Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  The lights around us were shining gold on our skin and sparkling on the marble courts in flashes of magenta. Ahead of us, the light formed vertical strips on the silver bars of the grille where men were tying ribbons outside the shrine. Some dabbed handkerchiefs on their cheeks to mop up their tears, while others let out soft melancholy sobs.

  “Why don’t you make a wish?” asked Mohammed.

  I had never prayed at a Muslim shrine before. Yet here, a Muslim who believed I was bound for hell was inviting me to pray at his country’s most important shrine.

  The touch of the bar was warm on my lips where so many other lips had pressed, and as I prayed to Imam Reza I felt swept up in something. Please please please, I prayed, pleeeeease help me get through Afghanistan.

  I stepped back to my companions, blinking away a tear.

  PART SIX

  AFGHANISTAN

  “The homes that are the dwellings of today

  Will sink ’neath shower and sunshine to decay,

  But storm and rain shall never mar what I

  Have built—the palace of my poetry.”

  —FERDOWSI, THE SHAHNAMEH

  16

  The Road to Ghazni

  Kandahar. October.

  “Mr. Nicholas!”

  Hassan-Gul whistles in my ear as he pulls back the blanket.

  “Aren’t you ready yet?” he asks.

  “No!”

  He is already in his shalwar qameez. As I sink my legs into the baggy depths of my own, the dawn azan is calling through the window, rallying the faithful to prayer. I zip up my waistcoat, making sure my Dictaphone is in the inside pocket. Today, if everything goes to plan, we will follow Ferdowsi to the capital of Sultan Mahmud’s empire. It’s time for the poet’s revenge.

  “You became an Afghan!” exclaims Hassan-Gul.

  He’s nodding approvingly, noticing my pantherlike stride to the door. He presses a hand on my shoulder and gives me an encouraging smile.

  “When we place our feet in Ghazni,” he says, “your heart will fly like a bird.”

  Oil lamps flicker from the doorways of mud-brick huts as an auto-rickshaw putters down Kandahar’s main street. They light up an old man arranging his gown on a stoop, a couple of boys slapping roundels of bread on the wall inside a shop, and men hunched over their sacks at the side of the road. In front of a metal shipping container, another lamp is raised by a small boy as he warms a turbaned ticket seller. The rickshaw drops us beside him, and we climb into the bus.

  Safe from scrutiny, thanks to early morning fatigue and the lack of sunlight, I scribble in my notebook. It’s the first time I’ve done this in public since leaving Herat. Even so, I keep it out of the attention of the other passengers, and when they try to talk to me, I still have to act dumb, pressing a hand on my chest and gesturing to Hassan-Gul to act as intermediary.

  Cones of rock are rising on one side of the bus, and low-slung fleshy banks of hill on the other, while ahead of us sprawls a sandy plain as gray and monochrome as the sky above it. The most dangerous part of the journey is behind us—in theory, at least. Although, since the UN High Commissioner for Refugees removed all its staff from this part of the country just a few months ago, after a shooting in Ghazni, it’s hardly as if we’re moving into Munchkin-land.

  Revenge—that’s what it’s usually about. Or so Hassan-Gul told me last night as we lay in the dark, swatting away the insects that had chosen us for their supper.

  “If someone wants to kill you,” he said, “it is because his heart has turned black from all the people who died. In our culture, it is blood for blood. Maybe you will say this is not right but it is how things are.”

  As the impetus for my journey, there could be nothing more appropriate.

  It’s certainly not exclusive to the Afghans—the importance of blood for blood among the Persians is illustrated in the Shahnameh itself. It’s a driving force throughout Ferdowsi’s epic—from the start, when the first shah’s son is torn apart by the evil Black Div and an army of beasts gathers to avenge him; to the killing of King Fereydoun’s son Iraj, which leads to an everlasting war between the ancient Iranians and the Kingdom of Turan; to the battles that follow the murder of Prince Siyavash. It’s the dark side of Persian culture, bleeding out under the rugs and books and fluffy cats. How better to honor the author of those stories than to set out for revenge on his behalf?

  But something is scratching at the back of my head, telling me it isn’t going to be so simple. When it comes to traveling in this part of the world, it never is.

  With nature being so spare, it’s up to the people to supply the color. Camel herd-boys have green cloths turbaned around their heads, while the women who cross the plains are wearing bright red and blue skirts and black headscarves. The camels’ heads are raised high on erect necks, replicating the posture of Afghan men, as if one has learned their stance from the other. But the women bend low—sometimes back-breakingly so, like those sweeping with handleless twig brooms in their courtyards. On the radio, a female singer is caroling a love song based on the twelfth-century romantic tale Layla and Majnun. The confidence of her voice, like the bare ankles of the women on the plains, is surprising in “Taliban country.” But it raises no objection from the men in the bus.

  We are in the medieval geographers’ Zabolistan, the highlands of Kandahar watered by the Upper Helmand. It’s a scorching, hellish land, where they say you can grill a fish just by holding it out to the wind, but these things are always a matter of perspective, and after the Desert of Death anywhere would look like a wonderful place to live. Men are moving rocks around a stream that claims the unusual advantage of actually having water, and at Moqor we see mounds of green and yellow melons. The sky grows brighter, while the earth is healing after the lunar plains, softening and sprouting the odd patch of grass. Fruit hangs in nets outside the shops and dangles from trees on the edges of the villages: grape and almond groves where sheep wander about as if to inspect the produce; a pomegranate tree providing shade to a family of Kochi nomads, dressed in bright colors like Romany gypsies, who are sitting outside the black hitched-up skirts of their tent. Near the city of Sultan Mahmud, nature is coming back out.

  It’s as if we’ve turned the page to a citadel scene in an illuminated manuscript. The stone walls of a round-towered fort soar ahead, and rooks squat on the walls like Afghan men at a teahouse. The scenes around us—women invisible under their veils, men with baskets and sacks, their turbans showing tufts at the back like Ferdowsi in every single painting or statue I’ve seen of him—all these could have been viewed through the poet’s own eyes.

  A rusting rocket launcher sticks out of a hilltop, reminding me of which era I’m in, while the Afghan tricolor flies above us (instead of the emblem Ferdowsi would have observed—the Ghaznavid lion and sun). The tricolor is everywhere—swaying above the fort, dangling out of the rods of new buildings, hanging over the side mirror of a truck. Men are sinking axes into wooden logs, some sawing them or boring holes with gimlets; and behind them auto-rickshaws are gridlocked with yellow taxis in front of the marketplace. Like Ferdowsi a millennium before us, we are on the threshold of Sultan Mahmud’s capital.

  If Ferdowsi had turned up in Ghazni when he was a child, he would have found a backwater. But a generation later, it was the most dazzling city in the Muslim East. A general called Alptigin escaped there in the 960s, after he’d botched a coup against the prince of the Samanids, the ruling dynasty in Central Asia, and made the city his bolt-hole.88 He was followed by a series of short-lived successors until, in 977, a military council elected a pagan-born Turk called Sebuktigin, whom Alptigin had bought at a Central Asian slave depot. Under Sebuktigin the empire of Ghazni swelled, with considerable help from his eldest son.

  That son was Mahmud—a man who, in the words of the medieval historian Nizam al-Mulk, “was not handsome; he had a drawn face, his skin was dry, his neck long, his nose high, and his beard was thin. Because he always ate clay, his comp
lexion was yellow.”

  Clearly he was no pinup—but it didn’t matter. Because Mahmud happened to be the military genius of his age. Expert swordsman and lance-fighter, he loved nothing more than to lead from the front, throwing himself into the fray and in one battle (at Multan, in what is now Pakistan, in 1005) notching up so many killings that his hand stuck to the hilt of his sword with congealed blood. He was also an expert tactician, adopting counterfeit movements to surprise the enemy. When things weren’t going well against the Ghurids of Central Afghanistan in 1011, Mahmud faked a withdrawal, drawing the enemy out, then flipped his army around and put them to a rout. It was this combination of cunning and chutzpah that made him the most terrifying conqueror around. In a world where princes were little more than tax-squeezing mobsters, Mahmud was the don.

  The effect of his military prowess started to tell in Ghazni itself. Booty came back by the elephant-load, turning the ex-backwater into a regional powerhouse. Palaces and lavish villas sprouted like the apple trees for which the city was famous, along with a spectacular Friday Mosque funded by Mahmud’s numerous conquests in India, made of marble and granite and known as the “Bride of Heaven.” The caliph of Baghdad, keen to share in the triumphs of Islam’s latest superstar, dispatched his messengers with precious gifts and gave Mahmud the title “God’s Shadow on Earth.” Visitors flocked from all over the region to make the acquaintance of the man who had never lost a battle. Among them, just a decade before Ferdowsi’s own visit to Ghazni, was one of his townsfellows, whose description gives us an indication of what the poet would have faced. “I encountered,” wrote Abu’l Abbas of Tus in 1001,a vast body of troops, too numerous to be counted, and all fitted out with the most splendid uniforms and outfits, and the finest weapons and equipment, that I have ever seen. . . . I entered, and found the forecourt thronged with wild beasts, chained up on both sides in lines facing each other. I made my way through them, noting first of all lynxes in their natural state, and then panthers likewise, all in great numbers. Finally, I reached Mahmud himself, a fine figure to see, installed in his full court, in a hall richly furnished and equipped. He was seated on his throne with all the great men of state standing before him in two ranks, all in their finest clothes.

  For Ferdowsi it would have been awe-inspiring. But it wasn’t only the sultan’s vast retinue that made him difficult to approach.

  According to a popular story, on his arrival in Ghazni, Ferdowsi encountered three poets sitting in a garden: the poet laureate Unsuri, the lyricist Farrukhi, and another called Asjadi. Although they were all capable writers, they had devoted most of their talents to oily, ego-massaging panegyrics for their master.89 On seeing a ragged old man, whose speech they considered old-fashioned and rustic, they refused to believe he could seriously claim to be a poet of any merit. More to amuse themselves than as a genuine test, they offered him a challenge. Sure, they would let him into the court—but only if he was able to complete a quatrain of rhyming verse. Each of them would recite a line, matching the rhyme of the first and continuing its meaning. And since Ferdowsi was the trespasser, his turn would be last.

  “Thine eyes are as clear and as blue as the ocean,” recited Unsuri.

  “Their glances,” continued Farrukhi, “bewitch and they charm like a potion.”

  Asjadi: “Their wounds can be soothed not by balm nor by lotion.”

  They knew of no other word to continue the rhyme: the old yokel was bound to falter. He barely paused, raising his voice as powerfully as his septuagenarian lungs could manage:

  “As deadly as Giv with his spear dealt at Poshan.”

  The poets were flummoxed: as much by Ferdowsi’s reference to a legendary battle as by his ability to complete the set. Honor demanded they admit him to the court, but the defeat rankled. It is said that both Unsuri and Farrukhi spoke out against Ferdowsi to Sultan Mahmud: Why celebrate the ancient warriors when there were so many heroes in the sultan’s own modern-day army? Perhaps this is what Ferdowsi means when he writes in his satire:A slanderer (oh! On his foul head a curse!)

  Interpreted evil from out of my verse.

  The credit I’d won with the Sultan he stole,

  Extracting the warmth from my hot glowing coal.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about these verses during the last few weeks—wondering why Sultan Mahmud treated Ferdowsi’s epic with such disdain. Why the poet, venturing to Ghazni with such high hopes, was in the end so dramatically rebuffed. By the time I leave the city, I am hoping I will have an answer.

  Ghazni at last! The excitement drives me through the market stalls, among Pashtun long-beards and wispy-chinned Hazaras carrying bags of grain measured with stones on tin scales, or women in white burkas bearing reed baskets full of pink rocks of salt; among the sheepskin coats for which Ghazni is famous, as well as the watered yogurt drink, dugh, praised by Abu Sa’d of Gorgan in the tenth century, who also recommended the city’s apples. “Their juice,” he wrote, “is like the saliva of a moon-faced youth.” As a taxi steers us upslope to the gray stone walls of the citadel, I can’t say the apple I am munching gives me that particular sensation, but perhaps this is because I’m distracted by the tension bristling around us.

  Children are filling pails with water from the hand pumps underneath the clay walls of their houses. Bound in torn trousers and bits of rag, they widen their eyes as they watch us pass, while older long-bearded men seem to scowl as we squeeze through the bazaar’s narrow backstreets. Their houses huddle behind them, falling in on themselves, snapped in half by shelling, and everywhere the walls are marked by the dot dot dot of the gun—holes regular and big enough for the children to poke all their fingers inside. They underline how precariously peace hovers over Ghazni—teetering like the sheets of corrugated iron perched on the roofs. In November 2003, in this same market, two men on motorbikes shot a Frenchwoman called Bettina Goislard: the first murder of a UN worker in post-Taliban Afghanistan, which led to the withdrawal of the region’s UNHCR staff.

  “Oh yes, we are having many difficulties,” says our taxi driver, Ghulam, addressing us in Persian.

  A large blue orb is swinging under his rearview mirror, a talisman against the Evil Eye, and a mini silver Quran dangles underneath it.

  “Just last week,” he continues, shaking a hand at the splintered windshield, “another mullah was assassinated.”

  He eyes me through the rearview mirror and speaks to Hassan-Gul in Pashto.

  “He said,” Hassan-Gul explains, “you have a foreigner’s eyes.”

  Another volley of Pashto.

  “I told him,” says Hassan-Gul, “you are not a foreigner—only you are suffering from a speech problem.”

  Another volley.

  “He said in that case you must be very weak.”

  Like the houses, the stone walls of the citadel are swiss-cheesed by bulletholes. But I’m not sure if these are from recent fighting or earlier (so often in Afghanistan, everything seems to melt together in one long, horrific saga of bloodshed), because there was a fierce conflict here in the 1840s, which had a peculiar effect: It brought Sultan Mahmud back to life.

  The British had demolished the gates of Ghazni en route to seizing control of Afghanistan: another piece of the Asian jigsaw under Queen Victoria’s sway. Placing a puppet king on the throne of Kabul, they established themselves as unrivaled masters of the Afghan plains, but when the challenge came, it would be sudden. Bursting out from the mountains, the warriors of the deposed king hanged the British senior envoy’s corpse in the Kabul bazaar and fomented riots throughout the capital. By the time the redcoats had sounded a retreat, it was too late—the Afghans were in no mood for mercy and they ambushed the British in the Koord-Kabul Pass. Those who didn’t take a direct hit were finished off by frostbite. Out of 16,500, only a single survivor made it to the safety zone of Jalalabad—a doctor who was saved from a knife wound by the copy of Blackwood’s Magazine he kept under his cap. The event would make its way into nursery rhymes, to be s
ung for many years afterward by Afghan children: “Poor Doctor Brydon, his lame donkey trotting, / While under our soil his fellows are rotting.”

  Returning to Ghazni a year later, the British were still fuming. Proving that the impulse for revenge was hardly exclusive to the locals, their “Army of Retribution” tore down the sandalwood gate of Sultan Mahmud’s mausoleum and sent it off to India, claiming it was the same gate seized by Mahmud himself in his most famous campaign—in 1025, when he slaughtered 50,000 Hindus at the Moon Temple of Somnath. “The insult of 800 years ago is at last avenged,” declared Lord Ellenborough, in a proclamation to “the princes and Chiefs, and people of India.” Set up on show in the fort of Agra, the gate became a symbol of the Raj’s policy of divide and rule between the Muslims and Hindus, and of its dubious victory over the Afghans.

  But it didn’t have exactly the effect the British had intended. Among India’s Muslims, a long-buried memory was awakened, and when they established their own nation, they made the sultan one of their mascots. In May 2002, showing how well they remembered Mahmud and his dynasty, the Pakistani army flight-tested its latest short-range single-warhead ballistic missile—the Ghaznavi.90

  “What do you think of Sultan Mahmud?” I ask Hassan-Gul, walking along a dusty track cutting through a hill over the citadel.

  He steps carefully in his rubber sandals, scouring the grass on either side of the track: According to Ghulam, there used to be mines here, and he’s not sure if they’ve all been cleared.

  “People in Herat,” says Hassan-Gul, “we have a big place in our hearts for Ferdowsi, and you cannot love them both. But when you talk to people here in Ghazni, you will find their opinion is different.”