The Places in Between (15 page)

But the war had come before it could be completed. Earlier that day we had passed what remained of it. A tunnel thirty feet high was cut two hundred feet through the rock and flooded with water, and girders thrust out over the gorge. Twenty-five rusty yellow JCBs stood in a line next to a group of collapsing concrete buildings. Around these ruins hung tales that might be told of the capital of a lost civilization. Villagers spoke of the fabulous wealth of the Japanese engineers. They talked of a three-thousand-strong workforce and machines that could cut through walls of rock. They said the plain we had walked across would have become a lake, ten kilometers long and heavy behind the dam walls.

Agha Ghori did not call himself a Tajik or an Aimaq. He was, he said, a Ghorid, a descendant of the rulers of the province of Ghor who had built the Chist domes in the twelfth century to honor a local sect of dervishes. He had grown up beneath their great fort at Taiwara. But he said he knew little about his ancestors.

These Ghorid rulers were the one exception in the otherwise obscure history of Ghor. They had begun as chieftains of the inhospitable terrain of central Afghanistan, surrounded on every side by dynasties of nomadic horsemen. Because horses were the foundation of military success and Ghor was too mountainous to support many horses or allow them to move at speed, the Ghorids seemed unlikely ever to defeat their neighbors.
¹⁶

In 1141, however, the Ghaznavid Turks, one of the neighboring nomadic dynasties, killed a Ghorid chief. In revenge the chief's brother attacked Ghazni. According to Babur, who visited Ghazni four hundred years later:

Alauddin the "World-incendiary" Ghorid [brother of the murdered chieftain] burned and destroyed the royal tombs, ruined and burned the city of Ghazni and plundered and massacred the inhabitants ... there was no act of desolation and destruction from which he refrained. Ever since that time the mound of Ghazni has remained in a state of ruin.

The Ghorid chieftain forced the inhabitants of Ghazni to carry every mud brick of their city up to the mountains of Ghor. There the Ghorids executed their captives and mixed their blood with the mud to make more bricks for their highland capital, the Turquoise Mountain. The Ghorids went on to conquer much of Asia from Baghdad to the east of India, and took control of the Silk Road to China. The Turquoise Mountain was described by Juzjani as including an enormous Friday Mosque filled with the wealth of India and dominated by two giant golden birds on the castle battlements. It was in the center of the mountains, in such an inaccessible place that no other dynasty ever attempted to occupy it and in such an unlikely location that archaeologists have since been unable to find it. The Ghorids continued to rule from this mountain city in defiance of all economic and administrative conventions of their time, and for the next half century this obscure mountain province of Ghor became the seat of one of the most powerful dynasties in the world. In 1216, however, Genghis Khan invaded and the already declining Ghorid Empire was destroyed. The city was lost and with it all details of this strange mountain civilization. Apart from the last flowering that Babur witnessed in Herat, Afghanistan was never to experience such a civilization again. As Muslim ruler of India, Babur saw himself as the Ghorids' successor.
¹⁷

The domes of Chist were one legacy of the Ghorids' improbable success. Looking at them that morning, I realized they were unlike any Islamic mausoleum I had seen. The nomadic Turks and Mongols often built their domes as though they were pitching yurt tents. Their buildings in Tabriz, Sultanijeh, Maragheh, and Samarkand seem dropped at random on the plain, as though all that mattered for a site was that it be level and cool and have pasture and water for the animals.

But the mausoleum at Chist had been placed more carefully. The domes were positioned in the center of a symmetrical plateau, which was lower than the western approach ridge. From above they had no silhouette, and from the bottom of the slope they were invisible. Only for a moment, halfway down the slope, did they rise above the skyline. Then they were lost again until the summit of the final climb when the curved roof slowly reappeared framed by the mountain range beyond, with the shape of the arches mimicking the shape of the peaks.

The domes were decorated with pale mud bricks the color of the earth, cut to imitate a pattern of brambles or thorns that spelled out a Koranic text.
¹⁸
The Seljuks of the period covered their domes with blue tiles, but the Ghorids had not used colored tiles here.
¹⁹
The shape of the dome, the pale color of the brick, and the script had all apparently been chosen to echo and enhance the landscape.
²⁰

Perhaps it was their attachment to the mountains and their pride in being the only highland people to found a pan-Asian empire
²¹
that led the Ghorids to mark the gateway to Ghor with these domes and to position them in a way that emphasized their mountain setting. But why did they dedicate them to the Chistiyah dervishes?

THE MISSIONARY DANCE

As I turned away from the domes an old man rode up on a white horse decorated with a finely woven saddlecloth colored with soft vegetable dyes. The horse was bony and lame and he rode it timidly. He looked as though he was wearing not a turban but a barber's basin on his head.

"I," he said, "am Khalife Seyyed Agha, son of Haji Khalife Seyyed Ahmed, direct heir and descendant of Hazrat Maulana Sultan Maududi, the saint of Chist who died in 1132. My ancestor is buried beneath that dome. I am the lord of all the land that you can see."

"So you are the head of the Chistiyah dervishes?"

"I am but there are no dervishes living here anymore. Can you draw a picture of my horse?"

"I'll try." It was cold in the snow and my hands were stiff, but my drawing looked like a horse. A younger man joined us and stood silently watching.

"Can I keep your drawing?" asked the old man.

"Okay." I ripped it out of my notebook and gave it to him.

"I like your sunglasses. Can I try them on?"

I handed them over and he hung them on his long nose. "Excellent. Can I keep them?"

"No, I'm sorry, I need them. I am walking through the snows of Bamiyan—I need them for the glare."

"Please."

"I am sorry."

"Just the sunglasses..."

"I'm sorry."

"A pity; I might have offered you hospitality." The patriarch turned and rode off. The Chistiyah dervishes were once famous for refusing gifts.

The young man laughed. "He is nothing now. His ancestors were great Chistiyah teachers, men of mystical power and great lords. There are no Chistiyah here today. He was too scared to fight the Russians, too scared to fight the Northern Alliance, too scared to fight the Taliban. He has done nothing in twenty-four years; I had almost forgotten that he existed. He is lucky that we haven't taken all his land."

Only hints remained of why this local Sufi sect (called Chistiyah because they came from Chist) had been one of the four most powerful dervish orders in the world. Surviving descriptions suggest they had a great deal in common with other mystics, even non-Muslim mystics. They repeated sacred phrases and used rosaries like Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians, who may have encountered Sufis during the Crusades. Their saints talked of being able to see the ultimate oneness of God and they drowned details of religious doctrine in a transcendental fervor, seemingly intoxicated with an almost erotic love of the deity.

But they also differed from other mystics in very particular ways. It was not just that one of their saints, Baba Farid, prayed suspended by his feet for forty days, or that, with the distinguished exception of Amir Khosrow, the Chistiyah wrote little poetry. Nor was it their theological views on
walaya
(the spiritual authority of the Prophet) and
welaya
(divine love). Nor was it that they carried a toothbrush attached to their turban and wore four-cornered conical hats. What made the Chistiyah most famous was their music. Whereas some dervishes achieved mystical union by praying and others by walking or whirling, the Chistiyah did so by playing instruments and dancing.

The Ghorids brought their local sect with them when they invaded India, adding some legitimacy to a military action presented as a jihad. They may have built the domes to honor this association. But Juzjani, who chronicled the Ghorid dynasty, suggests that the dervishes were not acceptable to all Muslims. As a judge, he presided over a complaint made about a ceremony called Sama, in which the Chist-iyah brought on religious ecstasy by dancing and playing music. Juzjani found in favor of the Chistiyah saint,
²²
who died in ecstasy during one of these performances a little later. A Chistiyah saint
²³
born in the thirteenth century records that these Sama sessions lasted throughout the night. They were led by male singers reciting Persian poetry and accompanied by drums, timbales, and tambourines, but not string or wooden instruments because these "blocked the taste and pain of the mystic." Hindus were allowed to attend and everyone was encouraged to dance and sing. Later descriptions showed how disturbing these practices must have been to the orthodox.

The disciple of this saint
²⁴
stressed that the visitation of the unseen in the Sama dance ceremony should be considered a form of love-making. Sama must happen at night, not in a mosque but in a closed hall, perfumed with sandalwood. Garments may be torn or thrown off in ecstasy. The dancing could overcome you as a feeling of uncontrollable agitation, it could develop into a feeling of total harmony, or it could be assimilated by conforming to the other dancers:

The Sufi may go round in circles in ecstasy, leap about, beat the ground in his place with his feet or lift his hands over his head, twisting them together and rotating them before bringing them down again.

The lavish domes make clear that the Ghorids had a particular affection for this dancing sect.
²⁵
It was a relationship they advertised by placing the domes so visibly at the entrance to their lands and engraving them with long passages from the Koran. Was this their answer to the Arabs and Seljuks who had mocked the obscure province of Ghor as one of the last pagan enclaves in the Persian world? Once again I was looking at evidence of a very different society and a very different Islam from what existed on the same site today.

The police chief at Chist had a generator, a VCR, and a black-and-white television. Twenty of us gathered to watch filmed dancing. He handed me the cassette sleeve, which showed a girl in a red sequined minidress with thigh-high boots. But when he switched on the video, the star was an overweight middle-aged woman in a puffy ballgown dancing in a tent in Peshawar. To the delight of rows of Afghan men seated on the floor, she had released her hair and bared her forearms. The film was shot in the dark by a man with unsteady hands, but he had captured most of her scowls. She danced by hopping stiffly up and down with her hands on her hips. Disappointed perhaps with her sloppy footwork, the cameraman zoomed in on her enormous breasts, which lurched from side to side as they filled the frame.

"Was there dancing here before?" I asked.

"Not in Chist, but we used to have it in Herat and Kabul when the king was in power," replied the police chief. "There was less with Najib because of the war. The Mujahidin stopped it completely."

"The Taliban?"

"No. Ismail Khan and the Northern Alliance stopped it as well. It is forbidden in Islam."

"Do you like dancing?"

"Me?" said the police chief. "I like it very much." Everyone laughed.

I sat down and wrote a long letter to my parents, in case I was killed. In the past sixteen months I had bribed, flattered, pried, bullied, begged, and wheedled in order to continue my walk. I was more of a tramp than a mystic, but as I wrote I felt at peace. I described to my parents the moments on the way that seemed to have a deep, unified relation to my past. I wondered if walking was not a form of dancing.

I was happy then and I slept well.

Carved marble from Jam, in Ghor

MIRRORED CAT'S-EYE SHADES

Abdul Haq behaved in his last hours with me much as he had the previous week. In a three-hour period he got lost, said we were almost there, changed his mind and decided we were still a night away, laughed, said he was a mule, and shot at a mud house. Then he turned to me and asked, "How much does it cost to buy a wife in England?"

"But you are already married."