peered inside a dark chamber containing a grand blue-tiled sarcophagus covered in a tattered green blanket. After Abdulrahim and I had squeezed through the window’s narrow opening and stepped down into the tomb, two young women descended into the darkness, paid their whispered respects to Rabi’a, covered their shy smiles behind their veils and climbed quickly back out into the light. “There was a tunnel,” Abdulrahim said, dimly remembering a story from his childhood about a tunnel that led from the tomb to the Bala Hissar, two kilometres distant. He shrugged and laughed.
We were soon on our rounds of Balkh in Farid’s white Land Cruiser, with the ANA and the ANP in their green Ford Rangers and children running along the dusty roads behind us. After only a few minutes, we were winding our way through a hive of narrow orchard lanes, and then there it was, like some giant, forlorn sandcastle, abandoned to the tides and falling apart: the khanaqa where the young Rumi had studied as a boy. It was the same Sufi madrassa where Rumi’s renowned father, Baha al-Din Walad, had taught, eight centuries ago, in the last days before the Mongol armies swept through and the shadows fell again.
The original structure was still evident in some high arches and collapsed domes, but other than that, it was just a mound. There was some evidence of a recent and rudimentary archaeological inventory. Kabul had little enthusiasm and less in the way of resources to take care of the place. Ankara and Tehran were squabbling over the rights to restore, protect and interpret Rumi’s ruin, but because of some arcane disagreement, work had stalled. It was probably just as well.
Some boys were tending a herd of goats nearby, and we managed to coax one of the boys to approach us. From Farid, I learned that his name was Sher Khan and he was seven years old. He was shy at first, but then he took me by a sleeve and guided me up into the mound, instructing me with words and gesticulations I couldn’t comprehend. Some of the other boys joined us. They scrambled up and down through collapsed passageways and alcoves and then stood silently with me, gazing up at the gently curved and half-vanished arches as though they were as astonished by the marvel of the place as I was.
As the story goes, the splendid Sufi boys’ school of Rumi’s childhood was destroyed by Genghis Khan. At that moment in history, the splendour of Balkh is said to have begun its long eclipse. A malaria epidemic that swept through the countryside and a flood that caused the Amu Darya to change its course away from Balkh are said to account for the city’s final withering at the close of the nineteenth century. By then, Mazar-e Sharif had displaced Balkh as the provincial administrative centre and locus of commerce and livelihood. But there was more to Balkh’s death than that.
There is also much more to the burial of Balkh’s great palaces and the forgetting of certain ancient Persian shrines. That story, too, involves an empire, one that was supposed to last a thousand years. It’s what those concentric rings of roadwork radiating outwards from the centre of town were all about. They weren’t ancient at all.
Go grubbing around in Quranic texts or CIA plots for the origins of Talibanism, and you come up empty. Look to the evidence of history, and you come across a network of well-worn roads that run back through time. Most of them peter out in the deserts and the mountains, but one of them forms a straight line back to a virulent Pashtun chauvinism that erupted in the years when the Pashtun royalty was propping itself up with military, financial, cultural and ideological support from the Third Reich. The lash of ethnic cleansing and cultural obliteration that the Taliban wielded to scourge Afghans in the 1990s was first put to the backs of the people of Balkh sixty years before, with Nazi Germany providing the guns, money, technical wherewithal and revisionist propaganda that Pakistan’s ISI would so generously provide the Taliban all those years later.
For the past 175 years or so, Afghanistan’s emirs, kings, shahs, mullahs and presidents have always had to rely on foreign stipends, subsidies, tributes or other such financial life supports from some foreign power, somewhere. By the early 1930s, the German colony in Kabul was the largest foreign enclave in Afghanistan, and German master-race theorists had convinced themselves and their Afghan hosts that they had discovered in Balkh the ancient Germanic “cradle of Aryanism.” The Afghan government’s Almanac of Kabul of 1933 begins with an essay entitled “The Race of the Afghans,” which claims Balkh as “the cradle where our nation was nurtured, even more, of the Aryan race.” The ring roads radiating from the city were laid down according to Nazi inspiration and an imagined Aryan history that required Balkh province to be cleansed of its Jews by an edict of the kingdom and the ancient city of Balkh to be emptied of its non-Pashtun inhabitants by decree of the king’s interior minister, Mohammad Gul Khan Momand. The young British art critic and historian Robert Byron happened to have lunch with Momand during a visit to Balkh in 1934. Although he did not know it at the time, Byron had already encountered Momand’s handiwork, several days earlier. On the road to Balkh, Byron had seen a caravan of hundreds of Balkhi Jews, travelling in the opposite direction, fleeing to Herat.
The ring roadwork, the purgings and the deportations began in earnest that year. The destruction did not require obliteration on the scale of the Taliban bombing of the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas during the late 1990s. But anything in Balkh that stood too obviously as a rebuke to the new Aryan version of ancient Afghan history was bulldozed or reinvented to represent the ruins of something else.
During the 1930s, Momand was known to British intelligence as a fanatical devotee of “Pashtunization”—the imposition of the Pashto language in all government transactions, the erasure of non-Pashtun cultural influences from the affairs of state, the marginalization of non-Pashtun Afghans and the mass resettlement of Pashtuns in the Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek and Turkmen regions of the country’s north. To the people of Balkh, Momand was known as “the second Genghis Khan.” According to Tajik historian Akhror Mukhtarov, author of Balkh in the Late Middle Ages, “The last significant changes in the fortunes of the city were tied to the uprooting of the indigenous inhabitants of Balkh and the influx of a Pashto-speaking population . . . simultaneously, he [Momand] took steps to ensure that existing monuments and grave markers provided no reminder that anyone other than Pashtuns had ever lived in the city.”
Historian Robert D. McChesney of New York University’s Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies has paid close attention to “the susceptibility of monumental commemorative structures to reinterpretation and consequent renovation.” The stories accounting for the origins of Balkh’s monuments proved acutely vulnerable to revisionism during the tenure of Momand, McChesney observes. Momand was a principal figure among the Pashtun elite, with whom the notion of a German-Pashtun kinship arising from a shared, imaginary Aryan origin found a particularly “warm reception.” Their affections did not go unrequited. “In those years, the idea of a superior Aryan race was growing out of the anti-semitism at the heart of the National-Socialist movement in post-war Germany, and because of it, German diplomats and scholars had come to see a kinship between themselves and the Afghans as Aryans,” McChesney writes. “Promoting Aryanism literally took a more concrete form in the decision to build a new Balkh.”
The Abu Nasr Parsa shrine and its surrounding gardens were to form the epicentre of a grand new city, with straight roads leading from its heart and circular roads emanating outwards as well, reminiscent of Washington, D.C., or Paris. The Abu Nasr Parsa shrine had served generations of Balkhis as a necropolis, surrounded by the precincts of a lively and welcoming Sufi madrassa. Momand obliterated everything but the shrine’s core and re-imagined it as an exemplary artifact of Aryan architecture, “the focal point of Aryan dreams,” as McChesney puts it.
The Afghan-Nazi relationship was sufficiently cozy that by 1936, the Reich had agreed to provide Afghanistan’s twenty-two-year-old Pashtun king, Zahir Shah, with military supplies worth 15 million deutsche marks. German military specialists took on a mentoring role for the Afghan army. By 1937, Lufthansa was running regular flights between Berlin and Kabul, and it wasn’t just Afghanistan that got swept up in the Nazi orbit. In February 1941, the German consulate in Tehran was pleased to report: “Throughout the country spiritual leaders are coming out and saying that ‘the twelfth imam [akin to the Judeo-Christian
