Shadow of the Silk Road (24 page)

From the summit of a knoll above the Kenkol ravine, an ocean of mountains surges into the Talas valley, sprinkling its orchards with isolated hills. Somewhere here, in
AD
751, the invading Arabs routed a Chinese army in a battle which drew Islam as far east as Kashgar, and sent west captive Chinese paper-makers and silk-workers whose legacy would mesmerise Europe. Here too, the country swarms with tales of Manas. Wherever a stone circle or a
mound appears, a myth alights. In this spot he hurled a boulder; down there he stooped to drink; over there he fired an arrow. And at the hill’s foot, invisible among the trees beneath me, he was buried.

I found the site become a national shrine. A path led over a bridge balustraded with spears, between flowerbeds where purple and red roses sent up an earthy blaze. Warriors in gaudy armour sauntered about like bored movie extras, with attendants dressed as Turkish odalisques in tapering headdresses and chiffon gowns. A shamaness ensconced in a ‘house of healing’ offered seances and cures through the cosmic power of the dead. And everywhere billboards trumpeted precepts drawn from Manas’s epic, about homeland unity and the love of nature.

But this pagan theatre-set, I grasped, had been built to heal a wound: the void left by Communism. In 1991, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, Kyrgyzstan uniquely ousted its old Communist rulers and became a liberal democracy: a small Switzerland in the heart of Central Asia. Its president, Akayev, was not a bureaucrat, but a physicist. He inherited a desperate economy and a corrupt administration, in a country riven with regional and tribal loyalties, and at last he took on some of the habits of dictatorship, silencing opposition, suborning parliament.

As a focus of national unity he turned to the great saga of
Manas
: the longest oral epic known, outstripping the
Iliad
,
Odyssey
and
Mahabharata
combined. Like a singing palimpsest, it ranges back over a thousand years to the Kyrgyz conquest of the Uighur, and centuries later mirrored its people’s struggle against the Mongols, before veneering itself with Islam. History and legend are ravelled inextricably; it is at once the Kyrgyz birth certificate and national anthem. Yet Akayev in a keynote speech–conscious that his country brims with Russian, Uzbek and other minorities–stressed the saga’s universal values and the multiethnic makeup of Manas’s warriors, and it was for this, perhaps, that I came into a vast ceremonial circle where the hero’s forty paladins were sculpted large as life around him.

Beyond, I entered a shrine-like museum. In its central painting Manas was conjured as a steel-plated prodigy–part wizard, part
Arthurian hero–whose hosts gathered behind him in a spectral forest of banners, ascending at last to the pastel clouds of heaven. But who was he really? I wondered. Did he even exist, or was he a conflation of half-mythic war leaders?

For the
Manas
, in origin, was a whole family of epics. Just as it was the Russians who defined the nation’s language and borders, so it was they who codified the saga from the songs of the last
manaschi
bards, and promoted it, in expurgated form, to divide the Kyrgyz from their Turkic neighbours. The Kyrgyz nation-state, in a sense, was the gift of Stalin.

So you come to the tomb. The epic tells how Manas’s wife, the clever Kanikay, assembled its clay on six hundred camels and roasted its bricks in the fat of a thousand goats. Before it now stands a black boulder which Manas struck as a flint, and a monolithic pillar where he tethered his horse–the wondrous Akula whose light illumined the road. Beyond them, eight concentric friezes ring the tomb entrance under a tent-like spire. Their colours have flaked, and have left exposed the delicately textured clay beneath, pitted by carving like the trails of lost insects. A notice forbids pilgrims to pick off the plaster. Inside the chamber, there is nothing.

But a thin, continuous stream of pilgrims comes: old men with their swathed wives, youths in dark glasses, dutiful children, women in high heels. A local imam chants a prayer while they listen with bowed heads. Then they circle the tomb, pressing their palms and foreheads against the warm terracotta. Among the friezes above them, the richest blooms into Arabic, twined in fronds and flowers. Its colours, too, have gone from the pink clay. But its Kufic script says that this is the grave of the princess Kyanizyak-khatun, the daughter of a Mongol emir, who died in the fourteenth century.

The pilgrims kiss the soft walls. If they could read the Kufic, it would not trouble them. A legend can lodge anywhere, and Manas, like the Yellow Emperor, swims in his own stream of time. A nation, as the philosopher Renan said, is bound not by the real past, but by the stories it tells itself: by what it remembers, and what it forgets.

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.