Read The Places in Between Online
Authors: Rory Stewart
I am indebted to J D-B for much that I will never be able to communicate, Peter Jouvenal for his encouragement, and Diana Livesey, Felix Martin, Nassim Assefi, Andrew Greenstock, Will Adamsdale, Luke Ponte, Palash Dave, Tommaso Nelli, Peregrine Hodson, Honor Fraser, Nico Schwarz, Mani Boni, Nick Crane, Fiona, Annie, Heather, Gordon, Gillie, and Richard for their friendship and advice during the journey and the writing.
Throughout the walk I was inspired by the courage and determination of Mohammed Oraz, who walked for three months beside me across Iran. I had hoped to finish the journey beside him. He was killed in an avalanche on the summit of Gasherbrum 1, his sixth eight-thousand-meter peak, in September 2003.
Finally, it is to my parents that I owe the most, in this as in so much else.
Footnotes
1 Babur describes scores of men in Herat and their painting, theology, dancing, and poetry and most of all drinking. Some of them were unusual people; see, for example, "the mullah who left a Persian prosody which omits many useful and difficult subjects and writes about obvious subjects in the minutest detail and was remarkable for the force with which he could deliver a blow with his fist."
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2 The mythical Huma bird never alights on the ground but is perpetually in flight. Its diet is bones. The female drops her eggs from the sky and her chick hatches as the egg plummets, escaping before it hits the ground. Anyone over whom the Huma flies will become king. It is part of the myths of both Persia and India and is celebrated by the Hindu poets as well as by Muslim Sufis such as Attar and Rumi. There were once two giant golden Huma on the walls of the lost Ghorid capital of the Turquoise Mountain. Even Babur quotes a poem about the Huma, written by one of his courtiers.
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3 The Malla were a medieval Nepali dynasty who conquered much of the Indian Himalayas. I walked from Gangotri, through Kedarnath and Joshimath, to Jumla in Nepal, along their routes.
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4 In fact, Ismail Khan was very keen to refuse formal deference. He would not allow people to bow to him. Ritual was even more complex in the sixteenth century, when status was also measured by how far a man advanced up a room. This is Babur describing being presented at court in Herat:
As soon as I entered the Hall of State I bowed, and then without stopping, advanced to meet the ruler, who rose up rather tardily to come to meet me. Qasim Beg, who was keenly alive to my honor and regarded my consequence as his own, laid hold of my girdle and gave me a tug; I instantly understood him and advancing more deliberately we embraced at the spot that had been arranged.
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5 Babur may have faced greater linguistic problems. Although everyone then, as now, spoke dialects of Persian, the differences between dialects were probably more dramatic. Babur says that there were seven languages spoken in Kabul at his time, some of which have vanished or are now confined to very small communities.
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6 The first refers to an attribute of God; the second is a name for the Prophet.
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7 In Herat under Ismail Khan, people who committed "vice crimes" such as drinking alcohol had their heads shaved or were denounced on television. Women could not walk or ride in a car alone with a man who was not a close relative, even a taxi driver. A police task force patrolled Herat city, arresting men and women who were seen together and suspected of being unrelated or unmarried. Men were taken to jail; women and girls were taken to a hospital to undergo forced medical examinations.
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8 Only Ismail Khan's men wore these scarves, which resembled the Palestinian keffiyeh.
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9 His description, which was to prove more than a little misleading, bears a strong resemblance to that of Mountstuart Elphinstone in 1815. The bold generalizations probably reflected the fact that, like Elphinstone, he had never visited the interior in person.
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10 The main pass through to Chaghcharan is called Shotor Khun—camel's blood—for this reason. All the ancient cultures seem to have agreed that the edge of the great Asian mountain massif beyond Herat was an important frontier. The Greeks called its mountains the Paropamisus from the Persian word
uparisena
—peaks over which the eagles cannot fly. Aristotle believed that from these mountains you could see the eastern edge of the earth. Perhaps this was why Alexander the Great refused to follow the Satrap Satibarzanes into the mountains.
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11 It may have been built as a status symbol by a local ruler who wanted to attract trade or simply to imply that his kingdom was a more integral part of classical Persian civilization and trade than it had ever been in reality.
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12 Hazrat Ali Hajweri.
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13 But the Taliban, who were never as close theologically to al-Qaeda as has been suggested, left the shrine of Ansari well alone.
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14 They may have been motivated as much by a desire to drive up prices as by religious considerations.
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15 Alexander sent his assassins twelve hundred kilometers from Herat to kill his friend Parmenion in Hamadan and they covered the distance in eleven days. In seven days Alexander's enemies, the Persians, could cover twenty-two hundred kilometers on the Royal Road from Sardis to Susa.
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16 Like the seventy small kingdoms of mountainous Nepal.
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17 "Three foreign kings have subdued India...," wrote Babur, "one of these was Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni ... the second was Sultan Muizuddin the Ghorid ... and for many years his slaves and descendants swayed the specter of these realms. I am the third."
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18 This Kufic script was unique to the Ghorids. I had seen it also in the alcove of the Herat mosque, where the al-Qaeda men used to chat in Urdu.
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19 See the Kabud dome in Maragheh.
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20 The ancient peoples of highland Asia were very sensitive to the landscape. During the earlier stages of my walk, in Turkey and Iran, I was often struck by the symmetry and isolation of a rock in the desert, only to find on approaching it that the Phrygians had carved a lion into its surface; or that forty feet up a sheer cliff, the Medians had placed the facade of a shrine; or that beside a volcano cone and beyond livid copper walls, the Persians had built water temples.
The Ghorids seem to have shared this delight in the shape and color of rock. Unlike the Seljuks or the Mongols, they were not nomads from the steppes but instead, like the Phrygians, Medians, and Persians, people who had lived for centuries among their mountains.
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21 A pride reflected in the Ghorids' use of the epithet Malik-I-Jabal, or King of the Mountains, as their royal title.
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22 Qutb-al-Din Baktiar Kaki.
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23 Nezam Al-Din Aulia.
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24 Gisuderaz.
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25 Not much, however, is known about their relationship. I found a myth in India of how a great Chistiyah saint walked through Multan and Lahore in the late twelfth century and, reaching Ajmer, appeared to the Ghorid prince in a dream saying, "Arise, the land of India is yearning to kiss your feet and the crown and throne await you there," encouraging the Ghorid to conquer all of India. Muinuddin Chisti Sanjari went from Multan (which they conquered in 1175) to Lahore (1186) and then to Ajmer (where they held their decisive battle in 1193). The saint's march into India seemed to pass through the cities the Ghorids conquered and in the order in which they conquered them. It suggested at least that the military conquerors supported the work of missionaries and then were in turn encouraged by the missionaries. The conquest was a jihad, a holy war, and both warriors and saints were required.
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26 See Nancy Dupree's account of the central route, 1976.
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27 They sometimes refer to themselves also by tribal names such as Taimani, Firuzkuhi, Jamshidi, and Hazara-e-Qala-e Nau.
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28 Some of the Aimaq have Mongol features. They are also supposed to use many more Turkic words in their dialect than other Persian speakers. Perhaps because my Persian was not good enough or because they were avoiding dialect in talking to me, I never noticed this. Even the Aimaq disagree about which are the four main tribes. Among the groups, however, are the Firokuhi, Taimani, Taiwara, Hazara, Jamshidi, and Timuri. Elphinstone in 1815 added the Zooree and has the Firuzkuhi and Jamshidi as subtribes of the Hazara.
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29 Their carpets would often be sold as Bokharan or "Khoja Rushnai"—areas hundreds of miles away. The main cost of the carpet lay in the wool. The women and girls who wove were often paid less than ten dollars for work that took them a month.
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30 The British retreat from Kabul took place in January 1842, almost exactly 160 years before my conversation with Dr. Habibullah. The Afghans killed at least twelve thousand of the British troops and their followers in six days in the snow-filled gorges below Kabul. Only Dr. Brydon, a medic, managed to ride into the fort of Jalalabad. Apart from a few prisoners released later, he was the sole survivor of the army of the Indus. Lady Butler's painting of him shows him half dead on his pony at the gates, looking, in his long-tailed tunic, like a pre-Raphaelite knight ending a Grail quest. He took the pony, which he had taken from an Afghan village and which had carried him to safety, back with him to Scotland.
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31 Arab historians also refer to it as a Hindu area, but they had a tendency to call all pagan kingdoms Hindu. Bosworth, who is the great authority on the Ghorids, suggests they may have had their own individual local religion, which simply vanished with the Islamic invasion.
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32 Among those who had been forgiven was the Russian-era governor of Ghor, Fazal Ahmed Khan, who was now the Christian Aid representative in the province, living in Shahrak. He came from a feudal family even grander than Haji Mohsin's. Haji Mohsin's family were
khan zada,
important district figures, but Fazal Ahmed's family had been Taimans, effectively controlling the province under the royal court. His KHAD security chief, Moheddin, and he had been forced into hiding.
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33 Haji Gul. He and Dr. Ibrahim, who had suddenly become governor of Ghor, were among the very few who actively fought the Taliban in this area.
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34 Mullah Hussein of Guk.
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35 The Mariam Sura on Mary, the mother of Jesus.
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36 If the villagers were right, these were gilt bronze not gold and were melted to form the famous cauldron in the mosque in Herat. The man credited with commissioning the cauldron was one of the last direct descendants of the Ghorid dynasty and may, therefore, have been reusing a family heirloom two hundred years after the fall of the city.
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37 Ancient because it seems to have been taking place even in 2000
B.C.
Egypt—hence the elaborate security precautions around the pyramids or, later, around King Midas's tomb in Turkey.
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38 In 2002 UNESCO, the UN body responsible for cultural heritage, visited Jam, more seminars were held, and a "world heritage site" was announced. But nothing was done to stop the pillage. In mid-August 2002, UNESCO was still refusing to acknowledge the scale of the looting or the quality of the objects removed. As a result, they continue to refer to the minaret as "possibly a victory tower" and would not concede that the Ghorid capital had been found and was being destroyed. Professor Andrea Bruno, who led the excavations of the seventies and the recent UNESCO visits, still maintained that "'Firozkuh' is only a legend for the moment." When I confronted him and others at a British Museum seminar in November 2002, I was told that an archaeologist would begin work on the site in April 2003, sixteen months after my visit and long after the villagers had removed everything they could.
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39 There were a very large number of faiths in medieval Muslim Asia. In the mountains of western Iran and Iraq there are still Yezidis, whose syncretic faith combines Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity and centers around the worship of a fallen angel in the form of a peacock. Their idols traditionally included vast bronze birds—reminiscent of the Huma birds on the city walls. The peacock, which they worship, is depicted like the peacock on the Ghorid clay disk that I was shown by Bushire.
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40 Abdul Salam apparently took his revenge six months after my visit. Residents of Ghor told Human Rights Watch that during late August 2002 a commander under Ismail Khan, whom they called Abdul Salam, attacked a rival commander in a village near Chaghcharan called Barra Khana. He killed the commander, arrested several of his troops, tortured, and then killed them. "The corpses were returned to the families," said one of the residents. The troops mutilated some of the detainees while torturing them: "When the families were given the corpses, they saw that the hands were cut off, eyes were pulled out, ears were cut, and then people understood that they had been tortured terribly in the prison." Human Rights Watch Report, October 2002.