What Irish historian Fred Halliday had to say about that aspect of things is especially unsettling to people who think of themselves as of “the Left,” which is how I’ve always situated myself. Halliday’s insight happens to have an overwhelming body of evidence in its favour, which is why it’s all the more disturbing.
A keen observer of Afghan history, Halliday, who died on April 26, 2010, was a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. He was competent in a dozen languages and the author of more than twenty books, most of them concerning political history in Muslim countries. Halliday paid close attention to the broad arcs of history, and he insisted that the so-called war in Afghanistan is properly situated in a direct line that originates in the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s: “To my mind, Afghanistan is central to the history of the Left and to the history of the world since the 1980s. It is to the early 21st century, to the years we’re now living through, what the Spanish Civil War was to Europe in the mid and late 20th century.” One thing I hope to show in this book is that Halliday was, if anything, more right than he knew. If I’ve done my job properly, the evidence will speak for itself.
Another thing I hope to show is that the way we in the West talk about Afghanistan has meant more to the course of events in that country than all the soldiers and guns and money we’ve sent there since September 11. What we say matters. It will continue to matter for some long while. It determines what Afghans hear from us, how much they allow themselves to hope for a peaceful and democratic future and how far they’re prepared to come from the shadows, out into the light.
CAIN SLEW ABEL. On that much the Torah and the Bible and the Quran agree, though in the Quran, these first sons of Adam and Eve are called Qabeel and Habeel. Qabeel wandered eastwards from Eden to the Land of Nod with a mark of some kind on him, a curse. His lineage came to nought, so it fell to his younger brother Shiith, known in the Bible as Seth, to be the settler, the farmer, the builder. Allah bestowed psalms upon Shiith, and Adam taught him the hours of prayer, bequeathed to him the duties of prophethood and further burdened him with the knowledge of the Great Flood that was to come. It is from Shiith Ibn Adam that all humankind today is said to descend. It is also said that Balkh, the “Mother of All Cities,” as the first Arabs called it, a city once greater than Babylon and lovelier than Nineveh, is where Shiith died and was buried.
Balkh is now little more than a sleepy northern Afghan town of overgrown ruins, forgotten by the world. On market day, down lanes that wind through apple orchards and cherry orchards, merchants slowly make their way to the central bazaar, their wares teetering on donkey carts. The alleyways they follow traverse vine-covered tombs and shrines and zigzag across a series of mysterious, concentric roads that radiate outwards from the centre of town, just as much of the long, joyful and sorrowful story of human civilization radiates outwards from Balkh. It is a story sometimes celebrated and sometimes mourned, but always contested. It is not at that tomb near Babylon but here in Balkh that the prophet Ezekiel was buried, the locals will tell you. There are also Islamic scholars who insist that it was to Balkh, and not to Egypt, that the prophet Jeremiah fled.
What is without controversy is that the metropolis, which once sprawled across a fertile floodplain of the Oxus River, was one of the world’s first cities. About 3,500 years ago, when a patriarch called Moses is said to have led a tribe of Seth’s descendants out of the deserts of the Sinai Peninsula, another tribe of shepherds and pastoralists had already established a small kingdom at Balkh. We know that this tribe had crossed the Oxus River—the Amu Darya—from the north, centuries before. We know the language they spoke bloomed into dozens of languages from the Ganges to the Danube. About a billion people speak those tongues today, in an orchestral echo of Scythians, Hittites, Persians and scores of empires and dynasties forged down through time. Among these were the Timurids, the Mughals who ruled India before the British came, and the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus the Great.
The hybrid Greco-Bactrian Kingdom that arose from the death of Alexander, the conquering Macedonian, was called the Kingdom of a Thousand Cities. Its capital was the city of Bactrus, also called Paktria, also called Balkh. The world’s first emperor to be called sultan was Mahmud of Ghazni, grandson of a slave keeper from Balkh, conqueror of all of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, most of Iran and great swathes of northwestern India. It was here in Balkh in 1370 that Tamerlane crowned himself before setting off as the Sword of Islam to slaughter and conquer from the Tigris to the Volga. It was in Balkh that Aurangzeb, Conqueror of the World, first held court. “In its heyday, Balkh was larger than Paris, Rome, Beijing, or Delhi,” says S. Frederick Starr, a research professor with Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “Like all the great regional centers, it had running water, baths, and majestic palaces.”
The heart of Balkh nowadays is a jumble of pleasantly unkempt gardens where old men sit on park benches or lounge under trees on ratty blankets playing chess. Women haggle with spice vendors in the shadow of the towering, blue-domed mausoleum of the Sufi philosopher-prince Khwaja Abu Nasr Parsa, whose shrine was built in the late fifteenth century by the sultan Husayn Bayqarah, Tamerlane’s great-great-grandson. But there is nothing of Tamerlane’s bloody glory here now. Balkh is one of the world’s great cradles of empire, but there are no interpretive centres, no splendid museums and no fleets of tour buses. There aren’t even any stores that sell garish souvenirs.
In the older Persian epics, the first man was not Adam, but Kayumars, who built his kingdom at Bakhdhi, which is the name for Balkh in the Hymns of Zarathustra. It was in Balkh, they say, that Zarathustra, the Zoroastrian Moses, first preached his revelations. It was here that some say he died, about 2,700 years ago. Seven centuries later, during the reign of the Kushan kings, Balkh was second only to Rajagriha as Buddhism’s most holy place on earth. Monks from as far away as Ceylon made pilgrimages here. Sombre historians and Muslim scholars still quarrel about the dynastic Barmakids of Balkh, who went on to become courtiers, viziers and warriors for the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad. Khalid ibn Barmak even ended up as the governor of Mesopotamia. But were the Barmakids Muslim converts from Zoroastrianism or from Buddhism? It’s hard to say.
Within the remnants of an old ring of walls that encloses Balkh and its surroundings to a length of about ten kilometres, the scatterings of Zoroastrian fire temples clutter gardens and pastures amid the detritus of Buddhist stupas, convents and monasteries. The townspeople sometimes engage in spirited quarrels over tea at the bazaar about which ruin is Zoroastrian and which is Buddhist, and in those debates, both sides can be right. Down through time, Zoroastrians and Buddhists took converts from each other and stole or traded temples and shrines. When Islam came along, the custom carried on. It’s rare to come across a Muslim shrine here that cannot claim a pedigree dating back to some earlier holy site.
From the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, Balkh was also an epicentre of the Nestorian Church. Its schismatics had been driven east after Rome declared them heretics at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Nestorian missionaries from Balkh travelled far and wide, and it was the Nestorian Church that introduced Christianity to China during the enlightened years of the Tang Dynasty. Their churches flourished as far east as Canton until the fourteenth century, when the Ming Dynasty chose to purge “foreign influences” and even to erase their legacy from China’s memory. But history is not so easily disappeared. The story of how the Chinese Nestorian Church was founded is inscribed upon a massive eighth-century stone tablet that was buried near the Chongren Buddhist monastery at the Silk Road’s eastern terminus at what is now Xi’an, the resting place of the famous Terracotta Army. The tablet was lost to the world until the seventeenth century. At the base of the monument, the identity of the man who commissioned the work in 781 is revealed, in