One bloodbath, the subject of a Human Rights Watch investigation, was the August 1998 Taliban takeover of Mazar-e Sharif. The Human Rights Watch preliminary report, gleaned from the accounts of witnesses who fled the slaughter, describes a “killing frenzy” that began with the Taliban (comprising Pashtun, Arab, Pakistani and Chechen fighters) shooting “anything that moved.” The Taliban next turned their attention to the city’s Shia Muslims; men who could not recite Sunni prayers on demand were either shot or rounded up for transportation to concentration camps. Taliban commander Maulawi Hanif then declared that the time had come to “exterminate” the city’s Hazaras. “During the house-to-house searches, scores and perhaps hundreds of Hazara men and boys were summarily executed,” the initial report found. A later UN investigation estimated that eight thousand people were murdered in this way over a two-month period. The Hazaras tried to flee the city, but thousands were caught. Men and boys had their throats slit like sheep in front of their families. The Hazara women and girls who were allowed to live were raped and enslaved.
Just as Momand had set about the work of obliterating Balkh’s rich cultural legacy and replacing it with an invented history, the Taliban banned the ancient Nowruz celebrations that had made Mazar famous throughout the former Persian realms. The same obscene “peace” that prevailed under Taliban rule elsewhere in Afghanistan fell like a dark shadow upon Mazar. Ride a bicycle with your husband or wife: a beating. If you’re a woman, and your footsteps can be heard when you walk down the street: a beating. If your husband says you are an adulteress: burial up to the waist, stoning to death by a crowd. You are said to be a homosexual: death by having a wall toppled over on you. The keeping of caged birds is against Islam because a bird might sing. No television sets allowed, no photography allowed, no card games, no chess playing, no music, no kite flying, no movies. Beards must be regulation length. No Western-style trousers permitted. If a woman lives in your house, you must paint over your windows. Shia Islam is apostasy. Debate is heresy. Doubt is sin.
History was repeating itself, and while it is sometimes said that history’s tragedies are repeated as farce, they do recur now and again as tragedy. But history is shadows and light, too. Sometimes its course is determined by dreams, and it is a dream that explains the breathtaking, heart-stopping beauty of the Shrine of Hezrat Ali in Mazar-e Sharif. The dream came to a Balkhi imam in the twelfth century, during the time of the Seljuk Empire, a Europe-sized Sunni domain that reached at its apogee from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea and from the Aral Sea to the Aegean Sea. There was a legend that the body of Hezrat Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, did not lie in glorious repose at Najaf, near Baghdad, but rather in some distant place. As the story went, Ali’s corpse had been spirited away from Najaf by his followers, who were concerned that it would be desecrated there. Ali’s remains were carried for weeks on the back of a white camel until the beast came to rest. The Balkhi imam dreamed that an old crypt on the plains to the east of Balkh was not a Zoroastrian tomb at all—and so not merely a fitting place for pre-Islamic Nowruz rituals—but rather the final resting place of Ali himself.
The Seljuk sultan Sanjar took the dream as divine direction and built a grand shrine around the crypt. The shrine was destroyed by Genghis Khan, but three centuries later, the Timurids restored it in the most extravagant style. That’s how it came to pass that Mazar is now Afghanistan’s third-largest city, a pilgrimage place for Sunni and Shia Muslims during the annual Nowruz festival. The city’s heart is a splendid blue-tiled, twin-domed mosque, the Tomb of the Exalted, enlivened by the flurries of hundreds of white doves.
It was only a few blocks from the Shrine of Hezrat Ali that Abdulrahim Parwani and I ended up meeting with several “civil society” leaders from Balkh. We wanted to know what they thought about the talk of shifting Canada’s efforts in Afghanistan from Kandahar province to Balkh province and its capital city. We heard from Nasima Azkiwa of the Balkh Civil Society and Human Rights Network; Ayatollah Jawed of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission; Rajab Ibrahimi of the Afghanistan Civil Society Organization; Arzoo Aby, the coordinator of the Mazar-e Sharif Youth Cultural Network; and some Mazar journalists. It was as though the question didn’t even need to be asked. Of course Canada should come north, everyone said.
The Swedes were running the Balkh Provincial Reconstruction Team, and while they were appreciated, they were regarded as parsimonious, timid and bureaucratic. The Germans were handling most of Balkh’s International Security Assistance Force duties, and they were all right. But Canada was seen as a particularly significant and aggressive ISAF contributor. Unlike the Germans or the British, Canada had no imperialist history. Unlike the United States, Canada didn’t carry all that Pakistan-ally baggage around. We didn’t bring any baggage at all. It was Canadians who would have to be convinced of the idea’s merits, everyone said, not the people or the government of Balkh.
In the cool of an evening, our hosts joined Abdulrahim and me on a stroll around the grand plaza of the Shrine of Hezrat Ali. Accompanying us was a young journalist who asked that I not mention his name. “There are still Zoroastrian families here, you know,” he said. “They changed their names to Muslim names a long time ago. I have been to their ceremonies, and they are very beautiful.” In the first years after the Taliban were driven from Mazar, the Zoroastrian families had thought about coming out into the light. “But not anymore, not now, anyway,” the young journalist said. “I can’t write this for the newspapers here. I can’t write about religious things.”
The subject had come up as we were talking about Mazar’s strengths and its vulnerabilities. Both the government and the people were committed to social and economic progress. The city’s Shia and Sunni Muslims coexisted and prayed together in traditions inflected by Sufism, Islam’s mystical cosmopolitanism. Women were not expected to closet themselves away in kitchens or hide themselves underneath burqas. But by standing out as a rebuke to the religious fanaticism that had for so long stultified civilized life from Persepolis to Peshawar, Mazar was being targeted for jihadist subversion. Among the radical mullahs who were quickly growing in influence in the city was the Sunni reactionary Mawlawi Abdul Qahir Zadran. He’d spent time in Pakistan, he was a powerful orator and he seemed to have a lot of money. You could buy his CDs and tapes in the markets. In Zadran’s sermons, Muslims who failed to cleave to Deobandist discipline were apostates. Americans were invaders and crusaders. Schoolgirls were prostitutes.
The young journalist and I talked about Iran, about the colleges the Tehran regime was opening on the outskirts of Mazar and the propaganda the Khomeinists were finding ways to get into the Afghan news media. As the “war-weary” Western world was losing interest in the cause of Afghan democracy, Iran’s shadow was looming over everything. Khomeinist Iran was the empire to contend with now.
At the entrance to Mazar’s grand Blue Mosque, the shrine guard took me accurately to be a kafir. He gently refused me entry, with obvious embarrassment to himself and to my hosts. The new rules say kafirs can’t come in, he said. I wandered around outside and mingled with the pilgrims happily enough, but the guard noticed me later and called me over to have tea with him, as a gesture of cordiality. He told me he was sorry. But the insult had been given. He knew it. I’d seen that it had offended him more than me, and he seemed to know that, too.
As it happens, I’d discreetly slipped into the mosque anyway, or at least into a chamber accessed by a back entrance, where the Sufis still had a secure place for themselves. I joined them for a few moments as they engaged in their euphoric and hypnotic ritual chantings. In the song they were singing, the refrain was from a poem by Rumi: “My life is going to end, but I hope to join with God.”
Afterwards, my hosts told me that the way things were going, even the Sufis’ days of liberty at the mosque were rumoured to be numbered. The Iranian-influenced Shia imams considered the Sufis dangerously unorthodox. The Deobandi-influenced Sunni imams had started calling them heretics.
Only the day before, on the plaza where we were walking, Mazar’s Khomeinists had gathered in an angry demonstration. “Death to America,” they chanted. “Death to Israel. Death to the Jews.”