8
To Samarkand
I went south for two days. Along the gorges of the Chychkan river, slung with pylons, my road emerged at last beside the lake reservoir of Toktogul, where I shared a hostel room with builders’ labourers, and took a bus on to the derelict industrial town of Ustkurgan. Winding beside the Naryn river, stilled beneath a vast hydro-electric dam, I was moving across Kyrgyzstan’s north–south divide, towards its poorer, Islamic regions in the Fergana valley, close against Uzbekistan.
A genial driver carried me alongside the frontier in a litany of nostalgia for Communism. In his home town of Ustkurgan, he said, the crystal-mining complex had barely been inaugurated before the Soviet Union crashed, and the place now lay in ruins. In Soviet years the town had been wonderful, he remembered–the past growing rosier all the time–when people went to the cinema and theatre on full stomachs. But now the future had stopped, and the national barriers were up. ‘Uzbekistan is a foreign country now.’
I was barred at two border posts. Once Kyrgyz soldiers waved me through to walk a mile over no-man’s-land, where women were harvesting melons, but the Uzbek guards ordered me back. Where once merchants had travelled at will between decaying Muslim khanates, the frontiers of the new Central Asia were a bureaucrat’s paradise. It was as if an ancient passageway had been cut into rooms. Wary of a united Muslim bloc inside his empire, Stalin had delineated these countries’ borders in the mid-1920s, handing them doctored histories. Hopelessly his frontiers tried to trace ethnic realities. Even now, after seventy years of Soviet rule, the Turkic dialects flow into one another. Uzbekistan, misshaped like a dog barking at China, spills its people into all the countries round it. Yet Tajiks and other Iranian peoples form the bedrock of its old cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, and spread into Afghanistan and even China; the Turcomans overlap into Iran and Afghanistan, and all Central Asia is infused by Russians, Ukrainians, Tartars, Germans, Uighurs, Chinese and Koreans. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, its infant Muslim republics, whose boundaries had been planned to grow meaningless with time, took their frail identities on to the world stage.
Nowhere were the borders more tortuous than in the region I was entering. Kyrgyz and Uzbek lived interleaved, and riots in 1990 had left three hundred dead. It was evening, near Osh, before I reached a working border post. Twelve years ago I had crossed here at the wave of a sleepy policeman. Now, beyond Kyrgyz guards, the Uzbek frontier was cluttered with roadblocks and customs houses where a loutish soldiery in desert battledress and forage caps was harrying old women to commit their bags to a scanner, and ordered me from office to office. Only by nightfall was I through and on my way into the darkness to Namangan, conscious of a changed land.
The air is warm and still, a lowland softness. At dawn the burbling and trilling in the trees evokes tropical jungle, but the birds are brown and elusive. In the bazaar, where the Uzbek merchants go in embroidered skull-caps, you breakfast on goat stew and nan bread, lounging on one of the platform seats where cross-legged men and women gossip separately. The stalls uncover melons and walnuts, or are mounded with clothes from China, Turkey and Dubai, printed with pirated Western logos. The mountain faces of the Kyrgyz have dwindled, like a lost innocence, and the features around you are more various and watchful–it is a large, poor town, after all, Namangan–and the unemployed thicken around the parks and stations.
You walk warily. The place has a tough reputation. The plane trees which the Russians planted have reached full height along the streets, but the Russians themselves have left. Their brick cottages and neo-classical public buildings are lapped on all sides by the labyrinth of the older town. Lenin Square has become Freedom Square–although sometimes this draws cynical laughter–and in his place sits a statue of Babur, founder of the Mogul empire.
In the memorial park for the Second World War there is no word of glory or the Soviet motherland, no eternal flame. It has become a monument to disembodied grief. The statue of a mourning woman stands in a garden, ringed by the names of the dead inscribed in hanging books. They might have died in a plague. Above the entrance the Turkic inscription has been translated quaintly into English: ‘You are ever in our hearts, my dears.’
But the Fergana valley is its own country. Fertile, populous, even in the 1940s it was filled with unofficial mosques, sown with secret Sufi societies and criss-crossed by itinerant mullahs. In the early 1990s the streets of Namangan were patrolled by Muslim vigilantes, cracking down on crime and indecorous dress, and by the end of the decade the Fergana villages were harbouring guerrilla ‘sleepers’, dedicated to the founding of an Islamic state. Each year their confederates–often nurtured in the Deobandi schools of Pakistan, which had nourished the Taliban–infiltrated the valley from bases in Tajikistan or Afghanistan. Their hatred was directed above all at Uzbekistan’s president Karimov, an ex-Communist tyrant whose rule has seen the routine torture and disappearance of all dissenters. Their leaders were young. In Afghanistan they grew close to Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, and were funded from Saudi Arabia, before in 2001 the US invasion of Afghanistan engulfed them.
I heard no call to prayer. Since Muslim radicals beheaded a police captain and some local officials six years before, the minarets had been silenced. The cells of one religious college were being turned into a museum of handicrafts, and shops gouged out of its walls. In another mosque–once a Soviet museum of atheism–the double prayer-hall of a Koranic school was building. ‘But the money is little and very slow,’ said its old imam. ‘It just comes from the people.’
The epicentre of the Islamic insurgence had been the Gumbaz mosque. Years before, the Russians had turned it into a storehouse for vodka and wine, but soon after independence activists of the future Islamic resistance took it over for prayer. By 1995 it had become a bridgehead of Wahabism, the puritanical Islam of Saudi Arabia, which was financing a rumoured two thousand students there.
But when I entered it, its ferment had gone. A tiny caretaker attended me, grinning, and a few students in black skull-caps were laying pavement over its courtyard. A clean-shaven young administrator approached me. An invisible fault-line, I knew, ran between the appointees of official Islam and the parallel mullahs of an earthier faith. This man wore a suit, and was smiling. The Wahabis, he said, were removed in 1996, and the place now held a hundred and twenty students, taught properly, with government money. The caretaker guided me beneath the enormous cupola of its mosque, our faces fanned by pigeons in the gloom. The posters plastered to the walls were not Koranic injunctions to piety, he grinned, but the sayings of President Karimov.
I look for the future as if it will be written like a street sign–in Cyrillic or Latin or Arabic–and it comes to meet me by chance (if this is the future) as I’m strolling past the little university in the town’s heart. Students invite me in, and follow me like a swarm of bees through the dilapidated corridors. Whenever we enter a classroom, its forty pupils scramble to their feet in a barrage of beaming faces, half of them young women. They pay five hundred som a week–fifty cents–unless they have scholarships. They are, in their way, the elite of Namangan, and will become its lawyers, doctors, civil servants and perhaps its dissidents.
I settle to green tea and halva in a café. A student is sitting there alone, staring at the tulips in the linoleum table-top. When Mansur smiles his face is a boy’s, alert, a little callow. No, he says, Namangan is no longer really dangerous. The radicals were never more than a few hundred. ‘We don’t go in for that extremism. We never did. It belongs over there somewhere!’ He nods in the direction of Pakistan. He is cracking his knuckles nervously, bunched against his mouth. ‘In the university, I’d think, only one per cent are truly Muslim. Or even fewer. People say they are, of course, but even in Namangan it’s not so. My father, for instance, he knows a few prayer formulas, but he doesn’t pray. And he drinks vodka.’
‘So what happened to the Wahabis?’
‘They’re still here, but their beards have
gone and they look like anyone else. They may be in many jobs–teachers, even professors. Some must be out of work, others in prison. They were very young, impressionable. Now their faith is blocked by the government, and I think it’s a pity. They should have been allowed to take their own way. Not many people will follow them.’
He smiles, a boy again. His is a familiar Turkic voice. It implies that extremism is unmanly. It may suit Iranians, Pakistanis, Arabs–merchant races, some of them infidels, people with no self-control. But our Uzbek way is different. Travelling here years before, in the dawn of their independence, I had heard this often.
Mansur says: ‘But we have been taught always to obey, to conceal. That was even before the Russians came, perhaps for centuries, I don’t know. How do you lose that?’
I say: ‘Independence is a start.’
‘We’ve become poorer with independence. Old families are even having to sell their Korans–lovely things, written on skin, some of them, with feathered quills. People say things were better in the Soviet time. We young can’t remember that.’ He presses a finger to his pulse. ‘But I think there is slavery in our blood.’
My bus moved through a country of lush calm, under a sky dissolved in haze. Its roof was pitted with holes for air and lights now gone, shaking above the passengers’ heads. Maize and sunflowers ripened in the torpid fields, and lines of women were stooped over the cotton harvest. Two thousand years ago the great valley had been pastureland to the ‘heavenly horses’, a swift, powerful breed, which the Chinese believed to be half dragon and to sweat blood. Chinese armies, fearful of the mounted Huns, invaded these lands to gain bloodstock, and for centuries bought horses in exchange for silk. But now the fields were crossed by misted files of poplars and mulberries, and the shine of slow canals. Occasionally a village sealed the road in a corridor of whitewashed walls, where carved doors hung. The land looked deceptively at peace. But at roadblocks checking for drugs and arms, the police were flagging down every car, and it was noon before we reached Margilan.
An old Silk Road town, refined, pious, a nest of the black economy in Soviet times, Margilan was sleepily alluring. I went into tranquil mosques and idled in tea-shops. I tried the main bank for money, but it had none, so a kindly official took me to a black marketeer, who passed me a parcel of near-valueless notes. In the streets around me the women seemed more vivid than elsewhere. They went in a shimmer of violent-coloured silks, gold-woven, their trousers silken too beneath ankle-length dresses. They flooded the pavements in a broken rainbow. Their darkly various faces, the high Mongol cheekbones or near-Persian fineness, were chastened by knotted headscarves, and this restraint, with the long beauty of some hands, was more erotic than nakedness. Only occasionally the hair of the very young cascaded in a ponytail, scandalously uncovered. They clutched carrier bags made in China or Pakistan, blazoned ‘Estée Lauder’ or ‘Have a Nice Day’.
Silk was everywhere. Margilan had been the silk capital of the Soviet Union, and its factories still whirred out millions of metres every year, dyed in cheap anilines. But older ways survived alongside. I walked into a courtyard atelier hung with rusty ventilation pipes and sown with roses. It extracted its red dyes from pomegranate skin, its yellow from onions, its brown from nuts. It echoed the workshops of Khotan in a practice so old, perhaps, that it pre-dated frontiers. Barefoot and cross-legged on their ovens, the same friendly witches attended simmering cauldrons, and pulled up the boiled cocoons in the same glistening webs.
Here the skeins of silk were intricately tied and retied with cotton and plunged into successive vats, until the fabric became a conflagration of interfusing colour, to produce the Atlas cloth beloved of the whole region. It lay on the loom like a hazy jigsaw puzzle. The clack and squeak of the shuttles was the only sound, and the thump of slippered feet on the treadles. But here the weavers were all young women, their looms spangled with the stickers of their dreams: Uzbek pop idols, Bollywood film stars.
This tie-dyeing was traditional to the valley, passed down through families, and imbued with a symbolism now lost. Islam–in which none but abstract patterns were permitted–had transformed the whole craft. Yet only in paradise, said the Koran, were the pious clothed in silk; in this life it was forbidden. The Prophet himself, it was said, tore off his silk gown in revulsion while at prayer, and the caliph Omar, at the capture of Jerusalem in AD 638, was horrified to see his followers wearing looted silks and ordered them dragged through the dust.
But after the battle of Talas, when captured Chinese silk-workers shared the last refinements of their craft, Muslim workshops in Persia and Syria flourished and fed the whole Western world. The Moors introduced sericulture to Spain, and all through Islam the old austerity gave way to heady indulgence. From their turbans to their embroidered slippers, silk was the choice of nobles. It hung gorgeously in the palaces of caliph and sultan, sometimes woven with Koranic precepts, and their retinues glittered like water. As late as the nineteenth century the only luxury in the decaying courts of Central Asia’s khanates was the silk which clothed the coarse bodies of their retainers, and the bolts of precious cloth they lavished as gifts.
After the homesteads of Kyrgyzstan, the hotels of Margilan were grim. Mine had wrecked furniture, no water, failed electricity. My boots made homesick tracks in the dust over the floor. I was there alone. Even the staff had abandoned it, except for a clerk who visited on afternoons.
So I found a family to take me in. In an old cul-de-sac, ending in apple trees above whitewashed walls, three generations lived round a peaceful courtyard. With unemployment rife, its young men were absent, hunting jobs or trading in other cities. Only the stout paterfamilias–a retired trucker–had given up driving and bought a Chinese bicycle, which was more peaceful, he said. His wife was selling the local leather boots in Tashkent; but his youngest daughter served us tea and mutton stew, and at evening sat with me on the platform seats, and talked in a pattering, stressless English.
In these private courtyards, life unravelled. Young women changed into jeans, and children ran amok. In Soviet times the tight-knit mahallalar–clusters of supportive households–had been a quiet bastion of Islam, and now the state was trying to co-opt their elders as an organ of control. But they were self-protective, the girl said, and inward-looking. In the maze-like alleys their compounds became interlocking fortresses. Yet inside, every room was bright with windows and glass-panelled doors, all gazing on their courtyards, for among the family everything, on the surface, was transparent, shared.
We sat out late, dusk gathering. The old man plucked pomegranates from a tree and split them apart for me, while the children of an absent son scavenged under the seats. ‘They are mujahidin,’ he chortled, and slipped away at last to watch television, while his daughter calmed the children and lit a lantern in the trees above us.
Mahmuda puzzled me. At twenty-four, she was unmarried. But as the evening wore on, she talked with growing obsession, as if confiding in a foreigner was like confessing to a far planet, and somehow did not count. Her upper face and eyes were animated and pretty, but the cheeks fell heavy round her mouth in a countervailing weight of tiredness or regret. ‘When I was fourteen I lived for that television,’ she said, ‘but my parents forbade it. As soon as they went out, I’d turn on Santa Barbara and soap operas from Mexico.’
‘You thought the West was like that?’
‘I didn’t think anything.’ She laughed. ‘I suddenly lost interest in it all. Instead I wanted to go to the madrasah, to religious college. I wanted to know about God. In those days almost all the madrasahs were closed, but after I finished high school I discovered one in Tashkent, funded from Saudi Arabia, which worked undercover. I went to the teachers’ homes secretly–that’s how they worked–and prayed alone. I prayed five times a day and read the Koran in Arabic, one page each day, and the Hadith in Turkish, praying and fasting. I was only sixteen. Then I began to feel strange. I walked under a veil, my whole face covered. And suddenly I began to feel
ill.’ She clasped her hands to her face. ‘Whenever I studied the Arabic, something happened in my head. I don’t know what it was. I’ll never know. But whenever I read the Arabic or turned to prayer, these piercing headaches started.’
I wanted to say something comforting, but my mind filled only with clichés about adolescence. I did not understand. I felt instead the irony of her journey. From pious Margilan–where on Fridays the lanes were blocked by the kneeling faithful–she had gone to modern Tashkent, and grown ill with secret prayer there, where women were becoming free.
She said: ‘In the end I felt too weak to pray. My parents came and brought me back to Margilan.’
‘They were right.’
‘So I went to university, to study languages, but after two years my father decided I should marry. That’s the tradition here, in Margilan. Your parents choose.’
I wondered if she had a husband, after all. But there was no sign of him, and she emanated solitude. She stared down at the table. ‘You know, there’s no way for young people to meet here. If you live in a flat, like the Russians, it’s easier. You meet on the stairs, and talk. But here in the mahallalar, whenever you leave, the old people are sitting out on their benches, watching…’
‘I’ve seen them.’ And in the streets were only men walking with men, women with women.
‘So my parents prepared this enormous wedding.’ She spread out her ringless hands. ‘The first time I saw my husband was at the registry office. He was skinny and dark and ten years older than me–not handsome at all. I looked at him and thought: I cannot love you. I can never love you.’ She had been barely eighteen, and her experience was Santa Barbara. ‘I stayed with him and his family for three months and I couldn’t touch him. He was a good man, he didn’t force me. Then I went out and looked into the canal near his house and thought: I want to die. Just to disappear. And I walked in very deep. I cannot swim. The water was soft, I remember. I walked in and sank. I don’t know what happened after.’ Her mouth opened, as if for air. Her lips were crimson with pomegranate juice. ‘I was in hospital for weeks. My husband came to see me there.’ She allowed herself another laugh. ‘But after I returned to his family I knew I couldn’t go on being married. I asked for a divorce and went home, and after a year it was done. My parents accepted this, and took me back. They are good people.’
Shadow of the Silk Road Page 21
