The Places in Between (38 page)
Read The Places in Between Online
Authors: Rory Stewart
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41 And are important for the peacock-worshipping Yezidis.
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42 I had barely met the great commanders and chiefs of the area. My hosts were all minor Aimaq headmen who owned small holdings such as Bismillah in Barra Khana, who ran a mechanics shop, and Dr. Amruddin and Dr. Paende, who were vets like Dr. Habibullah Sherwal. On the first day, I saw a chief's son cantering his white horse slowly across the snow, but he did not approach me. On the second day, an old chief rode past me across the snow with a column of armed men running behind him. He told me he and the others were on their way to Herat, where they had been summoned to meet the new president.
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43 The Chinese chroniclers long before the birth of Christ describe the barbarians in Mongolia as redheaded, and archaeologists have excavated four-thousand-year-old bodies with red hair preserved by the dry air in northwest China.
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44 He is a wealthy military commander from a feudal family. His uncle, who had held the village before him, was imprisoned by the Russians in Chaghcharan and executed.
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45 We had left the central route here to take a shortcut. The normal vehicle central route runs from Daulatyar to Lal. We only rejoined a branch of this road a week later at Yakawlang.
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46 The 1911 Britannica states, "The Hazara are of Mongolian origin ... descendants of military colonists introduced by Jenghiz Khan ... they have absolutely displaced the former inhabitants of Hazarajat and Ghor." I had initially assumed this was just another racial myth. The nineteenth century was particularly keen on the idea of whole races migrating homogenously. Hence the attempt to argue that the Neolithic people whose beaker-style pottery has been excavated in Europe were ethnically distinct from their predecessors. I assumed that much more intermarriage with the previous inhabitants took place in all these encounters. But the facial features of the Hazara are so distinctive that it does indeed appear that they drove out their predecessors. Babur, who knew them well, writes that "among the Hazara are some who speak Mongol"—implying that they had a strong Mongol ingredient, but that by 1507 they were mostly speaking Persian.
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47 This is also suggested by the fact that he thought it necessary to send sixty or seventy armed men just to find a Hazara guide.
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48 He continues:
A few Hazara lay in ambush in a cave near the valley. Sheikh Dervish, my foster-brother who had been in many an action with me, had gone up close to the mouth of the den, without suspecting anything, when a Hazara from within shot him with an arrow under the nipple, and he died the same day...[Later] I directed [some soldiers] to proceed and take the Hazara who had shot Sheikh Dervish. These wretches, whose blood had curdled through fear, still remained in the cave. Our people on coming up, filled the cave with smoke, took seventy or eighty Hazara, and passed the greater number under the edge of the sword.
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49 In the nineteenth century, the Pashtun dominated the court and were exempt from taxes, while the Hazara in the capital were largely slaves or manual laborers.
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50 The Taliban leader in Mazar made an explicit statement about this and encouraged "good Muslims" to exterminate or convert them.
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51 It is difficult to generalize about either Shia or Sunni Islam. The dispute was originally over who had been the legitimate successor of the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. But each sect had gathered its own collection of traditions and practices over fourteen centuries. Some Christian observers saw the Sunnis as the Protestant and the Shia as the Catholic sections of Islam. They pointed to the authority of the ayatollah priests in the Shia tradition and their emotional and colorful penances, their incorporation of local traditions, and their concern with saints and miracles. But others saw the Shia as Protestants: reformers who had returned to the original religion of the Prophet when the earlier Sunni tradition had been corrupted by power.
This conflict between the two sects, whatever its theological basis, is an old theme in Afghan history. The Ghorids of the Turquoise Mountain were Sunni and had aggressively persecuted Shia in their region. A Shia movement, called the Assassins after its enthusiasm for hashish, then claimed credit for murdering Muizuddin, the Ghorid prince and conqueror of India. (Ironically, this was a rare case of one mountain power destroying another. The Assassins were based in the remote country of the Elburz and were led by the "old man of the mountain." The Ghorids were governed by the
malik-e-jabal,
"the king of the mountains." The Mongols destroyed both.)
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52 The ibex is a common motif in Mongol art, and pickled ibex blood—thick, half-congealed red liquor, which I find difficult to swallow—is considered by the Mongols to be a very powerful tonic.
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53 Beyond Herat, the Hari Rud forms the border between Afghanistan and Iran and then the border with Turkmenistan.
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54 I did not ask Seyyed Kerbalahi but I assumed that he, like the majority of people in the Sar Jangal valley, was a Shia. This was certainly implied by his pride at having visited the great Shia shrine in Kerbala.
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55 The belief that fresh snow makes paths safer by covering crevasses was held also by nineteenth-century alpine climbers. They therefore insisted on crossing the
haute route
from Chamonix to Zermatt in the fresh snow of January. Today it is believed that fresh snow is dangerous, and people prefer to cross snow slopes in the spring, when there is less snowfall and the crevasses are visible.
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56 The English word "walk," rather than being some Indo-European ur-word, is in fact a late and eccentric adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon word for pressing wet felt, "walken"—an activity usually performed with the feet.
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57 The response of British intellectuals was more sophisticated. After September 11 they, unlike the mainstream media, did engage with the motivations of the hijackers, the symbolism of their action, its historical context, and the difficulties inherent in any response. But even intellectuals sometimes wrote pieces that would have surprised many Muslims with their confident pronouncements on Islamic orthodoxy, or with their reluctance to admit any differences between very distant cultures. Thus Terry Eagleton wrote in the
London Review of Books,
"It's Islamic fundamentalism, not
The Satanic Verses,
that represents a blasphemous version of the Koran," while Mary Beard suggested "that full-blown martyrs are a rare community, much more numerous in the imagination than on the ground" on the basis of her study of early Christianity.
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58 This may have been because many of them had been in the Balkans and remembered the fury of anti-Milosevic Serbs over the Kosovo bombing.
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59 Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.
Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression.
Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.
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60 A piece of silk could do the journey in nine months. Buddhism took nearly a thousand years.
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61 Babur passed through Bamiyan on his journey, but although he can't have missed the Buddhas, he never mentioned them. He had no interest, it seems, in a pre-Islamic past. The lack of interest may reflect the Islamic opposition to pagan idols. In the nineteenth century, the locals apparently had no idea what the statues represented and it took the study of Chinese chronicles and related statues for a British team to establish that they had been Buddhas.
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62 In the eleven weeks since the Taliban had left, the Hazara district had been peaceful, and Khalili, the governor (a Hazara mullah from a poor family), had no plausible rival. The new commanders, whatever their social origins, acted like the old feudal lords. They administered justice, distributed development aid, and represented their districts to the governor. They were not all educated or even literate, and they often helped themselves to foreign money, but their districts were surprisingly calm and most people said they supported Khalili. He even seemed to be relatively popular with the new government in Kabul.
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63 Ahmadi of Dewali Ghulakesh.
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64 The Russian invasion of Afghanistan coincided with the Islamic revolution in Iran. The Iranian government, which was Shia, was particularly interested in the Shia Hazara and, as well as supporting them against the Russians, encouraged them to stage an Iranian-style revolution. A fundamental ingredient of this there, as in Iran, was the confiscation of land from feudal landlords.
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65 In 2002, five girls' schools were burned down in Wardak, by people who have kept firmly to their Taliban views.
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66 Muslims are enjoined to be kind to children of the book (Christians and Jews). To say that one is an atheist or a Hindu would be provocative and dangerous.
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67 "Afghanistan: Rebuilding a Nation: 6 national priority sub-programs." Afghanistan's National Program for Reconstruction.