Long before the European Enlightenment, there was Hiwi al-Balkhi, also known as Hiwi the Heretic. He was a ninth-century Jewish contrarian who busied himself composing more than two hundred rationalist objections to the miracles of Hebrew scripture. Little remains of his effort except some fragments of text and the rousing controversies he set off in the writings of Jewish scholars from Babylon to Andalusia. Hiwi was also a poet—Balkh is renowned for its poets—and his work may have been the first to employ Hebrew verse for purposes beyond its sacred function in the synagogue. Balkh’s Jewish quarter persisted for ten centuries after Hiwi. The people were weavers, gardeners and merchants. After the Arabs came, the Jews were obliged to pay a special tax, like all non-Muslims, but they were outwardly much like everybody else, except that they were wine-drinking monogamists who liked to wear conical fur hats. The Jews were gone by the 1930s, but the Jewish quarter is still remembered in Balkh by the name of the neighbourhood Jehodanak: the Town of the Jews.
A century after Hiwi there was Ibn Sina, the Prince of Physicians. A polymathic genius from a Balkh Ismaili family, Ibn Sina was known to medieval Europe as Avicenna, and is still known to modern scientists as “the father of modern medicine.” Among Roman Catholic historians, Ibn Sina is known for his profound influence on Catholicism’s foundational theologian, Thomas Aquinas. Among philosophers, Ibn Sina is perhaps best remembered for his critique of Aristotelian metaphysics. Otherwise forgotten are Ibn Sina’s numerous pioneering texts on geology, paleontology, astronomy and physics.
A century after Ibn Sina, Balkh was a teeming city of perhaps 200,000 people when the eleventh-century poet Omar Khayyam was a schoolboy here. His classic Rubaiyat was unknown to the English-speaking world until the 1800s. In Khayyam’s day, Balkh was still a city of Persians, Turks and Chinese, who practised Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and Zoroastrianism. Their leavings are a muddle, and it doesn’t help that no one has ever undertaken a systematic archaeological survey of the place. UNESCO scientists have placed Balkh on their wish list of world heritage sites. It easily ranks with Angkor Wat or Tenochtitlán or Petra. You’ve probably heard of those places. Chances are you’ve never heard of Balkh. Don’t be hard on yourself.
In the frightening country called Afghanistan that we hear about in the West, Balkh cannot exist. That country is the “graveyard of empires.” The real Afghanistan is the womb of empires. Even in its blighted twenty-first-century form, Afghanistan is a concoction of at least a half-dozen major ethnic groups and more than thirty languages from long-lost civilizations loosely contained within the shrivelled remnant of the Durrani Empire, the eighteenth-century Pashtun imperialism that supplanted the ancient Turk, Mongol and Persian dynasties. The Durrani Pashtuns came from Kandahar, and it was they who first imposed “Afghanistan” upon the maps of the world. The Durrani Empire once covered a vast realm, from the Amu Darya to the Arabian Sea, and from the Iranian Khorasan to Delhi. In the upheavals of the Durranis’ long and grisly history of conquest, the child’s-play imperialism of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Afghan wars barely rates as a footnote.
But Balkh does exist. It is situated in the real country of Afghanistan. It is a small town in a big province that is also called Balkh, and in the summer of 2010, in the place where the Taliban throat slitters are supposed to be, children lead flocks of goats through groves of pistachio. Instead of the vast plantations of opium we always hear about, there’s wheat, barley, flax and cow pasture, though here and there, you might notice a plot of cannabis. Eccentric, long-haired malangs, decked out in garlands of plastic flowers, amuse passersby with their poems and their hashish-induced visions of Islam’s elysian afterlife. Stroll through Balkh around noon, and you come upon families gathered in copses of mulberry and Oriental plane trees for their midday meals of cherries and naan and melons. They will notice straight away that you are some sort of kafir from a faraway country. They smile and wave hello. Salaam. The word does not mean “war.”
For some reason, there is neither a tomb of Zarathustra in Balkh, nor a grand shrine of Kayumars, the Persian Adam, but there is a particular tumulus that everyone swears is the tomb of Seth, Shiith Ibn Adam. It is situated on the outskirts of town, embedded within a strange outcropping of clay and surrounded by a cheek-by-jowl amalgam of derelict mud-walled huts. The little tomb complex is painted sky blue and adorned with tattered green flags that flutter in the breeze. The crypt itself is open to the heavens, but it is covered by an unlikely shroud of green tarpaulin. Under a thatched roof at the entrance, an old man with a long white beard sits cross-legged behind a low bench, and he will take coins in exchange for holy cards, mementos and verses from the Quran written on little scraps of paper. Saddled horses doze in a grove of great-crowned chenar trees nearby.
Across an open field, arising from a hardscrabble plain, there is what appears to be a long ridge of steep cliffs climbing to a plateau. But once you’ve made your way through a ravine, you see that you’ve come through one of the ancient gates of the old city’s fortress, the Bala Hissar, and the cliffs are in fact the old fortress walls. Inside the fortress, a hollow expanse of goat pasture forms a nearly perfect circle more than a kilometre across. The Bala Hissar was sacked and ruined by Genghis Khan in 1220. The walls were built up again by the Timurids, who also built a grand citadel and a splendid mosque within. But there’s nothing left now except scattered shards of pottery and the sad little tomb of some long-forgotten warrior where a family of nomadic Kuchis has made a home, with a small garden, in the shade of some scrubby trees around a burbling spring.
From atop the Bala Hissar’s northern walls, six storeys high, you can look out on a prairie that fades into the horizon. A chaotic eruption of ragged clay hills in the middle distance is all that remains of the Buddhist monastery and university of Nava Vihara. It had been flourishing for dozens of generations by the time the Henan scholar and traveller Xuanzang visited in the seventh century. He arrived in Balkh at the close of an epoch, just a few short years before the Arab conquest brought Bactria within the Muslim orbit of the Umayyad caliphate of Damascus. Centuries before the Arabs came, camel trains were making their way to and from Balkh carrying furs and silks and precious gems from China, spices and perfumes from India, curiosities from Byzantium, frankincense and silver from Persia and wine from the Roman Empire. Down through the years, the Silk Road also brought ideas, slaves, arguments, discoveries and pilgrims from Isfahan and Lhasa, Samarkand and Athens, Xinjiang and Persepolis. Xuanzang found Nava Vihara teeming with scholars and pilgrims, its grand statues of the Buddha glittering with jewels. A dome-topped stupa stood twenty storeys high. Centuries after Islam laid its late-seventh-century foundations in Balkh, Nava Vihara was still thriving as Navbahar, a place of Buddhist worship and study.
That summer of 2010, I was standing on the Bala Hissar’s crumbling walls with Abdulrahim Parwani. We were looking out on the sad remnants of Navbahar, when he turned to me with a melancholy look. “There was even a barbershop,” he said. I noticed a bit of a gleam in his eye. Earlier, back in the town, Abdulrahim had been fondly remembering a barbershop from his boyhood days here. He couldn’t seem to recall where it was exactly, no matter how much he racked his brains. “I guess it’s gone, too,” he said sadly. Then he laughed out loud.
One of the most important things Abdulrahim taught me about Afghanistan is that it helps to keep your sense of humour. When I stepped into a slurry-filled ditch one day in Kabul after I mistook its dust-thick surface for the hard ground of a footpath, I was left with septic goo up to my knees. He laughed. Then he somehow got me to laugh along with him. The next day, it was my turn. A bright blue bruise had erupted right in the middle of his forehead. He’d been kneeling and bowing in the Muslim way of praying, except his head had missed the prayer mat and hit the cement floor a few times. I laughed at him, and he laughed with me.
We’d come to Balkh together almost as an afterthought, and mostly by luck. It had been three years since the two of us had signed on as founding members of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, and Canada was still showing every willingness to wash its hands of Afghanistan. We’d been invited to Mazar-e Sharif, the boisterous capital of Balkh province, to look into an idea that had been making the rounds of Toronto’s Afghan-Canadian community. Babur Mawladin, the Solidarity Committee’s Toronto president, was especially enlivened by it. He’d already talked about it with Balkh’s no-nonsense governor, Mohammad Atta Noor, who was just