The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

“I am Seyyed Qasim,” continued the soldier, emphasizing the title Seyyed, meaning descendant of the Prophet,

As the Persian poet says: ‘Man’s life is brief and transitory, Literature endures forever.’”

realized it was a medieval caravanserai—a way station for merchants on the Silk Road. Because caravanserai were built a day’s walk apart, I had used them for accommodation when I walked across the Iranian desert between Arak and Isfahan.

First, you are with the Tajik of Herat, who are the ancient Persians. Their farms are on the flat plains of the Hari Rud. Second, you will reach the Aimaq, a tent-dwelling tribal people, who live in the hill country of Ghor. There was the center of the ancient Ghorids who invaded India. Two hundred kilometers farther east are the high mountains of Bamiyan. There the Hazara live who are descended from Genghis Khan. They look like Chinese, are dangerous, and are Shia Muslims. Finally, after weeks with the Hazara, you will descend again to the valleys and the desert, where you will meet the Pashtun tribe of Wardak. All the other peoples you will meet speak Dari [the Afghan dialect of Persian], but the Wardak do not speak Persian, they speak Pashto. They support the Taliban.

But the caravans wanted to avoid the center, so they used Herat as a junction, turning either north onto the Silk Roads to China or south onto the Spice Roads to India.

There was surely enough water for wheat. Opium poppies, however, will die if they go five days without water.

Babur’s diary is the first credible report of the Koh-i-Noor. It was almost certainly the diamond he captured at the siege of Agra, and he describes it as worth “half of the daily expense of the whole world.” According to Babur, it had first been acquired by the Delhi Sultan at Malwa in 1304. There is no certainty about where it was before Malwa. Little evidence supports the Indian Sunday Tribune’s claims that the Koh-i-Noor was seized by Alexander the Great at the battle of Jhelum in the Punjab in 326 B.C., and then owned by the great Buddhist ruler Asoka. Babur gave the diamond to his favorite son, Humayun, who probably carried it into exile in Persia and presented it as a gift to the Shah of Iran, who in turn sent it to his liege-king in the Deccan. On July 8, 1656, the diamond was presented to Babur’s great-great-grandson Shah Jahan at Agra, where Babur had first seized it. In 1739 Nadir Shah, the ruler of Iran, acquired the diamond from Shah Jahan’s eventual heir and carried it back to Iran across Afghanistan. He called it “Koh-i-Noor,” Mountain of Light. It was then about 186 carats and common belief held that whoever owned it would rule the world, provided it was worn by a woman. Nadir’s son subsequently gave it to Ahmed Shah Durrani, his Afghan Chief of Horse and the founder of modern Afghanistan. Ahmed Shah kept the Koh-i-Noor in his capital at Kandahar as the central symbol of Afghanistan’s independence from Persia. His grandson then carried it back across Afghan...

ANYONE WHO HAS EVER STRUGGLED WITH POVERTY KNOWS HOW EXTREMELY EXCITING IT IS TO BE POOR.

Genghis Khan’s “arrow messengers” could travel 450 kilometers a day. This speed was the key to conquering or governing a large ancient empire.

Here, the ancient English sense of journey, “a day’s travel” (French journée), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang, “the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,”

They were religious questions. Islam, much more than Christianity, is a political and social religion. Clear rules govern who and how you can marry. In this region most people married their first cousins.

“I have memorized it,” Sheikh replied. “I can recite it in Arabic from end to end—more than one hundred thousand words. But I don’t speak Arabic, so I don’t understand precisely where the individual pieces are.”

When Dr. Habibullah said good-bye, he added, “Do you know about Dr. Brydon? He was English. We killed you all but we left him alive to ride into Peshawar . . . I think Afghans shall send you alive like Dr. Brydon.”30

“Why did you become a Mujahid?” I asked Seyyed Umar. “Because the Russian government stopped my women from wearing head scarves and confiscated my donkeys.” “And why did you fight the Taliban?” “Because they forced my women to wear burqas, not head scarves, and stole my donkeys.”

Babur seemed prepared to examine, mark with urine, and take possession of every meter of the next six hundred kilometers. Only once or twice in my eighteen-month walk across Asia had I felt some magical claim to the territory I touched with my feet. But Babur apparently felt it all the time. The warm stream of urine was set like a flag to mark his new empire. All his movement was conquest and occupation. He seemed ready to ponder and possess every place in the world. He was like a canine Alexander.

As I walked through the bazaar, I saw a number of fair-haired children. Afghans are often fair-haired. They sometimes say it is because they are descended from Alexander’s troops, but there were probably blond inhabitants before Alexander’s arrival.

The mastiff is perhaps the oldest breed of dog in the world. There are mastiffs on early Egyptian wall paintings and on the friezes of the Assyrians. His closest living relative is the Anatolian mastiff shepherd, a breed that spread across the kingdom of Alexander from Turkey, where they are called Kangal or Karabash (meaning black-faced), to Uzbekistan. The British Museum holds a copy of a Greek statue of a mastiff of the period of Alexander. It is two and a half feet high at the shoulder and sits with its great paws in front of it and its hindquarters folded sideways. It has cocked its head. Its ears and tail, like Babur’s, have been cut off.

The dogs of Ghor are mentioned in the earliest descriptions of the province and were always regarded as particularly special mastiffs. According to the Seljuk chroniclers of the eleventh century, there was “a remarkably fine breed of dogs in Ghor so powerful that in frame and strength every one of them is a match for a lion.”

There is a Persian proverb that Death in the company of friends is a feast.

Hazarajat, with a literate and politically engaged population. The Taliban attacked the town in 1998 and executed four hundred men against the clinic wall. Since then 75 percent of the population had either died or fled.

But the Hazara I met were delighted the Taliban had gone, and they did not resent the Americans for expelling them. Nowhere in Afghanistan did the cruelty of the Taliban seem so comprehensive or have such an ethnic focus. In a three-day walk from Yakawlang, where the Taliban had executed four hundred, to Shaidan, where eighty shop fronts had been reduced to blackened shells, every Hazara village I saw had been burned. In each settlement, people had been murdered, the flocks driven off, and the orchards razed. Most of the villages were still abandoned.

Religions, like camel caravans, seem to avoid mountain passes. Buddhism spread quickly south from Buddha’s birthplace in Nepal across the flat Gangetic plain to Sri Lanka. But it took a millennium to reach China and instead of crossing the Himalayas to get there it followed a parabolic curve one and a half thousand kilometers east, five hundred kilometers north, and two and a half thousand kilometers east again.

As Buddhism moved, it changed. In Tibet it incorporated the preceding Bon-Po religion and spawned new demonologies. In eighth-century northern India, it became scholastic; among the forest monks of Sri Lanka, pragmatic; in Newar, Nepal, married monks practiced inverted tantra; and in Japan, Zen devotees contemplated minimalist paradoxes. Afghanistan was where Buddhism met the art of Alexander’s Greece. There, in the Gandharan style, it developed its most distinctive artistic expression: the portrayal of the Buddha in human form. The colossal statues of Bamiyan were the legacy of this innovation.

He had just recited fifteen generations from memory. This was more than the fourteen separating Christ from the exile in Babylon or David from Abraham; only ten separated Abraham from Noah and Noah from Adam.