Go north. It was a faint hope, all things considered, but worth looking into. Abdulrahim and I had arranged to meet various provincial officials, academics, human rights activists and journalists in Mazar-e Sharif. We were curious to hear what they had to say.
I’d told Abdulrahim that if we had a bit of spare time, I wanted to see something of the fabled city of Balkh. It was the hometown of the great Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet known to the English-speaking world as Rumi and commonly described as the greatest poet Islam has ever produced. I’d heard that the school Rumi first attended was still standing. Balkh was only a short drive from Mazar, the roads were mostly paved and we could hire a rattletrap cab for the morning. We really should see the place, I’d said. It was only then that I learned Abdulrahim had spent some of his early childhood in Balkh. He remembered playing in the shadow of the ancient walls. When the rains came, the children of Balkh would carefully reconnoitre the ground along the base of the walls, because a good downpour would sometimes dislodge old coins from some ancient realm. A handful had come into Abdulrahim’s possession this way. So yes, of course, we must try to get to Balkh, he’d said.
We’d intended to meet Governor Noor, but he’d been called away on some last-minute emergency shortly before we arrived at Mazar’s desolate and decrepit airport. So we had an opening in our schedule, and instead of having to hire a motor rickshaw or something to take us out to the fabled capital of the Kingdom of a Thousand Cities, we ended up travelling in the company of Colonel Asif Brumand, a bald, stocky and always beaming professor of medicine, a confidant of the governor. The colonel greeted us in Mazar in camouflage fatigues, packing a heavy sidearm. He introduced us to his friend Farid Ahmad, a tall and somewhat distracted mujahideen veteran who appeared to have been conscripted to our service because he owned a functioning Toyota Land Cruiser. Colonel Brumand informed us that the district police chief in Balkh happened to be an old acquaintance, who would be pleased to have us in for tea at the Balkh police station.
We piled into Farid’s Land Cruiser and headed out of town escorted by two Ford Rangers, one carrying four heavily armed members of the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the other carrying an equal number of similarly equipped members of the Afghan National Army (ANA). Farid himself sported a brace of pistols underneath his loose-fitting kameez. This was not the way that Abdulrahim and I usually got around, and it certainly wasn’t necessary for our security, but the governor’s office apparently considered it necessary to Afghan hospitality. The young police officers and soldiers in our escort seemed perfectly happy to have the lark of a morning out in the country, besides. “They are good men,” Farid confided on the drive out to Balkh, “but if the people around here see any Taliban, they will just attack them and kill them themselves.”
When we got to Balkh, Police Chief Wahdood treated us to the customary and affectionately solicitous Afghan ritual of tea, almonds, apples, melons and toffees. Actually, there is not always much police work to do, Wahdood confessed. With a staff of 90 and a sprawling district of only 150,000 people, his biggest headaches were disputes over title deeds, water rights, property lines and all the other minor tumults you’d expect from the steady trickle of families returning after long years of exile in Iran and Pakistan. I mentioned that the bucolic scenery on the road to Balkh seemed punctuated by an exceptional quantity of the rusting hulks of broken Russian tanks that you see elsewhere in Afghanistan. This caused Colonel Brumand and Chief Wahdood to fall into reveries about the old times. As the conversation turned to politics and pleasant gossip about provincial affairs, Abdulrahim and I wandered off in the company of Sali Mohammad, chief of the Balkh District Criminal Investigations Division, who seemed to have some time on his hands.
A smiling and slightly built man in civilian clothes, Sali ambled along with us through Balkh’s central gardens until we came to a nondescript rectangular stone edifice, a shrine of some kind. “Yes, this is Rabi’a Balkhi,” Abdulrahim said happily. The locals say this is the very place where the ninth-century princess-poet was cruelly imprisoned and died, Abdulrahim explained. The poems attributed to Rabi’a are of a distinctly erotic tone, inspired by her lovemaking with a palace slave named Baktash. As the story goes, when Rabi’a’s courtings came to light, her enraged brother imprisoned her in this dungeon. Heartbroken but defiant, she slashed her wrists and wrote poems to her beloved Baktash in her own blood, and thus the dungeon became her tomb. For more than a thousand years, the lovestruck young women of Bactria, Persia, Khorasan and all the other empires and nation-states that have come and gone in their places have offered up their devotions to Rabi’a, entrusting her with their sighs and their longings.
Sali took a key from a caretaker and unlocked a low barred window that opened into a subterranean crypt. We peered inside a dark chamber containing a grand blue-tiled sarcophagus covered in a tattered green blanket. After Abdulrahim and I had squeezed through the window’s narrow opening and stepped down into the tomb, two young women descended into the darkness, paid their whispered respects to Rabi’a, covered their shy smiles behind their veils and climbed quickly back out into the light. “There was a tunnel,” Abdulrahim said, dimly remembering a story from his childhood about a tunnel that led from the tomb to the Bala Hissar, two kilometres distant. He shrugged and laughed.
We were soon on our rounds of Balkh in Farid’s white Land Cruiser, with the ANA and the ANP in their green Ford Rangers and children running along the dusty roads behind us. After only a few minutes, we were winding our way through a hive of narrow orchard lanes, and then there it was, like some giant, forlorn sandcastle, abandoned to the tides and falling apart: the khanaqa where the young Rumi had studied as a boy. It was the same Sufi madrassa where Rumi’s renowned father, Baha al-Din Walad, had taught, eight centuries ago, in the last days before the Mongol armies swept through and the shadows fell again.
The original structure was still evident in some high arches and collapsed domes, but other than that, it was just a mound. There was some evidence of a recent and rudimentary archaeological inventory. Kabul had little enthusiasm and less in the way of resources to take care of the place. Ankara and Tehran were squabbling over the rights to restore, protect and interpret Rumi’s ruin, but because of some arcane disagreement, work had stalled. It was probably just as well.
Some boys were tending a herd of goats nearby, and we managed to coax one of the boys to approach us. From Farid, I learned that his name was Sher Khan and he was seven years old. He was shy at first, but then he took me by a sleeve and guided me up into the mound, instructing me with words and gesticulations I couldn’t comprehend. Some of the other boys joined us. They scrambled up and down through collapsed passageways and alcoves and then stood silently with me, gazing up at the gently curved and half-vanished arches as though they were as astonished by the marvel of the place as I was.
As the story goes, the splendid Sufi boys’ school of Rumi’s childhood was destroyed by Genghis Khan. At that moment in history, the splendour of Balkh is said to have begun its long eclipse. A malaria epidemic that swept through the countryside and a flood that caused the Amu Darya to change its course away from Balkh are said to account for the city’s final withering at the close of the nineteenth century. By then, Mazar-e Sharif had displaced Balkh as the provincial administrative centre and locus of commerce and livelihood. But there was more to Balkh’s death than that.
There is also much more to the burial of Balkh’s great palaces and the forgetting of certain