6 Chapter 6. The Pearl of Khorasan

The border post lay behind us; fabled Afghanistan lay ahead. But we were not in Herat quite as soon as we had anticipated:

We had to wait in the shade for a minibus until 5:30 p.m. Having been warned already of a game the Afghan drivers played, telling travellers the fare to Herat was 50 Afs (46 to the dollar), then stopping halfway there and demanding 100, we were not surprised when it happened. But we refused to pay and just sat, while the Afghan boy who rode in the back kept running around the windows saying “100 Afs.” We got off the bus and stood outside for two minutes. After about an hour, the driver capitulated and agreed to 50 Afs, but we said we wouldn’t pay him until we got to Herat.

Herat is the first major Afghan city after the country’s border with Iran. It is an ancient place, associated with the Persian Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE), specifically with a region then known as Aria or, in Persian, Haraiva. In 330 BCE, Alexander the Great captured and rebuilt the city of Artacoana, capital of Aria, on or near the site of modern-day Herat. The Arian region subsequently came under the control of the Seleucid dynasty of Macedonia, before briefly becoming part of India’s Mauryan Empire and then of the Parthian Empire, ruled by an Iranian dynasty.

The Parthians stayed in power until the third century CE, when they lost the region to the Kushans, who came from northwestern China and who, like the Mauryan king Ashoka before them, embraced Buddhism. As the Kushan Empire began to fragment, Aria was incorporated into the Sasanian Empire (ca. 225–650 CE), where it became known as Harev. During this period of Iranian rule, Herat became one of the main cities of Khorasan, the easternmost province of the empire, earning its nickname the “Pearl of Khorasan.”

As was probably true of most Western travellers, I knew almost nothing of this rich and complex history when I stepped off the minibus in Herat. Rather, I was immediately swept up in a ritual to which Westerners entering towns and cities east of Istanbul swiftly became accustomed. Unless arriving as part of an organized tour, in which case bus operators took passengers to a specified hotel, travellers often disembarked in a state of confusion made worse by severe fatigue and, sometimes, real illness. Small children and avid young men would hang around train and bus stations or in the main squares bearing signs advertising specific hotels and bombarding arriving travellers with questions and assertions. (“Do you want a room? I know of a very good place. Come with me.”) The competition was fierce, sometimes leading to angry exchanges between vendors or their representatives—though physical confrontations were rare.

My arrival in Herat in July followed this script. Tired and dirty, I was led to the Jammi Hotel where I spent one night before moving to the Caravan Hotel.¹

Whether coming from the east or west, travelling through the sensory overload of India or the relentless modernity of Tehran, most travellers found Herat a welcome refuge; an oasis of calm, good food, and pleasant music where Westerners could recharge before going on. They could also find there easily accessible drugs, especially hashish.

Herat’s hotels, restaurants, and street scenes left a particularly strong impression on everyone who visited the city. Arriving in the city in the early 1970s, Margot Miller remembered staying in a small hotel room whose window opened onto the sight of the camels and donkeys tied up, and “animals, cars, and three-wheeled Chinese trucks arriving, bringing bundles of goods.”

David Lane’s recollections of being in Herat in 1971 offered a similarly romantic vision of a place caught in a time warp:

It was winter and there were loads of snow. I remember Herat as a really beautiful place with lovely blue and white and turquoise colours surrounding you. We stayed in some old hotel. It had a big central area which was warm, but the rooms were cold. If you wanted to have a shower, you had to thaw the pipes out. Everything was heated by wood. The hotel was on the second floor of the building, and when you looked outside, it was like something from a Russian novel. There were troikas drawn by lovely Arabian horses with bells sliding up and down.… You stayed pretty close to the hotel. The coffee houses were all male; you couldn’t go in with a woman.

Yet not everyone had such quaint memories of Herat. Geoffrey Seccombe told of being treated for meningitis in the city in 1971 “by a German doctor who turned out to be a Nazi war criminal in hiding there.” What was Seccombe’s evidence for this claim, I wondered. Was the doctor a war criminal for whom the police were seeking, or was he only a former member of the party, as so many Germans once were? I had only Seccombe’s questionnaire, so I tried to get in touch with him again, in hopes of more information, but unfortunately I was unable to reach him. So I have no answers.

What we do know is that Afghanistan and Germany had close relations going back to the nineteenth century and that during the early years of the Second World War certain elements within the Afghan government, notably finance minister Abdul Majid Zabuli, favoured a formal alliance with the Axis powers.² The idea that a former Nazi might later seek refuge in the country is therefore plausible.

At the time, I was already becoming conscious of Afghanistan’s strategic but delicate position in Cold War politics, receiving aid from both the US and the Soviet Union and finding it increasingly difficult to steer an independent course between the two powers. But Afghanistan had often been caught up in empire building, if seldom willingly. During both my stays in the city, I wrote up some historical notes on Herat’s conquest by Alexander the Great and subsequent capture and near-destruction by Genghis Khan’s son Tolui during the Mongol invasion of Khorasan, early in the thirteenth century. I was assisted in my efforts to understand Herat’s history and culture by historian Nancy Hatch Wolfe (later Dupree), whose Herat: A Pictorial Guide had been published a decade earlier. In it, she quotes a fifteenth-century historian who wrote, “In the Candlemakers Quarter, near the Iraq Gate, in the vicinity of the House of Mullah Ibrahim the Bookbinder, there is a mosque near which lies the tomb of saintly Bibi Nur.” As legend has it, somewhere around 900 CE, Bibi Nur and her sister Bibi Hur built the magnificent Pul-i-Malan, an arched bridge over the Hari River, to the south of Herat, for which they are said to have used a mixture of clay and eggshells. The writer goes on to say that Bibi Nur “possesses a warm spirit and may realize all your desires if you visit her tomb on Wednesday night. This is a proven fact.”³

Unfortunately, many of these sites had long ago disappeared as a result of war and pillaging, although the city has since been experiencing a welcome renaissance. On most days, I simply walked the streets, observing. Within shops, I watched metal workers hammering on silver or weavers spinning sheep’s wool. They were always pleased to have visitors watch while going about their work.

One day, I played a chess game with an eight-year-old boy, the son of a shop owner. He beat me handily and brutally. My pride was stung. I played him again. It was a marginally better game, but I still lost. I looked at the shop owner. “He does that to everyone,” he said.

I often wandered through the Herat Bazaar, a cluster of covered markets in the heart of the Old City. Most travellers to the Middle East and Asia will be familiar with a centuries-old act in which buyers and sellers perform well-established cultural roles. Conversations, starting the moment one even casually looks at some item—a jacket, an ornament—usually begin with the question, “Where are you from?” This is followed by an invitation to enter the shop and the injunction that any discussion of business must wait until one has drunk chai or coffee, accompanied by sweet cakes or candies. An important element of this performance is that the prospective buyer is not strictly required to buy anything, though the seller hopes, of course, that conviviality will carry the day. Such engagements were usually enjoyable and sometimes did result in me making a purchase or effecting a trade, as my diary reminds me:

Today I traded my worn-out sleeping bag and my Turkish shoulder bag for a larger, more ornate Afghan shoulder bag. It required much haggling. The young shopkeeper wanted more than I offered, and I had to say no, no, no many times, but eventually I got the new bag. Afterwards, some people thought I was foolish, a bad trader, and could have done better, but I was happy. I had gotten what I needed.

On another day, I got myself outfitted for a white linen shirt and pants, of the type many Western travellers on the way to India were buying. My purchase was not entirely a fashion statement. Typical Western garb—jeans and T-shirts—was simply not appropriate to the temperature and climate of India, which was where I was going. As I soon discovered, however, the fabric was prone to shrink, so that wearing the clothes after their first wash would have required me to lose several pounds and at least two inches in height. In the end, I just left them behind at the hotel, free for the taking.

Beyond the market stalls, a different chance encounter led me to see another side of daily Herati life. I met a dark-haired Italian woman, Sandra, during my first time in Herat. She was a schoolteacher, and one day we visited an elementary school for girls. It was not far from five minarets that date to the fifteenth century. I have since learned that the minarets, though heavily damaged, are the last of twenty such towers. They are among the ruins of what was once a large Islamic religious complex that includes a mosque, a madrasa, and the mausoleum of Queen Gawhar Shad, who commissioned the complex’s construction beginning in 1417.⁴

We watched the girls at study and play for several minutes. They wore colourful dresses and seemed like all young girls everywhere; happy and smiling, and curious about the foreigners. That experience owed much to Sandra, as female travellers were better able to engage with local women and children than were Western males. Anna Danielle, who travelled through Herat around the same time, recalled seeing the unveiled faces of young girls and one day being invited into a home. Such invitations did not happen to male travellers.

But mostly I experienced Herat’s sense of timeless calm and serenity. What I wrote at the time now seems heavily romanticized yet somehow indicative of the mood the city inspired:

Herat is a lovely town. The Afghanis have the most divine serenity in their faces. They don’t hound you to buy. They seem simple and gifted with the beatitude of silence. The jingle of bells on the red tasselled bridles of the horses pulling hansoms in the street is like trickling water. It’s like Xmas without snow, a gentleness hovering over every rooftop and head; the white-bearded faces of Afghanis aged in wisdom and wise through age, squatting on sidewalks in white turbans, cracking open melons, and letting the centuries pass, one into the other.…

Walking down the streets of Herat, with the cool-warm wind in the evening blowing endlessly through the guarding pines and spilling out over the hash-smokers on the curbs, one has an almost divine sense that one could fly down the street—just raise one’s arms and be lifted clear over the town, the rough-hewn sand and cement shacks, the smiling men in their sleep, lifting and blowing through a hundred open windows to the source of every thought and heart.

In the market, tall, striding men walk with easy smiles and eyes that seem drawn from Afghanistan’s desert and cold mountain landscapes; a thousand years wrinkled in their foreheads, they walk, leading burros carrying packs, muskets, and endless bags of uncured skins of wolves and foxes.

In the years following, the easy smiles of Afghan people—men, women, children—were vaporized in recurrent wars and acts of repression. I have often thought since of the young girls that Sandra and I visited in the school, schools which they would later be prohibited from attending, and the young chess player who taught me a lesson in humility. I think of the tradesmen in their shops, the women going about their familial tasks. May the Afghan people be granted the peace and prosperity they deserve.

Afghan music was embedded in Herat’s daily life and left a distinct impression on me and others. Journeying through Herat in 1974, Brenda Grant met an old man named Abdul who ran an antique store. He played a dutar, while his thirty-five-year-old son played tabla and a Western traveller played guitar, while Abdul’s grandson watched. Grant recalls Abdul making them a special meal, a sort of omelette sprinkled with granulated sugar, cooked on a tiny charcoal brazier that sat on a Persian rug on his shopfloor.

Two years later, when passing through the city with Bruce Shore, Brenda Grant again found Abdul. He had aged a little but could still play, as she put it, “a mean dutar,” while sporting a “distant enchanted look.” Richard Gregory recalls entering “a chai shop where thirty Afghans sat around the walls cross-legged on a raised platform.” He took a place on the floor as green tea and pipes of hashish circulated. “Then the music started. Musicians in the centre of the room played diverse local instruments and several men around the outside had hand drums. There was a communal singalong that reminded me of a football crowd back home.”⁵

Gregory’s tale points to the casual role that drugs played in Afghanistan culture. Afghan men squatted on street corners and in their shops smoking hashish. Foreigners could casually buy a lump of hash on the street and toke up in broad daylight. My hotel keeper one day upbraided me for purchasing hash when he would have given me some for free. Whether one chose to partake a lot, a little, or not at all, drugs were simply woven into Afghanistan’s daily life and culture. As Ernest remembered:

We arrived in Herat well after midnight and pulled up in front of a two-storey low-cost hotel/hostel. Greeted warmly by the manager and an entourage of adoring little kids, we were ushered into the manager’s office. Beaming with pride, he handed us large chunks of a variety of hashish, some blonde, some dark, all with beautiful stamps we couldn’t read. Smelling and examining them carefully, we chose two and were shown to our rooms, not sure what to expect next. Ten minutes later one of the kids showed up with an already stoked “habli babbli” with multiple hoses for smoking. The kid knew what he was doing, and within a few minutes we were all quite pleasantly relaxed enjoying the cool Afghan night air and smells coming in through the screen-less window.

At the Caravan Hotel, where I moved on my second day, I was treated to a musician’s playful sleight-of-hand:

I was sitting on the floor carpets in the Caravan’s chai shop, after smoking two hash joints, a small table in front of my folded legs, when an accidental performance was put on for me. Directly ahead of me, an Afghan musician dressed in the typical garb of the east, sat on a divan and played his instrument, a tambour. A small boy was running around, carrying in his hand a pheasant-plumed fan. As he ran, he let the fan rise and descend over the heads of the sitting customers, mine included. Several persons had attempted to relieve him of the fan with little success, as he would immediately emit a frightful cry. Whereupon, however, the musician, at his rest, took the fan away, and then with a display of artful gesticulation, raised it first over the child’s head, behind him; then, as the child turned, brought it up abruptly, and deftly twisting his wrist, tucked the fan between his legs and thrust it under the divan; followed quickly by his hand passing over the child’s returned gaze while pointing in a false direction to which the object had seemingly gone. The child, completely bewildered, whimpered once, and stared all about the room, but the musician only gazed upwards and indicated that the fan had flown far away—and since such was a divine occurrence, not to mention being awesome, the situation was irredeemable. The child soon took the fan’s loss in stride and was quiet.

This play took less than one minute, but I can’t forget the almost mystic and sage-like aura that permeated this event—a parable, too, of the wonder of discovery and the mystery of loss that so complete every life.

Beyond the artful legerdemain of any musician, Herat seemed at times magical. It existed in the sounds of tinkling bells on horse-drawn carriages and the thousand-fold stars that danced across the night sky. But, more than anything, the magic of Herat could be seen in the quiet demeanour of its people. Soon, however, the magic was to end.

In April 1978, a violent military coup led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew President Mohammad Daoud Khan and installed a communist government friendly to the Soviet Union. Its heavy hand in forcing change upon Afghan society was resisted by much of the population outside the capital of Kabul. The first major revolt occurred the following March in what is known as the Herat Uprising. The communist government responded to the insurgency with an aerial bombing of the city in which an estimated 25,000 people died. The insurrection was put down for the moment, but uprisings continued until finally the Soviets stepped in, invading the country in December 1979, thereby inaugurating a decade of bitter warfare.⁶

1. I kept no record of what I paid per night at these hotels, but Richard Gregory notes that his hotel in Herat cost 10 Afs a night. “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “Afghanistan” section.

2. See, among others, Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghanistan’s Foreign Affairs to the Mid-Twentieth Century: Relations with the USSR, Germany, and Britain, chap. 8, esp. 245–46, 249–50 ; Louis Dupree, Afghanistan, 480–81.

3. Nancy Hatch Wolfe, Herat: A Pictorial Guide, n.p. The Iraq Gate is one of the four gates of Herat’s Old City, from which travellers would set out in different directions.

4. Wolfe, Herat: A Pictorial Guide, n.p.

5. Gregory, “The Hippie Trail 1974: London to Kathmandu,” “Afghanistan” section.

6. Ali M. Latifi, “Remembering Afghanistan’s Herat Uprising,” Al Jazeera, February 13, 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2014/2/13/remembering-afghanistans-herat-uprising.