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 PART
9
The Samarkand circle
Part 1:
The last frontier: China's far west
Part 2:
The king of the steppes
Part 3:
In pursuit of the snow leopard
Part 4:
Touching base
Part 5:
A new learning experience
Part 6:
Peaceful jihad
Part 7:
The American client
Part 8:
The Sufi way
SAMARKAND - His empire was immense. At his apex, from 1365 to 1405, he was the
supreme ruler from Constantinople to Kashgar - and everything in between and
around: the Caucasus, Baghdad, Mosul, Isfahan, Shiraz, Ormuz, Mashhad,
Nishapur, the Caspian sea, all of present-day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan,
Kabul, Kandahar, Peshawar, Lahore and Delhi. As we stand in front of the
dark-green jade stone that marks his resting place at the Guri Amir ("Tomb of
the Emir", in Tajik) mausoleum in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, the question is
inevitable: what would great conqueror Timur (1336-1405) think of George W
Bush's Alexander the Great syndrome?
There's hardly a more ideal site for meditation on the rise and fall of empires
than mythical, resonant Samarkand - the heart of Timur's empire, the city he
considered "the center of the universe". When 
Alexander the Great arrived in 329 BC to what was the capital of the Persian
Achaemenid empire, he said it was "still more beautiful" than he
imagined. The fabulous Persian city was invaded by Seleucids, Greek-Bactrians,
Turks. Here, in the 9th century, the Samanids ruled over the first Islamic
independent state in Central Asia. Genghis Khan's hardcore horseback warriors
implacably destroyed it in 1220. When Marco Polo came half a century later, he
found it totally rebuilt, "a very large and splendid city".
This vital Silk Road crossroads, under the sun of art and science, was home to
Omar Kayyam - the author of the Rubayiat; al-Biruni - the first man to
learn that the earth revolves around its axis; and Avicenna - whose medical
canon was Europe's top reference as late as the 17th century. Countless
European poets spent their lives dreaming of the "Golden road to Samarkand" -
and helped to immortalize it as the essence of Oriental mystery. Then it was
decadence: the Russians - who arrived in 1868 - and later the Soviets,
forcefully introduced a reluctant city to the Industrial Revolution.
The Registan - a delicate prodigy of proportion with its three tilting madrassas
(religious schools) enveloped by dizzying turquoise mosaics - is Central Asia's
answer to the Piazza San Marco in Venice. In Timur's time, the late 15th
century, it was a vast bazaar. The ruined remains of the massive Bibi Khanym
mosque evoke Timur's love life: Bibi, his Mongolian princess wife, ordered the
building of the mosque in secret while he was away conquering the world. The
architect fell in love with her, so Timur had him beheaded and instituted
mandatory use of the veil for women. But the stone slabs of Guri Amir mausoleum
are really the ones with the power to enthrall. This is where Timur, his two
sons and two grandsons are buried - including Timur's favorite grandson, Ulugh
Bek, whose heritage is particularly relevant to Islam today. Ulugh Bek was the
Islamic, Central Asian version of the Florentine Renaissance humanist Lorenzo
de Medici. A man of letters and an exceptional astronomer, he was responsible
among other things for setting up Samarkand's great Islamic university: the
Ulugh Bek madrassa, still gracefully standing at the Registan.
More than two millennia ago, when the Greeks traded with the Chinese, Central
Asia was indeed the center of the universe. When it also became one of the
centers of the Islamic world - attracting students from Tatarstan in Russia,
and from India and China - it was inserted in another network whose central
node had even more prestige: Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Historically, the link
between Central Asia and Mecca for centuries has been via India and the Ottoman
Empire: this political and intellectual cross-fertilization lasted until the
advent of the Soviet Union. Then, suddenly, Central Asia lost its centrality.
Externally - because the whole region became inaccessible to Muslims from the
rest of Asia. And internally - because the Soviets barred the circulation of
students from Tatarstan and India towards Bukhara, and the circulation of
Central Asian pilgrims towards holy places like Salomon's throne in Kyrgyzstan,
the "stone tower" which used to welcome Greek travellers of the Silk Road.
During the more than seven decades of this rupture, Islam in Central Asia lived
inside a bottle - dismantled and remodeled according to Stalinism's whims. It
was only with the implosion of the USSR, when Central Asia ceased from being a
geographical object in the periphery of the empire, that Islam in the region
reactivated its ties with the rest of the Muslim world.
Many European scholars are still asking themselves whether the new Central
Asian republics really desired their independence from the USSR: after all,
their status immediately fell from being members of "the other superpower" to
being mere emerging - and in most cases submerging - states. What these
scholars dub "difficult decolonization" is nothing else than an euphemism when
contrasted to the harsh life of the local populations, even in former centers
of glory like Samarkand.
Samarkand may not be Timur's "center of the universe" anymore. Timur - after 74
Soviet years - was resurrected in the early 1990s as the great Uzbek national
hero. It was not long ago that a Soviet soldier killed in Afghanistan received
the Order of Lenin in public but a funeral by a mullah in secrecy. Soviet-built
Samarkand remains as bleak as Siberian Omsk. But being so close to the vast
steppes, where all borders between Asia and Europe disappear, this is still, at
least in theory, the key crossroads for all routes coming from Turkey to
Pakistan and from the Persian Gulf to China. To bear in mind the magnitude and
the explosive possibilities at play, nothing better than to apply a splendid
concept by French scholar Jean-Luc Racine: let's draw the Samarkand circle.
Imagine yourself, dear reader, in front of the shining blue-tiled dome of
Timur's mausoleum, only a few minutes away from Ulugh Bek's gracefully tilting
Islamic university. From this historic, artistic and scientific center, we can
draw a circle with an axis of 2,000 kilometers. The circle envelops the five
former Soviet Central Asian republics (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan), Armenia, Azerbaijan and part of Georgia,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, northwest India, Tibet and Xinjiang in China, and
southern Russia. To the north, the circle passes to the north of the
Trans-Siberian in Omsk. To the northwest, it crosses the Urals and descends
parallel to the Volga until it crosses Georgia to the west and descends through
the Turkish border towards occupied Iraq. To the southwest, the circle crosses
the Persian Gulf and traverses the Indian Ocean towards the south. To the east,
it crosses Tibet and Chinese Xinjiang until it gets to Russia's extreme south.
The circle therefore configures all New Great Game strategies at play
concerning oil and gas, radical Islam, nomads and settlers, the extreme
frontiers of China and Russia, peoples of the steppe, most parts of the
troubled Caucasus, Chechnya, all of the Turcophone world, "axis of evil" Iran
and deep-in-trouble post-Taliban Afghanistan.
In a sense, Samarkand - even as a metaphor - indeed remains one of the centers
of the universe. This is certainly very much imprinted in the ambitious mind of
Uzbek President Islam Karimov, a former Soviet apparatchick born in Samarkand
who incidentally more than welcomes his hero Timur's domination methods. The
perception is also in the minds of Washington, establishment and
neo-conservatives alike, for whom Uzbekistan is a key node for American
influence in Eurasia (see Part 7 of this series).
The American empire will inevitably have to face Persian resistance. As we
travel around Central Asia, we see that Persia - not Iran - is everywhere. The
Persia of Cyrus the Great spread from Ephesus to Kabul, and from the Sinai to
the Syr Daria river (today in Uzbekistan). Since these times, Central Asia's
identity has been played around Persia. The southern part of today's Central
Asia is nothing less than Transoxiana. The long Persian domination extended to
Afghanistan - the former Bactria. It left a heritage more lasting than any
political construct: the Persian language, used from the Moghul court in India
to Uzbek clans.
Much more than languid Bactrian camels crossing the landscape, the
cross-fertilizing heritage of Bactria also sends a powerful message to
contemporary Central Asia. This is where monks, starting in the 1st century in
Kushan Buddhist monasteries, developed a tolerant, creative and intellectually
exciting culture. They laid the groundwork for a scholar like Mohammed Ali
Hakim al-Termezi, who was fundamental in the development of Sufism (see Part 8
of this series). The monastery of Ayrtam - on the shores of the Amu Darya
river, 18 kilometers away from the contemporary city of Termez - was the first
site leading to the study of Buddhism in Central Asia. In another matchless
example of Soviet finesse, it was destroyed in the 1980s during the
construction of the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya towards the Afghan
border.
Central Asian governments insist that nation-building is more important than
religious identity. A tradition of centuries of tolerant Islam is anyway a
further guarantee that fundamentalism won't work. A Samarkand student at the
local university wishes the Uzbek government wouldn't waste its whole energy
combating "terrorism", instead of modernizing the economy (if he voiced the
protest in public he would face torture in prison). At the same time, from
Xinjiang to eastern Kazakhstan, a new axis develops, including the multiple
opening of Chinese borders to the west and the feasibility of a non-stop
railway which would allow a direct link between Shanghai and Rotterdam.
Government bureaucracies in Central Asian republics still remain deeply
suspicious of each other. But in the heart of the Central Asian steppes - in a
college in Almaty, in an economics faculty in Samarkand - this correspondent
has met young visionaries dreaming of oceans: Asia-Pacific to the east,
Atlantic Europe to the west. This would be, essentially, the New Silk Road. It
may be a far-fetched dream. But after this long, painful transition phase for
the young republics, the dream may be the only way for Central Asia to
recapture its place in history and fulfill all the promise of these two
concepts - "Asia" and "Central".
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
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