visited in the seventh century. He arrived in Balkh at the close of an epoch, just a few short years before the Arab conquest brought Bactria within the Muslim orbit of the Umayyad caliphate of Damascus. Centuries before the Arabs came, camel trains were making their way to and from Balkh carrying furs and silks and precious gems from China, spices and perfumes from India, curiosities from Byzantium, frankincense and silver from Persia and wine from the Roman Empire. Down through the years, the Silk Road also brought ideas, slaves, arguments, discoveries and pilgrims from Isfahan and Lhasa, Samarkand and Athens, Xinjiang and Persepolis. Xuanzang found Nava Vihara teeming with scholars and pilgrims, its grand statues of the Buddha glittering with jewels. A dome-topped stupa stood twenty storeys high. Centuries after Islam laid its late-seventh-century foundations in Balkh, Nava Vihara was still thriving as Navbahar, a place of Buddhist worship and study.
That summer of 2010, I was standing on the Bala Hissar’s crumbling walls with Abdulrahim Parwani. We were looking out on the sad remnants of Navbahar, when he turned to me with a melancholy look. “There was even a barbershop,” he said. I noticed a bit of a gleam in his eye. Earlier, back in the town, Abdulrahim had been fondly remembering a barbershop from his boyhood days here. He couldn’t seem to recall where it was exactly, no matter how much he racked his brains. “I guess it’s gone, too,” he said sadly. Then he laughed out loud.
One of the most important things Abdulrahim taught me about Afghanistan is that it helps to keep your sense of humour. When I stepped into a slurry-filled ditch one day in Kabul after I mistook its dust-thick surface for the hard ground of a footpath, I was left with septic goo up to my knees. He laughed. Then he somehow got me to laugh along with him. The next day, it was my turn. A bright blue bruise had erupted right in the middle of his forehead. He’d been kneeling and bowing in the Muslim way of praying, except his head had missed the prayer mat and hit the cement floor a few times. I laughed at him, and he laughed with me.
We’d come to Balkh together almost as an afterthought, and mostly by luck. It had been three years since the two of us had signed on as founding members of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, and Canada was still showing every willingness to wash its hands of Afghanistan. We’d been invited to Mazar-e Sharif, the boisterous capital of Balkh province, to look into an idea that had been making the rounds of Toronto’s Afghan-Canadian community. Babur Mawladin, the Solidarity Committee’s Toronto president, was especially enlivened by it. He’d already talked about it with Balkh’s no-nonsense governor, Mohammad Atta Noor, who was just as enthusiastic.
The idea was fairly straightforward. After the parliamentary paralysis that brought Canada within a few votes of entirely withdrawing its troops from the UN’s ISAF coalition in Afghanistan in 2007, Canada’s minority Conservative government handed off the file to an independent panel headed up by former Liberal foreign minister John Manley. The Manley panel recommended extending the Canadian Forces’ battle group duties in Kandahar to the summer of 2011, after which the soldiers were to be pulled from Kandahar. The Solidarity Committee had few objections to that. Barack Obama had ascended to the White House partly on his pledge to take Afghanistan seriously, and he’d promised a major troop “surge” in the south. He’d come through. Canadian soldiers had spent four years doing brave work rousting brigands in Kandahar’s treacherous Taliban strongholds. We could let the Americans worry about that now. Maybe Canada could set up a new provincial reconstruction team in Balkh instead. The Canadian Forces could make use of itself, too, training up the local military and police.
Go north. It was a faint hope, all things considered, but worth looking into. Abdulrahim and I had arranged to meet various provincial officials, academics, human rights activists and journalists in Mazar-e Sharif. We were curious to hear what they had to say.
I’d told Abdulrahim that if we had a bit of spare time, I wanted to see something of the fabled city of Balkh. It was the hometown of the great Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet known to the English-speaking world as Rumi and commonly described as the greatest poet Islam has ever produced. I’d heard that the school Rumi first attended was still standing. Balkh was only a short drive from Mazar, the roads were mostly paved and we could hire a rattletrap cab for the morning. We really should see the place, I’d said. It was only then that I learned Abdulrahim had spent some of his early childhood in Balkh. He remembered playing in the shadow of the ancient walls. When the rains came, the children of Balkh would carefully reconnoitre the ground along the base of the walls, because a good downpour would sometimes dislodge old coins from some ancient realm. A handful had come into Abdulrahim’s possession this way. So yes, of course, we must try to get to Balkh, he’d said.
We’d intended to meet Governor Noor, but he’d been called away on some last-minute emergency shortly before we arrived at Mazar’s desolate and decrepit airport. So we had an opening in our schedule, and instead of having to hire a motor rickshaw or something to take us out to the fabled capital of the Kingdom of a Thousand Cities, we ended up travelling in the company of Colonel Asif Brumand, a bald, stocky and always beaming professor of medicine, a confidant of the governor. The colonel greeted us in Mazar in camouflage fatigues, packing a heavy sidearm. He introduced us to his friend Farid Ahmad, a tall and somewhat distracted mujahideen veteran who appeared to have been conscripted to our service because he owned a functioning Toyota Land Cruiser. Colonel Brumand informed us that the district police chief in Balkh happened to be an old acquaintance, who would be pleased to have us in for tea at the Balkh police station.
We piled into Farid’s Land Cruiser and headed out of town escorted by two Ford Rangers, one carrying four heavily armed members of the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the other carrying an equal number of similarly equipped members of the Afghan National Army (ANA). Farid himself sported a brace of pistols underneath his loose-fitting kameez. This was not the way that Abdulrahim and I usually got around, and it certainly wasn’t necessary for our security, but the governor’s office apparently considered it necessary to Afghan hospitality. The young police officers and soldiers in our escort seemed perfectly happy to have the lark of a morning out in the country, besides. “They are good men,” Farid confided on the drive out to Balkh, “but if the people around here see any Taliban, they will just attack them and kill them themselves.”
When we got to Balkh, Police Chief Wahdood treated us to the customary and affectionately solicitous Afghan ritual of tea, almonds, apples, melons and toffees. Actually, there is not always much police work to do, Wahdood confessed. With a staff of 90 and a sprawling district of only 150,000 people, his biggest headaches were disputes over title deeds, water rights, property lines and all the other minor tumults you’d expect from the steady trickle of families returning after long years of exile in Iran and Pakistan. I mentioned that the bucolic scenery on the road to Balkh seemed punctuated by an exceptional quantity of the rusting hulks of broken Russian tanks that you see elsewhere in Afghanistan. This caused Colonel Brumand and Chief Wahdood to fall into reveries about the old times. As the conversation turned to politics and pleasant gossip about provincial affairs, Abdulrahim and I wandered off in the company of Sali Mohammad, chief of the Balkh District Criminal Investigations Division, who seemed to have some time on his hands.
A smiling and slightly built man in civilian clothes, Sali ambled along with us through Balkh’s central gardens until we came to a nondescript rectangular stone edifice, a shrine of some kind. “Yes, this is Rabi’a Balkhi,” Abdulrahim said happily. The locals say this is the very place where the ninth-century princess-poet was cruelly imprisoned and died, Abdulrahim explained. The poems attributed to Rabi’a are of a distinctly erotic tone, inspired by her lovemaking with a palace slave named Baktash. As the story goes, when Rabi’a’s courtings came to light, her enraged brother imprisoned her in this dungeon. Heartbroken but defiant, she slashed her wrists and wrote poems to her beloved Baktash in her own blood, and thus the dungeon became her tomb. For more than a thousand years, the lovestruck young women of Bactria, Persia, Khorasan and all the other empires and nation-states that have come and gone in their places have offered up their devotions to Rabi’a, entrusting her with their sighs and their longings.
Sali
