promote this trend is sharply to emphasize Muhammed’s struggle against the Jews in the olden days and that of the Führer today.”
The Second World War brought an end to direct Nazi influence in Afghanistan and to Balkh’s reinvention as the birthplace of the Aryan race. At least two thousand Afghan Jews had managed to evade the deportations of 1934, and many of Balkh’s original families eventually managed to return to their homes and their farms. Still, the 1930s-era effort to manufacture an Aryan Absurdistan can explain why the people of Balkh differ among themselves about the provenance of so many of the ruins, shrines and tombs that distinguish their little town.
Interior Minister Mohammad Gul Khan Momand is still remembered in some Afghan circles as a great statesman and Afghan patriot. The Pashtun chauvinism he nurtured during his tenure has unambiguously lived on. It is impossible to be certain in the absence of a proper census, but Pashtuns appear to make up somewhere between a third and a half of the Afghan population. Even so, Pashtun master-race delusions persist in the commonplace, reactionary notion that the Pashtuns are the only “pure” Afghans and are consequently entitled by their ethnicity to govern the country. Pashtun chauvinists educated in Nazi universities remained in the most intimate corridors of power in Afghanistan well into the 1960s. Afghan journalist Soraab Balkhi takes the point further, pointing to the “crypto-fascist” Afghan Mellat Party, which purports to be a kind of Afghan social-democratic party. The Afghan Mellat, founded in 1966 by the Nazi-educated Pashtun chauvinist Ghulam Farhad, persisted into the twenty-first century as a force in President Hamid Karzai’s Pashtun-dominated inner circle. “The party itself had gone through many changes, but has always kept the same imperious, self-serving goals,” Balkhi writes.
The Taliban are a Pashtun phenomenon, though to leave it at that would be woefully imprecise and invite slander against the Pashtun people. Neither are the Taliban merely a function of the Pashtun elite’s encounters with the Nazis—Talibanism is sufficiently grotesque without having to bring European fascists into it. But it does warrant attention that the Taliban and their Islamist contemporaries—Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Khomeinists and so on—have antecedents distinguished by an admiration for and often open collaboration with European fascism. North Americans may recoil from “clerical fascists” as a descriptive term for the Taliban. For many Afghans, however, it is completely without controversy that the Taliban years resembled nothing so much as the state-sanctioned purges, pogroms and expulsions visited upon Afghanistan’s Shia Muslims, Hazaras, Tajiks and Jews during the 1930s.
When the Taliban swept through Balkh in the 1990s, it was as though Mohammad Gul Khan Momand had returned a second time and Genghis Khan a third time. As always with the bloodletting Afghanistan’s various late-twentieth-century militias and armed groups exacted from each other, it is worthwhile noting that “atrocities were committed on all sides.” The Northern Alliance carried out at least one mass execution of captured Taliban soldiers. But nothing was equivalent to the genocidal bloodshed the Taliban visited upon the non-Pashtun civilians of the country’s north during the years and months leading up to September 11, 2001.
One bloodbath, the subject of a Human Rights Watch investigation, was the August 1998 Taliban takeover of Mazar-e Sharif. The Human Rights Watch preliminary report, gleaned from the accounts of witnesses who fled the slaughter, describes a “killing frenzy” that began with the Taliban (comprising Pashtun, Arab, Pakistani and Chechen fighters) shooting “anything that moved.” The Taliban next turned their attention to the city’s Shia Muslims; men who could not recite Sunni prayers on demand were either shot or rounded up for transportation to concentration camps. Taliban commander Maulawi Hanif then declared that the time had come to “exterminate” the city’s Hazaras. “During the house-to-house searches, scores and perhaps hundreds of Hazara men and boys were summarily executed,” the initial report found. A later UN investigation estimated that eight thousand people were murdered in this way over a two-month period. The Hazaras tried to flee the city, but thousands were caught. Men and boys had their throats slit like sheep in front of their families. The Hazara women and girls who were allowed to live were raped and enslaved.
Just as Momand had set about the work of obliterating Balkh’s rich cultural legacy and replacing it with an invented history, the Taliban banned the ancient Nowruz celebrations that had made Mazar famous throughout the former Persian realms. The same obscene “peace” that prevailed under Taliban rule elsewhere in Afghanistan fell like a dark shadow upon Mazar. Ride a bicycle with your husband or wife: a beating. If you’re a woman, and your footsteps can be heard when you walk down the street: a beating. If your husband says you are an adulteress: burial up to the waist, stoning to death by a crowd. You are said to be a homosexual: death by having a wall toppled over on you. The keeping of caged birds is against Islam because a bird might sing. No television sets allowed, no photography allowed, no card games, no chess playing, no music, no kite flying, no movies. Beards must be regulation length. No Western-style trousers permitted. If a woman lives in your house, you must paint over your windows. Shia Islam is apostasy. Debate is heresy. Doubt is sin.
History was repeating itself, and while it is sometimes said that history’s tragedies are repeated as farce, they do recur now and again as tragedy. But history is shadows and light, too. Sometimes its course is determined by dreams, and it is a dream that explains the breathtaking, heart-stopping beauty of the Shrine of Hezrat Ali in Mazar-e Sharif. The dream came to a Balkhi imam in the twelfth century, during the time of the Seljuk Empire, a Europe-sized Sunni domain that reached at its apogee from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea and from the Aral Sea to the Aegean Sea. There was a legend that the body of Hezrat Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, did not lie in glorious repose at Najaf, near Baghdad, but rather in some distant place. As the story went, Ali’s corpse had been spirited away from Najaf by his followers, who were concerned that it would be desecrated there. Ali’s remains were carried for weeks on the back of a white camel until the beast came to rest. The Balkhi imam dreamed that an old crypt on the plains to the east of Balkh was not a Zoroastrian tomb at all—and so not merely a fitting place for pre-Islamic Nowruz rituals—but rather the final resting place of Ali himself.
The Seljuk sultan Sanjar took the dream as divine direction and built a grand shrine around the crypt. The shrine was destroyed by Genghis Khan, but three centuries later, the Timurids restored it in the most extravagant style. That’s how it came to pass that Mazar is now Afghanistan’s third-largest city, a pilgrimage place for Sunni and Shia Muslims during the annual Nowruz festival. The city’s heart is a splendid blue-tiled, twin-domed mosque, the Tomb of the Exalted, enlivened by the flurries of hundreds of white doves.
It was only a few blocks from the Shrine of Hezrat Ali that Abdulrahim Parwani and I ended up meeting with several “civil society” leaders from Balkh. We wanted to know what they thought about the talk of shifting Canada’s efforts in Afghanistan from Kandahar province to Balkh province and its capital city. We heard from Nasima Azkiwa of the Balkh Civil Society and Human Rights Network; Ayatollah Jawed of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission; Rajab Ibrahimi of the Afghanistan Civil Society Organization; Arzoo Aby, the coordinator of the Mazar-e Sharif Youth Cultural Network; and some Mazar journalists. It was as though the question didn’t even need to be asked. Of course Canada should come north, everyone said.
The Swedes were running the Balkh Provincial Reconstruction Team, and while they were appreciated, they were regarded as parsimonious, timid and bureaucratic. The Germans were handling most of Balkh’s International Security Assistance Force duties, and they were all right. But Canada was seen as a particularly significant and aggressive ISAF contributor. Unlike the Germans or the British, Canada had no imperialist history. Unlike the United States, Canada didn’t carry all that Pakistan-ally baggage around. We didn’t bring any baggage at all. It was Canadians who would have to be convinced of the idea’s merits, everyone said, not the people or the government of Balkh.
In the cool of an evening, our hosts joined Abdulrahim and me on a stroll around the grand plaza of the Shrine of Hezrat Ali. Accompanying us was a young journalist who asked that I not mention his name. “There
