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The Golden Road to Samarkand
We bowled along the road into Uzbekistan from neighbouring Tajikistan, up and over a pass through the snowy Pamir mountains, with me intoning selected verses from Flecker's 'The Golden Journey to Samarkand':
Away, for we are ready to a man!
Our camels sniff the evening and are glad.
Lead on, O Master of the Caravan:
Lead on the Merchant-Princes of Bagdad.
Have we not Indian carpets dark as wine,
Turbans and sashes, gowns and bows and veils,
And broideries of intricate design,
And printed hangings in enormous bales?
And we have manuscripts in peacock styles
By Ali of Damascus; we have swords
Engraved with storks and apes and crocodiles,
And heavy beaten necklaces, for Lords.
Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand…
…and then we would suddenly hit a pothole with a crash. For the road was long and, in reality, far from golden—two hundred miles or so of cracked grey concrete slabs, each junction making our vehicle lurch violently enough to lift our stomachs into our mouths, the shoulder occasionally adorned with the burnt-out wreck of a truck lying on its side or even upside down. But arriving in Samarkand made the effort worth while. Here we were in one of the world's dream cities. Dusty, hot and tired, we stood in the central square and marvelled. It is said of the Taj Mahal that, however familiar the photograph, the reality is more breathtaking than one can possibly expect. So it is with Samarkand.
My two earlier journeys to the East had led me to stumble many times across the traces of the Persian prophet and the religious ideas developed by his later followers. Often dismissed by pious Muslims as mere folklore, or falsely condemned as foreign influence, or even blankly denied even in the face of overwhelming evidence, the traces of Zarathustra's teachings refuse to fade away. In spite of everything, Zarathustra lives.
Before travelling south to the Pamirs as the Soviet Union sulkily retreated into history—this was the beginning of the 1990s—we had spent time in Moscow, talking to experts on the region, acclimatising ourselves to both the culture of Central Asia and, as we quickly discovered, its climate. Moscow apartments in winter must be among some of the hottest places in the world; the Soviet high-rise housing blocks that line the Prospekts, the great grim thoroughfares leading out from the city centre through the suburbs, all stained cement and peeling plaster, don't allow you to adjust the savage central heating. But sitting sweating in shirtsleeves seemed an appropriate way to learn about life in the desert cities of the Soviet deep south; to hear Dr Lazar Rempel, octogenarian Jewish architect and historian, give an outsider's view of Central Asia as he reminisced about his fifty-six years of exile in Bokhara and Samarkand.
Dr Rempel's fate was not unusual in Stalin's USSR. Many of those unlucky enough to attract the attention of the Father of the International Proletariat found themselves expelled from home and condemned to live thousands of miles away, among people with a different language and a different culture. Most went back as soon as they could. My own uncle in Prague had been in the Czech army before the war and had led a band of Partisans into the Bohemian forest during the Nazi occupation. In 1946 he and his men were absorbed into the Red Army and sent to the steppelands of Soviet Kazakhstan, ostensibly to help guard a 'disinfection station' to which victims of smallpox and other epidemic diseases were spirited away. One day a convoy of trucks arrived. Soldiers jumped out and began unloading bale upon bale of barbed wire.
'It seemed to me,' my uncle told me long afterwards, 'that when barbed wire starts going up, no good ever comes of it.' So he ran away, to become, years later, a stalwart of the Czechoslovak military establishment.
But, unusually, Lazar Rempel had decided to stay in Central Asia. He had been sent to Uzbekistan in 1937, in the course of one of the great Soviet anti-Jewish purges. He was lucky to be alive. Stalin, who had once studied for the priesthood, had remembered his early Bible lessons well. The best way to make a nation like the Crimean Tatars or the Tribes of Israel disappear, he had learned from the ancient Assyrian despots, was to carry them off to faraway places, where they would eventually disappear into the general population.
Rempel made a new life for himself among the Muslims: 'What did the prophet Jeremiah say? "Build houses, plant gardens, take wives and beget children. For in the peace of the city where you are captive, you will find peace." That was my way.'
And how did the Jewish exiles get on with the locals? In all his fifty-six years of banishment, Rempel couldn't recall a single instance of being badly treated because of his race or religion.
'But then,' he told me, 'the Muslims of Central Asia are of a special kind; whatever they call themselves: Sunni, Shi?ah, Isma?ili, that is only on the surface. The first religion of these people was Zoroastrianism, the religion of Iran before Islam, and underneath they are still Zoroastrians through and through. If you don't believe me, go and look at their religious monuments. There are Zoroastrian symbols everywhere.' He suddenly thought of something. 'Wait, I will show you a picture.'
Rempel jumped up and went rummaging among the piles of books, folders and papers which reduced the floor area of his flat to a rabbit run. He brought back a brown and faded photograph and waved it in front of me. 'Look at this. Do you normally expect to see something like this in a mosque? I found it soon after I arrived in Bokhara. It was in the district of Juibar which, when I arrived, had just been emptied of its people—executed, expelled, I don't know. I happened to look through the gateway of an old mosque and there was this huge pile of rubbish, of manuscripts, just lying in the yard. At that time, in the late 1930s, it was too dangerous to possess even an ordinary document written in Arabic characters, let alone a religious text like the Qur?an. But people could not bring themselves to destroy the Holy Word, so they would secretly come and abandon their religious books in the courtyard of a mosque. I went through the top layers and set aside just the most interesting things I found. These are now preserved in the Tashkent museum. The rest, including manuscripts going back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, were all destroyed. And, you know, this happened in the very city about which the great philosopher Ibn-Sina had written that nowhere else in the world had he seen such books as he was able to read in the libraries of Bokhara.'
Rempel's photograph showed a wall plaque bearing the icon of an Islamic saint, robed and turbaned, hands held out palm upwards, the Muslim gesture of prayer. The figure stood in front of a stylised Islamic cityscape of domes and crenellations. From around the head streamed rays of light. Whom did it represent? 'Maybe the Prophet, maybe ?Ali. I am not sure. All I know is that this does not represent orthodox Islam. See the light rays? This is typically Zoroastrian. It is from this that Christian icon-painters first took the idea of the halo.'
'Where is the original?'
'The mosque is long gone,' Rempel admitted gloomily. Then he brightened up. 'But the people haven't changed. The Soviets couldn't destroy their religion, only the evidence of their unorthodoxy, so the fundamentalists should really thank them for it. Go to Central Asia, see how the people still celebrate their marriages, how they mourn their dead. You will find their beliefs and rituals far richer, deeper and older than the Islam which conquered the area only in the seventh century.'
Rempel's words were unexpectedly confirmed by another of our Moscow sources. Davlat Khodanazarov didn't look like the stereotype of an Islamist. He was rather handsome, clean-shaven with short dark hair, refined features, well dressed in a smart safari outfit and blue shirt—a film-maker as well as an Islamist politician. He made notes to himself as we talked, in meticulous handwriting. He had a sense of humour and knew how to play to the camera. When we commiserated with him for having only just failed to win the Tajikistan presidency for the Islamic party, he smiled wryly.
'You should congratulate me. I am relieved I lost.' On the piece of paper in front of him he drew a stick man. 'If I had won, I would have had to be assassinated.' On the word assassinated, he heavily crossed the stick man out.
Given the support Khodanazarov had received from his country's Muslim parties, I was astonished to hear him say that Islam in Central Asia was strong because it was built on a firm foundation of Zoroastrianism.
'And this faith,' he explained, 'lives on into the present. Zoroastrianism is the ideology of the future. Do you know what Zoroastrians believe? That the world is a battleground between good and evil and it is the duty of everyone to foster good and fight evil. Zoroastrianism failed in the end because it came too early in history. It is an idea for now.' He drew a globe on his paper, and then a ring around it. 'The world has become a very small place. For the first time we really can speak of a world community. To secure our future we must find a humanist philosophy. And Islam, supported by the message of Zoroaster, offers that philosophy.' He spoke the prophet's name as Zarathushtra, like the ancients did.
Amazing though it was to hear the name of the pre-Islamic prophet invoked with such respect by a Muslim politician courting the Muslim vote, the suggestion of a very complex Central Asian religious identity was hardly new to me. Listening to Khodanazarov's stirring speech, I was able to think back to many other times over the years when I had been offered hints and indications of something deeper going on behind the pious, sober and blank Muslim façade.
Central Asia lies on the outer periphery of the Islamic domain. Travel any further east and you find yourself entering a very different world, where Indian and Chinese culture preside. Here, on the edge, the three worlds blend. In the first centuries of the common era, for example, the territory of Gandhara, which linked Afghanistan with northwesternmost India, merged the Greek culture of Alexander the Great and his successors with Persian, Indian and Chinese elements. Under its Kushan rulers Gandhara became a world centre of Buddhist thought and art. The colossal third-century Buddhist statues of Bamian, permanently destroyed by Afghanistan's temporary Taliban rulers, set a style for Buddhist iconography that proved to be definitive for the entire Orient. To this day, from India to Japan, statues of the Buddha are modelled, it is said, on the image of the god Apollo and draped in the flowing garment that the Greeks called the chiton.
So it is no great surprise to find that in Bokhara and Samarkand, so far from the Muslim mainstream, cut off by political and sectarian conflict from the centres of Islamic orthodoxy, the new religion should have been unable to wipe out every trace of the old. Even in Iran itself, part of the very heartland of Islam, the past can still burst out of its restraints and express itself forcefully in the present.
Most pious Muslims regard what happened before the time of the Prophet Muhammad's revelation as the period of jahiliyya, ignorance—best forgotten. Which is one thing for those like the Arabs, who first enter the full spotlight of history with the advent of Islam, but quite another for those to whom the Muslim conquest brought an end to a thousand years of spectacular achievement. Persians, particularly, could never forget what they once had been. The Persian national epic, Ferdowsi's Shah-nameh, written around the turn of the first millennium by a Muslim poet for a Muslim ruler, and still regularly recited in the Iran of the Ayatollahs, tells of the creation of the sacred Aryan land in ancient times, of the breakup of that Iranian world into the warring states of Iran and Turan and of their subsequent reunification. The Prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathushtra or Zardosht), his one supreme God Ahura Mazda, and Ahriman, the Power of Evil, all play a major part in the story:
Zardosht, the prophet of the Most High, appeared in the land. And he came before the Shah and instructed him. And he went out in all the land and showed the people a new faith. And he purged Iran of the power of Ahriman. He reared throughout the realm a tree with beautiful foliage, and men rested beneath its branches. And whoever ate of its leaves became learned in all that regards the life to come, but whoever ate of the branches became perfect in wisdom and faith. And Zardosht gave men the Zendavesta, and he bade them obey its precepts if they would attain everlasting life.'
Bald translation cannot convey the true flavour of the Persian verse, which Iranians declaim for the sheer pleasure of its sound as well as for its story.
Though the Shah-nameh is openly Zoroastrian in subject and treatment, somehow converting ancient history to myth and legend has purged nostalgia for the past of its apostasy. Even so, Iranian Islam, passionate as it is, has an uneasy quality about it, as if it could tip over at any moment into something older and much more complex than the simplicity of the Prophet's desert faith. 'Underneath they are still Zoroastrians through and through,' Lazar Rempel said of the Central Asians. And in Iran, too, pre-Islamic history lies very close to the surface, even though it was buried more than thirteen hundred years ago. How close it lies, and how threatening that proximity can be to the edifice of Iranian Islam built on top, became particularly clear to me as I observed, from a privileged vantage point, the Shah of Iran's extraordinary historical jamboree in October 1971.
The Greatest Gathering in History
In the early 1970s, Bush House, the headquarters of the BBC External Services in London's Strand, was a very unusual place. Developed, designed and decorated by Americans and dedicated to the 'friendship of the English-speaking peoples', its imposing pillared portico sheltered dozens of groups of intelligent, articulate, often politically motivated expatriates and refugees from positively non-English-speaking peoples, who sat before the microphones of the BBC, representing to the world in dozens of languages the face of British post-colonial even-handedness and fair play. At the same time, and in the same serious spirit, many plotted and planned among themselves the confusion, if not the outright overthrow, of their governments. It was said that no other building on earth housed as large a number of would-be—and actual—revolutionaries and insurrectionists at the same time. Meeting in the canteen and debating and arguing for hour upon hour, day after day, they often seemed to be balanced just on the edge of action. Eventually plucking up the courage to jump after many false starts, they mostly came to a sad end. For weeks, a charismatic young man from northern Africa would hold daily court at a corner table. Suddenly he and his group were no longer there. Where were they? The word was that he had flown into his country hoping that the people would rise up to support him. They didn't. He was shot.
The Persian section of the Eastern Service, in which I worked at the time as a programme producer, was staffed by a mixture of archetypes. There were the elder statesmen, conservative and anglicised by long residence, who just wanted a quiet life. There were the young firebrands, usually Marxists, members of every possible expatriate opposition group. There were the ambitious hopefuls with their hearts set on America and movie or musical stardom. (Though we didn't know it at the time, we also had our proper complement of Iranian secret policemen.) Nobody overtly supported the Shah, but nor would any of the broadcasters have advocated, or foreseen, the creation of an Islamic state. They didn't all get on with each other, of course: small groups of expatriates who have to work together are always prone to petty jealousies, in-fighting and paranoia. The firebrands hated the elders for their dishonesty and their compromises; the elders accused the firebrands of ignorance, treason and terrorism. Each side considered the other fraudulent. But all were utterly astounded by what the Shah got up to in Persepolis.
Under Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Arya Mehr, son of the founder of the last Persian royal dynasty of our time, Reza Khan—who had begun his climb to power as an illiterate soldier from a northern province—the polity of Iran was entering a period of great social and political instability. The Shah's increasingly savage and crude efforts to suppress all opposition were proving ineffective. Protest spilled on to the streets, prisons filled with dissidents, there was an endless succession of executions, trials, disappearances, assassinations. In this inauspicious climate, teetering on the edge of revolution, the Shah seemed to believe that his only recourse was to assert his legitimacy by presenting his rule as a continuation of the Iranian imperial tradition. To this end, he decided to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Achaemenid dynasty, whose empire had first brought fame and glory to the Persian nation.
The Achaemenid Empire is customarily regarded as having been founded by Cyrus II, known as 'the Great', who was the first to unite the Iranian tribes of the Medes and the Persians. His reign began in 559 BC. Adding two and a half millennia to that date would bring one to the year 1941. The Shah seemed to feel that 1971 was close enough. But if the timing raised a few pedantic eyebrows, the proposed centrepiece of the celebrations, a pageant representing the march of Iranian national history and power, provoked a more cynical response. 'When in trouble, play the nationalist card,' snorted my closest Marxist colleague in his Hollywood-learned drawl, 'but it'll do him no good. What the people want is a future, not the past.'
In fact, the celebration was not intended to involve the people at all; they were kept outside an impenetrable ring of military steel. This performance was for foreign and media consumption only, as if the Shah hoped to cement his hold on the Iranian people by demonstrating the high esteem in which he was held everywhere but at home. Thus the main pageant took place before the representatives of sixty-nine countries, including twenty kings, five queens, twenty-one princes and princesses, sixteen presidents, four vice?presidents, three prime ministers and two foreign ministers. The occasion was, in the words of the Shah, 'the greatest gathering of heads of state in history'. Tens of millions watched it on television. The Persian section of the BBC ran live commentary from correspondents on the spot.
The show was truly spectacular, worthy of Cecil B. deMille at his most extravagant. In front of the ruins of Persepolis, Darius's sixth-century BC capital which Alexander the Great had personally torched, before the assembled dignitaries sheltering in air-conditioned tents furnished with Limoges china and Baccarat crystal, phalanx after phalanx of Persian soldiers from every period of Iranian antiquity marched in time to a fanfare of trumpets and a rolling of drums. Medes, Persians, Achaemenians, Seleucids, Parthians, Sassanians, Abbasids, Safavids and Turks, they flowed continuously on like a veritable river of history. Brightly clothed in authentic costume, cloaked, bearded, helmeted, shod and fully armed, all with meticulous attention to historical detail, a forest of spear-points, banners and glittering standards floated above their heads. Some travelled by chariot, others rode horses, the rest marched on foot. They seemed to have stepped straight from the bas reliefs on the palace walls of ancient Susa, Persepolis or Ecbatana, Nineveh or Babylon. This is what the Assyrian cohorts must have looked like when they came down on Israel like a wolf on the fold.
It was a display set to confront thirteen hundred years of Iranian Islam. For at the high point of the ceremony, the Shah himself stood up before the shades of his adopted ancestors—though Cyrus's palace and tomb are actually forty miles away at Pasagardae—and spake thus:
'Cyrus, Great King. King of Kings. King of the Achaemenians, King of the land of Iran. I, the Shahanshah of Iran, offer salutations from me and from my nation. 'Cyrus, Great King of Kings, noblest of the noble, hero of the history of Iran and of the world, rest in peace. For we are awake. We will always stay awake!'While the guests at Persepolis concealed their embarrassment behind their glasses of chilled Piper-Heidsieck champagne, diplomatic observers abroad treated the event with the fond indulgence of elderly relatives observing the antics of a spoiled favourite nephew. Though we now know that the Queen of England and the Prince of Wales were advised not to attend on account of the event's vulgarity, a British Foreign Office civil servant said to me at the time: 'What's so wrong with putting on a show, anyway? After all, it doesn't really matter what the Persian people think. We can keep the Shah in power as long as is necessary.'
Almighty God, Creator of the Universe and of mankind, bestower of intelligence, wisdom, and thought on humanity, who hast granted numberless blessings to our noble land, thou hast appointed the just Arya Mehr as custodian of the land of Iran.In the Persian section of the BBC, even the firebrand Marxists were shocked. It was not just that Mohammed Reza Pahlavi had associated himself with Cyrus, the glorious founder of Persia's first empire—an emperor, moreover, who, quite unlike the cruel, vindictive and megalomaniac Shah, was famously generous and magnanimous to his defeated enemies. Now this monster was claiming to be the anointed of God! And, by implication, not the Prophet Muhammad's God, but the God of Cyrus, who was the God of Zoroaster.
The Shah's error, like that of his British and American allies, was to misunderstand Iranian Islam. When the last Zoroastrian Shah's troops succumbed to the Muslim army at Nehavand in the year 641, it was to be for good. The defeat was so overwhelming that the entire Sassanian state and its religious establishment were completely swept out of existence. In any case, the old religion had been too tainted by association with a rigid, caste-bound and despotic monarchy, its priests too obsessed with enforcing the pettifogging details of correct observance. What Zoroaster had taught—'that the world is a battleground between good and evil and it is the duty of everyone to foster good and fight evil'—was entirely compatible with the Prophet Muhammad's new, simple and pure message. Yet though the Iranian state was incorporated into the Muslim world suddenly and by force, the Iranian people converted to Islam more slowly and largely by conviction—though heavy taxes must have played their part too.
New converts don't just give up their former spiritual and ethical world-view; they usually bring them along, transferring the old wine into the new bottle. Just as in Europe the Holy Roman Empire—'neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire' said Voltaire—was actually a way for baptised German warlords to repackage their pagan traditions in Christian wrapping, so Iranian Islam came to incorporate Iranian national consciousness, Iranian national culture, Iranian national pride and, yes, Iranian Zoroastrian beliefs. But in this synthesis of old and new lies a danger: the incorporation of too many disparate elements into one religion risks making it too diverse to hold together. This is one danger that Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors have managed to avoid. But the conflict between different threads of Muslim belief has totally ruined Afghanistan and may be in the process of despoiling other Central Asian states too.
The Iranian clergy did not rouse the anger of the people with the cry that the Shah had 'done evil in the sight of the Lord' by 'whoring after other gods'. Their pitch was simpler: Choose between Islam or a corrupt tyranny. But in the Central Asian borderlands, as elsewhere in Asia, the confrontation is within the faith itself: between a deep, rich and complex, Iranianised Islam and the severer puritan ways of the desert and mountain peoples surrounding them.
This is a conflict with many ancient precedents, and one whose biblical dimension became ever clearer as I watched the war-clouds gather over Afghanistan from a front-row seat. Ten years before the Shah's misguided Persepolis extravaganza, I was practising an earlier vocation as the only European dental surgeon in Kabul. The revolution that was to sweep away the entire Afghan ancien régime was still far in the future, but not even a young, naïve and ignorant outsider, never privy to the religious and political feelings of the citizenship, could be unaware of the tensions within Afghan society. Nor could I ever again believe in the fiction of a nation united by a single universal orthodox Muslim belief.