The Lost Heart of Asia (10 page)

But of all this activity almost nothing in brick or stone survives. The wall which circled the oasis for 150 miles, shielding it from nomad and sandstorm, was allowed to fall to bits in this time of hallucinatory wealth, and Turkic invaders, arriving from the east in AD 999, captured a city already declining into squalor. Only the mausoleum survives among its trees; a lavish, unshining gem. Its centuries-long protection under the earth has left it pristine. Even from a distance the biscuity brickwork lends it a perforated lightness, as if it were clothed in some loose-knit garment.

Yet nobody knows who was buried here. In later centuries, nostalgic for past glory, people imagined that it belonged to Ismail Samani, founder of the dynasty, and its grave shows two holes, where supplicants would whisper their petitions to the emir and a hidden mullah give his answer. Even into the twentieth century, such buried leaders were believed to protect the emirate, so that pious men were bewildered when their vengeful spirits did not rise from their graves against Bolshevik forces in 1920, and massacre them. Now, after years of disinfection as an official monument, the tomb was covertly open to worshippers again. Sometimes a semi-circle of stately pilgrims could be seen praying in its chamber, and occasionally one would place his lips to the perforation in the grave, and whisper.

One morning I returned to the Ulug Beg medreseh. The surly guardian had gone, and a group of pale-robed students lingered round the entrance. Their dress lent them a fraternal anonymity, and beneath their snowy turbans the faces all seemed embalmed in the same epicene delicacy. I was assailed again by the feeling that they were the keepers of something cardinal and secret in the country's psyche, and that they knew its future.

But the instant I started talking with them this sameness broke up. A semicircle of disparate faces shifted round me. I arrived amongst them like a virus in a bloodstream. Some cells spun away, fearful of contamination, but a compensating swarm of antibodies nudged closer. They came from all over Central Asia and beyond. Only a tinge of reticence united them, a vague suspiciousness which ebbed away. They had rustic, cloistered expressions, without the acquisitive glitter of the youths who rode motorbikes in the nearby alleys and tried to sell things. There was a hot-faced Uzbek from Namangan, an urbane youth from Tashkent, a sharp-featured Azeri, a Kirghiz, a Turk, even an Afghan Tajik. For five years here they studied the Koran, the Traditions and Moslem law, they said, and they did not want to become mosque imams – ‘the imams know nothing!' – but to pass on their learning in the medresehs. They were the future élite.

‘How many Moslems live in England? How many in America?' they clamoured. ‘How many mosques in London?'

I guessed a figure.

‘There are many Moslems in Italy,' said the fervent youth from Namangan. ‘Italy is very Moslem.'

‘Italy's a Christian country,' I said. ‘But I've read it . . . .' The youth looked at me, bewildered. ‘It was written!'

I said: ‘You can read anything.'

‘But you Christians say Jesus was the son of God, and that Mary was the mother of God. How can that be so? God has no mother or son. God is one.' He was bright with his own certainty again.

I became uneasy. The family tree of God has always amazed the Moslems. It amazed me, a little. I found myself launching a plea for tolerance. Why should one religion hold a monopoly on truth, I asked' Faith was a matter of private conscience . . . . The clichés left me in gusts of ungrammatical Russian. My evangelism for tolerance began to sound fanatic. In front of me the faces were mild, listening. Several of them murmured agreement; others relaxed into polite waiting. Tolerance, I think, appealed to some modesty in them.

‘Yes, Christians, Jews, Hindus . . . people should be free,' said the Kirghiz. ‘But we believe that in the end everybody will become a Moslem.'

‘With the will of God!' they chorused.

‘Islam is the last revelation,' the Kirghiz went on. He had a flat, elliptical face, with the shallow-set eyes of a Mongol. ‘First came the Jews' book, then the Christians' book, and finally the Koran. The Koran is the last word of God. It was right at the time for Jews and Christians to believe as they did. They had nothing else. But now it is our way which is right.' Yet he spoke this courteously. He was appealing to me.

I said pedantically: ‘The Communist doctrine came later than Islam, but didn't disprove it. The last book isn't necessarily the right one. Your own Traditions come later than the Koran, but they don't supersede it.' This coup produced a hum of assent, and the Kirghiz nodded graciously, and I felt, for some reason, ashamed. ‘The Jews believe that the first is the best,' I added gently, ‘because it's the original.'

Simplified thoughts like these created a profound and uneasy hiatus in them. They were not used to them. They were used to written certainties. They lingered on the edge of such concepts, as if waiting for an imprimatur.

Suddenly the Azeri said: ‘What about that other book?
The Satanic Verses?'

I was taken aback. News of it had filtered even into the bowels of Asia. I delayed. ‘What do you think?'

‘I don't know,' he answered. ‘I haven't read it.' Prayer-beads slithered in his hands.

I looked at the others. But none had read it, and only the Azeri seemed to have thoughts on it, which he did not disclose.

I said: ‘It's not fact. It is a novel. Our traditions of the novel are different.'

‘Is he still alive?' asked the Azeri.

I tried to read his expression, but could not. ‘Yes. Some Moslems wanted him killed, but that is against our justice.'

Nobody demurred, and the moment passed. The youth from Tashkent said: ‘We don't like the Iranian model. They are far from Islam, far.' He joined his fingers, then parted them. The simple gesture created an abyss. ‘They don't understand the texts.'

‘What texts?'

He lifted a teacherly finger. ‘Islamic law, for instance, does not prescribe the veil absolutely. If a woman wishes to be veiled, she may. But with us, three parts can be open: the arches of the feet, the palms of the hands, and the face. Yes, the face.' He circled his fingertips close around his cheeks and forehead. ‘The hair must be covered, but the face may be open.'

‘But best of all is the woman who remains at home,' said the Namangan youth ominously. ‘It's written that a woman only has to leave the house twice: once for marriage and once for burial.'

I said: ‘What do women think of this?'

They went momentarily silent. The Azeri smiled. But the Tashkent man said: ‘The women here are far from Islam. They don't understand, they don't know anything.'

‘The veil would have to be forced on them,' said another youth, ‘so it is not possible!'

The Azeri sensed my misgiving. He said: ‘When our people see a foreign woman with bare legs or arms, they get inflamed and can't study for hours. But I know that among you it's common, and that you don't notice it or feel anything.'

The others made noises of understanding. They looked a little unhappy. They spoke of the West with mixed repudiation and awe. The West meant licence, profligacy. There was a haunting Westerner in every one of them.

‘The people here in Bukhara know nothing of religion,' the Namangan student went on. ‘They've been Sovietised. It's a godless place. In the villages they know a little, but here, nothing.'

‘Not in our villages,' said a dark Turcoman. ‘There's no religion there.'

I looked at them in surprise. Unconsciously I had imagined them the heart of Bukhara, as if they were its unifying essence; but all the time they considered themselves strangers here, just as I was. In this conservative backwater – Bukhara ‘the Pillar of Islam' – they felt they walked in spiritual exile, through a sea of unbelief. It was strange.

Soon they said goodbye with the stately Moslem placing of the right hand on the heart, and filtered back into their medreseh. If nobody stirred them, I thought, their natural Islam would be a restrained and dignified one, despite their tyranny to women. Most dangerous was their ignorance – they knew almost nothing of any world outside theirs – and the spectre of economic collapse, which could drive people to extremes. I watched them disappear with mixed respect and misgiving. Compared to the commercial fecklessness of youths in the streets, their questing intensity was archaic, attractive and dangerously innocent.

I ambled away, directionless. The close lanes and squares gave the feel of a city only half unlocked to the light. I found myself brooding over the students, consoled by their slow, Turkic conservatism. The fires of fundamentalism still felt far off.

But as I walked, I lapsed into private apprehension. What would become of the promenading girls whose skirts ascended godlessly to just below the knee, I wondered, and whose legs showed patterned stockings and high heels? I dropped an imaginary veil over every woman I saw, and pictured the world through a gauze of black horsehair. As for the young men wheedling to change money, I turned the passion for dollars into the passion for God, until I had replaced their opportunist faces with others more moral, and more threatening.

In this disquieting daze, I tramped full-circle and arrived opposite the Mir-i-Arab medreseh. On one side spread the huge Kalan mosque, where Genghiz Khan had hurled down the Koran and initiated the slaughter of the city. On the other, the drums of the medreseh shone in complex knottings of Kufic script, and bloomed into sky-coloured domes.

A few students were chatting under the gateway, and I recognised the evangelising Kirghiz youth of an hour before. He approached me shyly. Shorn of his companions, he looked gentler, more awkward, and seemed to wear a faint, perpetual look of surprise. For a minute we talked pleasantries, then he said: ‘Don't speak to anyone. Just follow me.'

With the traveller's delight in the forbidden, I followed him unchallenged through the medreseh gate and into the courtyard. It was brimming with life. Its arches were hung with notices in Arabic and Uzbek, invoking sobriety, friendship, integrity. Under the tiled porticoes the students conversed in murmuring conclaves, or sat alone with their Korans propped on chairs, repeating the same
sura
over and over. Above the double tier of their cells, two turquoise domes shed down an astral beauty. The past shone all about them, and seemed to convey a truth. It was the prince of medresehs. For years after the Second World War it had been the only one permitted open in Central Asia, with a mere seventy-five students. Now it housed over 400, and the nasal chant of remembrance filled its walls.

I padded after the Kirghiz, but nobody seemed to notice us. He pushed open a low door into one of the cells. It was tiny: a hermit's den. An unbroken succession of students had studied here for more than 500 years. The air was rife with dogma. Nothing substantial had changed, except that two iron beds had ousted the quilts on the floor, and an iron stove flooded the room with heat. The Kirghiz grinned at me. ‘Nobody will see you here.' We sat at the rough table while he dropped a filament into a pot to brew tea, and broke fresh bread. Around us the walls were pierced by banks of niches scattered with belongings: an Arabic calendar, a jar of eau de Cologne, a clock, a box of Indonesian tea, jumbles of bottles, books and pens.

He poured tea into a chipped cup. He came from near Bishkek, he said, the capital of Kirghizstan, the obscure mountain nation on the borders of China. It was the last object of my journey. Yet he was not a Kirghiz by race, but a Dungan Chinese, one of a remote Moslem people who had fled west from China in the 1870s. Crossing the Tienshan mountains in mid-winter, they had left the snowfields covered with their dead. ‘My grandparents still speak of what they heard from their grandparents, how people died in the avalanches and on the glaciers. And the Russians shot down thousands . . . .'

He turned his mild face to mine without anger. It was too long ago to resent. And myths had been entwined with history. All disasters were traced back to the Russians, and I told him hesitantly that they had not massacred the Dungans (according to Western historians) and that the native Kirghiz had welcomed the survivors as they stumbled in tatters out of the mountains.

‘That's what is good about this place,' said the youth, who was not listening. ‘We have no nationalities here, no hatred. Nobody says “You're a Kirghiz” or “You're an Uzbek”. They just say “You're a Moslem”, and we feel at one.' He mounded the crusts of bread between us in token of community. ‘It was the Soviet Union that created nationalism here. Before Stalin, the borders weren't there. It's only since then that people have said they belonged to countries.'

It was true, and I was to hear it again often: the nostalgia for a time before frontiers, for some imagined brotherhood. In these centuries of flux, when the borders of the Central Asian emirates were only transient opinions, people conceived of themselves first by extended family or tribe. The whole region existed in a time-warp, where the tragedy of modern nationalism scarcely intruded. Now people looked back on that era as an age of stateless peace, made not for politicians but for merchants on golden roads. Yet it was this shallow-rooted patriotism that had laid these lands passively under the Soviet heel.

‘Our identity is in Islam. Islam goes deeper,' said the youth. ‘It's true that in Kirghizstan, where I come from, there's not much religious feeling. But people did pray in secret even in the Stalin years, closed the doors behind them and prayed in the dark, in families.'

I asked: ‘Did you?'

‘No, my family never did. I came to believe in another way.'

He fell silent, wondering whether to divulge his conversion. I could not guess it. I waited. Maybe some illicit mullah, I thought, had gathered the boy into his circle. Or perhaps an adolescent idealism had led him this way alone.