The Places In Between

by Rory Stewart

Nevertheless, although the diaries changed my view of fifteenth-century Asia, they had little relevance to modern Afghanistan. Babur was a medieval man. His world view was formed by his being a direct royal descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine, by his contact with fifteenth-century Persian culture and Islam and by his never having travelled west of Herat.

Policy makers did not have the time, structures or resources for a serious study of an alien culture. They justified their lack of knowledge and experience by focusing on poverty and implying that dramatic cultural differences did not exist. They acted as though villagers were interested in all the priorities of international organizations, even when those priorities were mutually contradictory.

The differences between the policy makers and a Hazara such as Ali went much deeper than his lack of food. Ali rarely worried about his next meal. He was a peasant farmer and had a better idea than most about where his next meal was coming from. If he defined himself it was chiefly as a Muslim and a Hazara, not as a hungry Afghan. Without the time, imagination and persistence needed to understand Afghans’ diverse experiences, policy makers would find it impossible to change Afghan society in the way they wished to change it.

The silk and Buddhist scriptures carried into Bamiyan thirteen hundred years before must have arrived amid similar billows of sand and screams of muleteers. Earlier travellers such as Babur or Marco Polo, who moved in long columns of horses and pack-animals, must not have seen the landscape for the dust. I was grateful I generally travelled alone.

A pale brown sandstone cliff hundreds of feet high rose sheer from the northern edge of a valley, broader and more fertile than any I had seen since Herat. Cut into the cliffs to my left were two niches, each two hundred feet tall, with rubble at their bases. For fourteen hundred years, two large Buddhas stood in the niches. But seven months before I reached them, the Taliban dynamited the figures. This valley of Bamiyan, at eight thousand feet, was once the western frontier of the Buddhist world.

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 kilometres east, five hundred kilometres north and two and a half thousand kilometres east again.60 The religion eventually stretched to Mongolia and Japan, but in Afghanistan Buddhism filled only a narrow belt that left pagans in the valleys to the east and west in Kailash and in Ghor.

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 practised inverted tantra; and in Japan, Zen devotees contemplated minimalist paradoxes. Afghanistan was where Buddhism met the art of Alexander’s Greece.

The colossal statues of Bamiyan were the legacy of this innovation.

The last Bamiyan Buddhists probably lived at about the turn of the first millennium. Their religion, initially weakened by a Hindu revival, was extinguished by Islam. By the time the Ghorids captured the valley in the twelfth century, hardly a Buddhist was left between Bamiyan and Bangladesh. We know little about what kind of Buddhism was practiced in Bamiyan. From tens of thousands of monasteries stretched over a thousand kilometres, only fragments of stupas, sculpture, inscriptions and manuscripts, and the records of Chinese travellers, remain.

The dynamited niches now echoed the earliest pre-Gandharan depictions, in which the Buddha is represented by an empty seat, showing where he had once been.