Osama bin Laden is not a popular character in Central Asia's cultural and religious heartland in the southwest of Uzbekistan. "To kill innocent people violates the principles of Islam," says a local imam. "Why doesn't he order his own army to fight the army of the infidels?" Bin Laden is an Arab Wahhabi from Saudi Arabia. The
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people of Bukhara are substantially Tajik, and most speak Tajik, although calling themselves Uzbek. This means that they are culturally oriented towards Persia. Bukhara - as well as the larger city of Samarkand - are not in present-day Tajikistan because of Joseph Stalin's warped mapmaking. Ever since the 9th and 10th centuries, as capital of the Samanid empire, Bukhara has been annexed to the fabulous Persian artistic heritage. And ever since the 14th century, it has been a privileged home of Sufism, a more mystic branch of Islam. Islam Karimov, the current ruler of Uzbekistan, is also not a very popular character in Bukhara - according to prominent local merchant families. But the reason is not religious, it is because of his government's corruption and inefficiency. Last week, Karimov and entourage travelled in style to Bukhara, to reopen the meticulously restored birthplace and tomb complex dedicated to 14th century Sufi saint Bahauddin Naqshbandi - the founder of the most important Sufi tariqah (order) in Central Asia.
During the presidential visit, the complex was off-limits to Muslim pilgrims for two days. State television widely replayed Karimov's speech extolling the tolerant virtues of Naqshbandi. "He didn't even pay for it," scoffs the scion of a bazaari family. "The restoration was paid by three sheikhs, one of them from America." Featuring two old mosques, a lovely leaning minaret, a courtyard with a stone pool, a young mullah saying prayers for pilgrims with special requests, and the dead trunk of a very old mulberry tree traced by legend to Naqshbandi himself, the whole complex is one of the most sacred, serene and inspiring in the Islamic world.
Sufism may have originated with animist, shamanistic peoples in Siberia, after the long pilgrimage of primitive man from Africa to Mesopotamia. Siberian shamans crossed the Baring Strait and spread around America: others arrived in England and Gaul: and others still travelled back East, to Turkey - one of the oldest development centers of Sufism. Some of these shamans continued their pilgrimage as far as Afghanistan, where they finally settled down in temples in the Hindu Kush mountains. The first great Sufi school was the Cairo mosque, in 980; the second was founded in Baghdad, in 991. The word "Sufism" as we know it comes from the Latin sufismus, via a 19th-century German scholar. Sufi initiation is via a pir (master) and a tariqah (community).
The most important Sufi tariqah is that of Naqshbandi, founded in 1317. Naqshbandi means "to paint" - in the sense of "one who makes paintings comparable to the divine science". Islamic scholars place Naqshbandi as a tariqah from Turkestan, with important branches in Turkestan itself (the contemporary Central Asian republics), China, Kazan (Tatarstan, in Russia), Turkey, India and Java in Indonesia, and also very active in other parts of Russia. It is the only Sufi order that traces its transmission of knowledge back to the first Muslim governor, Abu Bakr - which means that it is directly linked to the Prophet Mohammed and Imam Ali.
Sufism, as Bukharans never tire to explain, is the pantheistic essence of Islamic religion and philosophy. It has absorbed influences from neo-Platonism, Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. It is an ascetic mysticism of extreme intellectual purity. Its creed, if we could synthesize it in just a phrase, would be something like "to light in our heart the memory of the name of God". The late Sufi master Idris Shah defined it as a mix of ideology, science, art and method for human development. It involves tremendous self-discipline, and it implies great freedom of spirit. Sufism talked about human conditioning centuries before Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freudian sexual analysis was preceded by 900 years by Sufi master Al Ghazali in The Alchemy of Happiness. The theory of Jungian archetypes was exposed by Sufi master Ibn al-Arabi. Sufi dervish Hujwiri talked in technical terms about the identity between time and space almost 1,000 years before Albert Einstein. And Sufis formulated a science of evolution more than 600 years before Charles Darwin.
Silk Road memories
Bukhara's old town - dating from the late 16th century, during pre-Russian times - still evokes Silk Road memories. Ancient Bukhara was essentially an enormous market, with dozens of bazaars and inns, more than 100 madrassas (religious schools) and more than 300 mosques. In post-Soviet Karimov times, what remains is still a formidable collection of buildings, some under heavy restoration. But the madrassas are closed - or turned into harmless, non-indoctrinating, tourist-oriented inns.
Alexander the Great came, saw, conquered - and destroyed - Bukhara. The Arabs came in the 8th century, and the Samanids in the 9th century. In its golden age, with the proliferation of Islamic scholars, the most iconic was doubtless Abu Ali Ibn Sina, or Avicenna, whose medical canon dominated in Europe until the 17th century. Genghis Khan's destructive urges razed Bukhara to the ground in 1220. Timur - the post-Genghis Khan ruler in Central Asia, today resurrected as the great Uzbek national hero - incited something of a Renaissance in the 14th and 15th centuries. In the 19th century, Bukhara became a key pawn in the Great Game between imperial Russia and imperial Britain. A fascinating paradox is that this Islamic sanctuary, always teeming with scholars, periodically turned into a throne dripping with blood. In the 19th century it was the most violent of the Central Asian regions. Emirs like Nasrullah Khan, aka "The Butcher", demonstrated deep fascination with severed heads - the most famous of which may have been British Great Game protagonists Connolly and Stoddardt, executed in front of the Ark, Nasrullah's citadel, in 1842.
The Registan in front of the Ark - the showcase for successive emirs' atrocity exhibitions - today is just a peaceful square crossed by bearded elders in their padded Uzbek cloaks on the way to the carpet bazaar. Uzbek is the state language, but most people speak Tajik and even refuse to speak Russian - the language of commerce. The most entrepreneurial merchants dream of speaking Japanese to conveniently attack their most free-spending tourists. Film-making is a steady source of foreign exchange. Bukharans loved to see their city as the background for a very successful Russian James Bond-ish flick. And an American crew was in town recently shooting night scenes inside the breathtaking 16th century Kalon mosque for The Keeper, based on the life of Persian poet Omar Khayyam.
Wahhabis are not comfortable with the tolerant mysticism of Naqshbandi. And they would condemn modern Bukhara girls to rot in hell. These Tajik-speaking Shi'ites always say that if they had a lot of money, the first thing they would do is go on a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. But they don't listen to the muezzin calling from the minarets of the mosques; they prefer Andy, an Iranian pop superstar living in Los Angeles. They never wear a hijab - only colored scarves and Western clothes. They dream of going to Europe. They don't even appreciate legendary Bukhara carpet designs: they prefer "European" designs. But social life is still regimented. Girls can't go to the disco alone - otherwise they are derided as vulgar. A Bukhara girl is supposed to marry young, stay home and bear many children. In a traditional marriage, the man buys the house - a very good one in the center of old Bukhara would sell for only US$15,000 - but the woman must contribute with everything else, from furniture to the family jewelry.
Anyway, we're a far cry from those times when an "indecent" wink was enough to have the perpetrator hurled from the top of the Kalon minaret, the tallest in Central Asia, built in 1127 and so impressive that Genghis Khan himself refrained from destroying it. Bukhara legend tells that the only person who ever escaped death by free fall was the wife of a wealthy local merchant. Before the jump, she asked her executioner for her servant to bring the dresses she had received from her husband as gifts. The servant brought all of her 40 dresses. She piled them up in the square, climbed to the top of the minaret, jumped onto the clothing and survived. The emir was so impressed that he spared her head. So tradition now rules that every man, just in case, must give his wife 40 dresses when they get married. No wonder that at least in the psychedelic silk bazaars nobody in Bukhara and environs knows the meaning of the word unemployment.
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