the ‘male and female deities’.
Even the much-maligned Muslim institution of the madrassah may have its roots in the Buddhist monastery. Both are institutions of intense religious learning, sustained by charity; for centuries now in Swat, small cliques of religious-minded men and women have sequestered themselves from the world to devote themselves to prayer, the learning of sacred texts and the accumulation of merit in the next life. As I enter the cool underground meditation cells in the second century CE Takt-i-Bahi monastery, south of Mingora, I try to visualize groups of sutra-learning nuns–but it is the study-rooms in Swat’s female madrassahs that come most vividly to mind, with their distinct, acrid odour of rhythmically swaying bodies.
The rapid Islamicization of the eastern and western peripheries of India has furrowed many a scholarly brow, for although the Muslim rulers of India made few attempts to mass-convert their ‘pagan’ subjects, in the two frontier lands along the Indus and Brahmaputra rivers, Islam proliferated unaided, ultimately resulting in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Perhaps Islam, far from annihilating Buddhism with its jihadi scimitars (as colonial historians suggested), merely co-opted its rival by absorbing its rituals. Maybe the similarity of forms–trans-ethnic, proselytizing, attached to merchant networks–made it easier for the Indus people to accept the one, and then the other. Or possibly it was the lie of the land–on the periphery of the Indian scene–that mutated any religion which entered its winding valleys.
For the long, rich millennium prior to the advent of Islam to India, Buddhism had profited–as caste-bound Vedic Hinduism, confined as it was to India, could not–from the cosmopolitan Silk Road caravans. This mobile banking system, or brotherhood of travelling salesmen, stretched from the Mediterranean to China, carrying silk, spice and gold from one end of the world to the other. On the remoter roads where commercial hoteliers would not venture, merchants needed succour and shelter, and local kings relied on the routes staying open. Both kings and merchants were happy to patronize Buddhism’s presence in distant valleys, and especially at difficult river-crossings, and so monasteries doubled as Silk Road taverns. In return, the monks received support and made converts. The Swat valley, on the crossroads of the Silk Route between China and South Asia, thrived on this reciprocal arrangement. And thus while it was in eastern India that the Buddha was born, preached and reached Nirvana in the fifth century BCE, it was in the middle Indus valley, three hundred years after his death, that a second Buddhist holy land was established.
Hinduism had strict concepts of ritual pollution, and a rigid notion of geographical impurity. Crossing the kalapani (black water) resulted in loss of caste. Kalapani usually meant the ocean–but it was also applied, at times, to the Indus. The river demarcated mainland India from the far north-west, a region known to the ancient Sanskrit texts as Uttarapatha. This included part of northern Punjab and the city of Taxila, and the unregulated lands beyond the river. As a frontier region, Uttarapatha’s reputation was ambiguous. It was famed for the beauty of its spoken Sanskrit; it was also, for Hindu India, a peripheral, pariah state. Strange, perverted things were rumoured to take place in its isolated valleys.
For an inclusive, non-racist religion such as Buddhism, Uttarapatha was fertile ground for evangelizing. From the third century BCE onwards, Buddhism became the major religion of two large provinces in Uttarapatha: Gandhara, the well-watered plain running eastwards from modern-day Peshawar to the Indus; and perpendicular to it, Uddiyana, or Swat.
Uddiyana is a Sanskrit word, usually assumed to mean ‘garden’ or ‘fair dwelling’. But Karl Jettmar, the German professor of northern Pakistani history, suggested an alternative etymology more in line with the region’s reputed character as a place of sorcerers and debauchery: ‘Uddiyana may be traced back to the root “di”, to float in the air,’ Jettmar wrote, adding that ‘the witches of Swat prefer to ride on hyenas. The rough hair on the spine of the animal is said to give them extreme sexual pleasure.’
Because o
f its wide river, Uddiyana was self-sufficient in water, fish and timber; and because of its geographical importance as a thoroughfare on the trans-Asian Silk Road, it was never short of patrons or visitors. Kings came and went in central India, but for over a thousand years in Uddiyana, Buddhism remained a constant.
The valley accepted and incorporated each major change in Buddhist doctrine: from Theravada (the practice that the Buddha himself followed, with its emphasis on meditation as the route to enlightenment) to Mahayana (the worship of the Buddha in all his past lives and future incarnations) and, finally, Tantric Vajrayana, which developed in Swat itself. The most esoteric form of Buddhism, Vajrayana showed initiates the secret but rapid route to enlightenment through the union of opposites–pure and impure, high and low caste, and above all, male and female during sexual intercourse. Practitioners were taught to flout sexual taboos, caste laws and social norms, eating forbidden foods and living like outcasts, before attaining enlightenment through sexual union.
Padmasambhava, the man who in the eighth century popularized Vajrayana, was an exorcist and wizard, known to his followers as Guru Rimpoche, the ‘Great Master of Uddiyana’, ‘the Second Buddha’ and ‘the Precious Guru’. He had two wives, and once lived in a charnel ground. But by the eighth century CE, Buddhism was on the wane in Swat, so Padmasambhava travelled to Tibet, where he subdued the local demons, converted the King with his rituals and incantations, and passed on the knowledge that had been transmitted secretly through generations of Swati gurus. For centuries thereafter, Swat became a major pilgrimage site for Tibetans. Padmasambhava is still honoured throughout Tibet, and all along the upper Indus in Buddhist Ladakh (the northernmost province of India). After his death, secret books written by him in the language of Uddiyana on ‘rolled-up yellow leaves’ were discovered by his Tibetan disciples; and in Ladakh’s monasteries, which honour the road that he travelled and the caves where he slept by the upper Indus river, there are paintings of him sporting a fashionable Pakistani-style moustache. But in his Pakistani homeland, the Great Master has been forgotten.
Empires of the Indus Page 20