The Places in Between (30 page)

We had too far to go that day to stop for long, but we did stop when we came down from the ridge into Pasuruan. Here we rejoined what had been the main road from Yakawlang. No one was using it because of the mines. The Taliban had burned Pasuruan and the next village, Ghorak, which we reached at nightfall.

BLAIR AND THE KORAN

Below Ghorak I met Ali, the headman's son. I explained that I wanted a bed for the night. He said it would be difficult.

"Travelers sleep in the mosque, but you can see the mosque..." He pointed to a long, fire-ravaged shell among the abandoned houses. "No one can entertain a guest here."

I waited in silence. After a minute he said, "We could see my father. Follow me and be careful of the mines."

"The Taliban laid the mines?" I asked, to make conversation.

"No, we laid them, but we can't remember where they all are."

We climbed past ruined buildings to the crest of the hill, where we entered his courtyard house. It had been burned like the others, but the family had repaired part of one room. I could not see through the smoke from the dung-fed stove how many people sat inside, but I could hear a baby screaming in the far corner. Ali's father lay swaddled in blankets on a high iron bed. It was the first bed I had seen in an Afghan village house. Ali's father looked about eighty. He asked me to sit. Then he broke into a lung-bruising staccato cough that pulled him upright with a quivering body and wet eyes, mouthing, "In the name of Allah," and retching into a tin spittoon. When the cackle and roar subsided, he lay down and closed his eyes and said, "I am sick. Excuse, please, my rudeness to my guest."

"I should go..."

"You are our guest. You will stay for meat," the headman replied. "Some rice, some meat ... My baby son is crying. He is two and I am old and too decrepit to discipline him. Accept, please, my apologies. My elder son will tell you about the Taliban and us Hazara. They burned our Koran. Look."

Ali lifted the lid of a carved wooden box, kissed the bundle inside, unwrapped it carefully, said a prayer, and opened the Koran. The fire had consumed one corner, exposing thin layers of oil-blackened paper, and as Ali opened the book, some ash fell from the binding.

"The Taliban did this to our holy Koran," said Ali's brother.

"If you want to understand the Taliban, look at what they did to our holy Koran," Ali added.

There was no electricity or television in the village. These men had never visited an Afghan city or met a journalist. I wondered why they immediately explained to me what the Taliban had done and why they focused on this Koran rather than on their families and their village.

"Can you read the Koran?" I asked.

"No. We cannot read or write."

"Did the Taliban take it out and burn it?"

"No. It was lying in one of the houses that the Taliban burned when they attacked the village."

"So it was accidental."

"Yes. You see what kind of people the Taliban are." He meant I imagined they were infidels.

"How many people did the Taliban kill in this village?" I asked.

"Five."

"Six," corrected another. "Hussein, Muhammad Ali, Ghulam Nabi..."

"Six," agreed Ali.

"From your family?"

"Yes. My brother. His father. But look at the Koran."

There was no Pepsi in this village; the only global brand was Islam. Ali thought the only thing he and I had in common was the Koran and I would understand that anyone who burned the book, even accidentally, would be damned for sacrilege. He didn't think foreigners would be interested in deaths in his family. In a way he was right. Westerners paid little attention to the killing of the Hazara. What moved them was the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas or the fate of the lion in the Kabul zoo. In Britain and the United States nine hundred thousand dollars had been raised for the lion. Tony Blair paid particularly close attention to the Koran, but Ali would have had difficulty understanding Blair's view of it.

On September 20, 2001, Blair packed his Korans for a tour of the Middle East. Nine months earlier, he had told an interviewer he possessed two editions. Now, according to the
Guardian,
he had three. "Blair," it stated, "now carries a copy of the Koran at all times for 'inspiration and courage'—a habit he picked up from President Clinton's daughter." Blair had encouraged Muslims to study their holy book before September 11, telling readers of the
Muslim News,
"the concept of love and fellowship as the guiding spirits of humanity is so clear ... if you read the Koran." On October 7, speaking of the 9/11 hijackers, he said: "The acts of these people are contrary to the teachings of the Koran ... It angers me, as it angers the vast majority of Muslims."

And a week later, he said, "I can't understand how anybody who truly studies the teaching of Islam and the words of the message of the Koran can possibly justify the slaughter [of September 11]." Bush joined in: "Islam's teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith..."

Blair's handling and discussion of the Koran would have struck Ali as highly eccentric. In Ali's view, Blair could not have read the Koran because Blair could not read Arabic. Since the Koran, unlike the Bible, is the verbatim word of God, spoken through Muhammad in Arabic, a translation is not considered to be the Koran. At times, it has been considered blasphemous to translate it at all.

Ali carefully wrapped his Koran, kept it in a wooden box on a high shelf, and approached it only after ablutions and with a prayer. He would have been horrified to see Blair thumb through his translation on a plane or to hear Blair make confident statements about its meaning. The Koran's dense network of metaphor, poetry, and allusion is traditionally interpreted with reference to the Hadiths (sayings) of the Prophet and long traditions of legal and theological exegesis. As a result, public pronouncements on the meaning of the Koran are usually reserved for the most learned and senior of mullahs.

Blair's confidently casual handling of the text was not supposed to be patronizing or presumptuous, but to display his sensitivity to Islamic culture. He seemed to assume the Koran resembled the Protestant Bible, which can be translated without problem; easily understood; freed of apocrypha; opened to interpretation by laypeople; and physically handled much like any other book. This assumption may be shared by other Christian commentators such as Bush. In November 2001, a photograph showed Bush casually dragging a Koran across a table with his unclean left hand, while the mullah who presented the book struggled to smile.

Much of the British media followed Blair in defining Islam almost exclusively in terms of the Koran without reference to the text's cultural context. They might not have been as quick to reduce the Catholic Church to the gospels. But perhaps they were more interested in changing Islam than in describing it. On September 16, 2001, the
Guardian
remarked that the houris the Koran promises the faithful are purely innocent symbols, rather than virgins provided for sexual services, and implied the suicide bombers had been misled. A month later, the
Observer
wrote of one version of the faith, "This is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity." Commentators rarely described the variety of Islamic beliefs and practices. This may have been because their comments were primarily intended to calm anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain (and perhaps, in the case of Tony Blair, appeal to Muslim coalition partners). Anti-Muslims also approached the Koran without context, though in support of a different agenda. In November, the Chairman of the British National Party wrote:

[We] began by looking for the piece [in the Koran] which has been quoted again and again since September 11th, including by George Bush, Tony Blair, Iain Duncan-Smith and an endless string of journalists: "Whoever kills a soul is like one who has killed the whole of Mankind." This sentence is at the heart of the Politically Correct campaign to ensure that the war fever against Islamic terrorists doesn't lead to an explosion of hostility against Muslims per se. After all, isn't it clear evidence that Islam is at root a peaceful, loving religion; Christianity with a towel on its head?

Indeed it would be, if it were genuine. But the problem is that this quotation is a Politically Correct fabrication. Just look at what Surah 5, Ayat 32 actually says:

"...whoever kills a soul, not in retaliation for a soul or corruption in the land, is like one who has killed the whole of mankind."

He went on to cite twenty-three verses as "evidence" that Muslims are "a threat to British life."
⁵⁷

SALT GROUND AND SPIKENARD

The next day, I fell in with two Ghorak boys who were driving a donkey to Bamiyan to buy salt. We walked the first five hours, perhaps twenty-five kilometers, without stopping. I noticed very little of the landscape, but when we climbed ridges I saw how very difficult it was to move a donkey through deep snow.

Like many villagers, the boys were tough on their donkey—I saw them break a bamboo stick on her back and then strike her with a sharp stone. But in the snow the boys beat a path for her and patiently returned to lift her whenever she lay down. She would take a couple floundering steps and lie down again while they beat more of the path and doubled back to stroke, encourage, and lift her once more. In the Qarghanatu valley, the boys pointed out a number of mines, some only two feet from the path. I tightened Babur's lead.

In the early afternoon, we came over the Shibartu pass to what had been a Hazara resistance center. Here Khalili, the Hazara commander, had run an airstrip where supplies were dropped from Iran. All that remained of the village was a single crowded room. The other buildings had been burned by the Taliban and abandoned. But this valley had not suffered only under the Taliban. Babur reached it in mid-February 1507:

We descended by the hill-pass of Shibartu. The Turkoman Hazara had taken up their quarters in the line of my march, with their families and property and had not the smallest intimation of my approach. Next morning on our march we came among their huts, close by their sheep folds, two or three of which we plundered; whereupon the whole of the Hazara, taking alarm, abandoned their huts and fled away to the hills with their children.

Soon afterward, there was information that a body of them had stopped our people in a narrow defile and were assailing them with arrows ... Our men were all rather perplexed and halted. I came up alone. I attempted to encourage them. Not one of them listened to me or advanced on the enemy, but they stood scattered about in separate places. Although I had not put on my helmet, my horse's mail, or my armor, and had only my bow and quiver, I called out that servants were kept that they might be serviceable and, in time of need, prove their loyalty to their master; not for the purpose of looking on while their master marched up against the foe; after which I spurred on and advanced...[He inserts a Turki poem about the events...]

My men, on seeing me advance, advanced also,
Leaving their terror behind.
We gained the top of the hill, and drove the Hazara before us,
We skipped over the heights and hollows like deer;
We plundered them and divided their property and sheep;
We slew the Turkoman Hazara,
And made captives of their men and women;
Those who were far off too we followed and made prisoners
We took their wives and children.

Fourteen or fifteen of the most noted insurgents and robber chiefs of the Hazara had fallen into our hands. It was my intention to put them to death with torture at our halting ground, as an example and terror to all rebels and robbers; but Qasim Beg happening to meet them, was filled with unseasonable commiseration, and let them go: (As Saadi, the Persian poet, writes...)

To do good to the bad is the same thing
As to do evil to the good;
Salt ground does not produce Spikenard;
Do not throw away good seed on it.

PALE CIRCLES IN WALLS

We continued up to the Shaidan pass. My pack seemed to force me into the ground and the struggle to move narrowed my awareness to little more than my breathing. My head came down to watch the path; my thoughts settled, burrowing into the movement. I moved in slow steps like the donkey. Babur's head was sunk down, his tongue lolling out, and I knew if I let him off the leash he'd stop entirely.

On the Shaidan ridge we paused on a path littered with antiaircraft shells. The Taliban had used this position to fire on the Hazara planes at Shibartu. The village of Shaidan looked beautiful as we descended. Its fields were broad beside the river. The ornate octagonal towers of the castle stood above a mud bazaar of eighty shops leading to the courtyards of a seminary. Ancient poplars lined the landlords' orchards. The old caves in the cliff were set with wooden windows, and above them a fifteen-thousand-foot snow peak rose against a dark blue sky.