The Profane Invasion of Holy Bokhara
I
THE cities of ancient Turkestan have each their endearing adjectives; to mention a city without its adjective is inelegant. Thus Fergana is ‘empearled Fergana,’ circled as she is by cotton fields. Shahri-sabs, birthplace of Tamerlane, and just now the hot centre of land confiscation, is ‘Town of Beauty.’ Samarkand is always ‘the ancient,’ or else ‘green-curled Samarkand,’ an allusion to the trees of her irrigated district. But Bokhara has three adjectives: ‘high, holy, divinely descended Bokhara.’
It is also said of the cities in an ancient verse, ‘Samarkand is a jewel on the face of this earth, but Bokhara is the heart of Islam.’ And again the proverb runs, ‘Whoever says Bokhara’s walls are not straight, he is cast out of God. ’
Such was the reverence offered to that holiest stronghold of the Mussulman faith, into which I trudged one dusty morning in November to study the profane invasion of the past few years. For Bokhara has a new reputation since the Emir fell to the Soviet Republic. Its women unveiled themselves last year more spectacularly and with more resultant murders than anywhere else in Central Asia. Bokhara is to-day Soviet Bokhara; and, whatever else the Soviets may claim, they make no claim to holiness or divine descent, but quite the contrary.
It must at once be admitted that godliness has no relation to cleanliness anywhere in the East. The streets of Old Bokhara, through which I passed that morning, are narrow alleys of thick dust which the winter rains change to heavy mud. There have, it is true, been notable street improvements in the passionate modernization of Soviet days. Rough cobbles have been laid in the main bazaar streets, and, whereas it was formerly necessary to traverse their deep mud on horseback, they can now be walked, albeit somewhat filthily, at all seasons. The few pale electric street lights, which make a dim dusk of the crooked alleys, are also a late contribution to the Soviet religion of electrification, and were turned on for the first time amid appropriate ceremonies, while women shrieked and sophisticated men applauded. They have brought about a decrease of the picturesque night murders for which the city was famous. I learned also that the Institute of Tropical Medicine, a recent organization, has drained the malarial swamps which once were permanent within the very walls of the city, and which formerly offered to Bokhara’s dwellers a frequent transit to that paradise from which the city itself is divinely descended. No Western newcomer, however, without this information, would imagine that Bokhara could ever have been any dirtier than now.
None the less, or perhaps all the more, Bokhara was truly holy, filled with many ancient mosques and medresses (religious academies) to which aspiring students came from the plains of Kazakstan or the irrigated lands of the Uzbeks to study the Koran. Old Bokhara was so holy that no Jew was permitted to ride in its streets. Millionaire merchant he might be, — and rumor made all Bokharan Jews famous and wealthy merchants, — but he still might not escape Bokharan mud or dust by sitting even on a donkey; he was obliged to walk, wearing always around his middle a little rough rope, in token of slavery. To-day, Jew and Mussulman, Russian and Uzbek, are equal citizens in the streets of the city. Only the merchants and the clergy are downtrodden — they who once made the fame of Bokhara.
As I passed through narrow dusty alleys from the massive gate which once was shut at sundown and is now open continuously for the autobus line to Kagan, the high, unwindowed earthen walls behind which lay the homes of the Uzbeks, with their separate quarters for men and women, began to be broken at the base by shop fronts. Sellers of meat, bread, rugs, silks, and silver sat on carpeted floors a little above street level and invited would-be buyers to sit also, quaff tea, and begin bargaining. Shopping in the East is no mere business, but a leisurely pastime. Between the shops walked the Bokharan water carriers bearing large goatskins filled with water, from the necks of which they deftly expelled a scattering shower to lay the dust of the streets. I later learned that the profane invaders have put all these water carriers into trade-unions, with working clothes and vacations on pay provided by the householders who employ them.
As the alleys opened into a dusty square I saw the source of the water — the Holy Pool, surrounded by mosques and medresses and tea houses, with stone steps on all four sides down which the water carriers trudge to fill their goatskins. There are other pools in Bokhara visible through stone archways, some dark, some sunlit, but all of them stagnant. The Holy Pool, also unmoving, is the largest, the ‘Father of Waters.’ Its water is brought by ditches from the distant river to serve as drink for the Bokharans. Boiling it for tea is insufficient to disguise its taste — only strong coffee makes it drinkable; and after consuming this coffee I had trouble with my digestion.
Only one change has the profane invasion yet made in Bokhara’s water system. The Institute of Tropical Medicine, an admirable institut ion dating from 1924, has forbidden the water carriers to enter the pool with bare feet, and has thus brought under control a loathsome parasitic worm which burrowed in long curls under the skins of the city’s dwellers and was transported by the water. The water carriers still enter the pool, but they now wear shoes; thus civilization advances! Other changes are under way; a new waterworks, hailed as a modern triumph, is even now approaching the city. Lest unthinking Westerners envisage actual water pipes laid in dwellings, let me explain that the water will be delivered at three places in the city and there will be no resultant unemployment of water carriers.
But neither the water, with the continuous resultant indigestion, nor the bare hotel room, which lacked even the grace of this water to wash with, sending me to a common bucket on the verandah of the court, nor yet the dust, which rose in special clouds when the city’s cattle came home at evening, and lay like a London fog obscuring the sunset — none of these things could prevent Bokhara from being a constant thrill of joy. Here is the most colorful bazaar of Central Asia, running for miles under covered streets. Every corner, every shop front, is crowded with gorgeous pictures; old bearded Abrahams and Noahs from the Sunday School cards haggling over ancient silks, or roasting succulent mutton over an open fire, or preparing hot meatfilled crusts of such tempting odor that one again imperiled internal peace by indulgence. From deep in the shops came the sound of music, monotonous throb of tambourine and baraband or the wailing of a variety of stringed instruments in native strains which cannot be reduced to European notes. The method of writing this music was lost five hundred years ago, but has now been revived from ancient manuscripts. Meanwhile the melodies themselves have passed from musician to musician through the ages. The Central Asians are so devoted to them that they sit even in the dust of the streets with their backs against a shop front and their legs thrust out under the passing donkeys, thrumming their musical instruments in oblivious contemplation — the same look with which the old men in the chai-khanas (tea houses) watch the centuries roll by them.
II
To-day, however, in the very midst of the amusing donkeys and their serious human freight, in the swirl of camels, under the very shadow’ of the Tower of Death whence former emirs cast enemies to death in the market place — everywhere in Bokhara are signs of a new and unholy invasion which makes no truce with the picturesque life of bazaar and medresse and Holy Pool. Right across its waters I see a great red banner waving ‘Welcome to the Regional Congress of Trade-Unions.’ Beneath that sign is a large clubroom with ugly instructive placards about tuberculosis, the industrial loan, the unveiling of women, venereal diseases — everything at once that is new and scientific. On the floor above is a crowded cinema, displaying a feature film made in old Tashkent by the Uzbekistan State Motion Pictures — ‘The Second Wife,’ a propaganda tragedy of polygamous marriage. I visit the film and enjoy its picturesque Uzbek interiors, but conclude that Central Asian audiences resemble the Russians at least in this — they can take their tragedy undiluted for three hours. This clubhouse and motionpicture theatre are housed in a former medresse.
Many other old medresses have been turned to secular uses. Above one I note, ‘Dormitory of Construction Workers Union’; above another, ‘People’s Club and Red Tea House. ’ The largest medresse of all, overlooking the Holy Pool, is being remodeled for a women’s club — what greater profanation than this, for women to meet here in public? Into still another medresse I come by chance, to witness what may have been the legal death of the last religious academy of Bokhara.
A pale-faced clerk, local representative of the Committee on Ancient Monuments, faces a group of sullen, swarthy sons of Allah, Kazaks from the desert, Kirghiz from the eastern steppe, who have come to enter a course of religious study announced to reopen, after many years’ interruption by war and famine, in the most holy medresse Mir-Arab, the favored medresse of the deposed Emir. It is clearly an attempt of the Mohammedan clergy to try out the Soviet Government, and most predictions are that they will succeed. ‘Have we not religious freedom and are these not adult students?’ The young clerk of the Committee on Ancient Monuments informs them, however, as he refers to lists in his large black ledger, that all rooms in the medresse have been apportioned to other uses and that none are available for their residence. Thus neatly he cuts the ground from under their expectations, without the slightest mention of religion, though all know this is his reason.
They make no loud protests, though any one of the desert sons could have felled the slight clerk with a hand touch. They only stare bitterly and file out.
‘They will protest,’ says the clerk wearily, ‘to the government at Samarkand.’
‘And what will be the outcome?’ I ask him.
‘How do I know?’ he answers. ‘I merely obey orders. ’
‘To what extent does the local population support you?’ I ask, curious to learn how religious, after all, is Holy Bokhara.
‘It is hard to tell,’ he confesses, ‘but I think they are indifferent as to what happens to the clergy.’
‘And if the clergy try to arouse them against you?’
‘They did try,’ he answers briefly. ‘It was liquidated.’
He alluded, of course, to the Bashmach movement, the ‘Holy War’ against the Bolsheviki, last and most persistent of all the armed attacks on the Soviet Union. It sprang up when the Emir of Bokhara fell; it was given form by Enver Pasha’s political disappointments and by the militaryreligious ambition of Ibrahim, a wouldbe Genghis Khan of the hill tribes. Though beaten as an important foe in 1924, it dragged its way through bandit raids of the two following years, and the echoes of it still survive in occasional murders of unveiled women and young Communists in distant villages.
The late and unlamented Emir of Bokhara, who still survives as a wholesale caracul merchant in Kabul, was one of the last of the theocratic despots who once ruled all of Central Asia. The Emir’s officials had both civil and religious authority; the courts were church courts, with the Koran as law code, liberally interpreted by those in power. The schools were church schools in which small boys squatted on rugs to recite the Koran, learned by rote in an alien language. In its treatment of Jews, and peasants and workers, Old Bokhara was of the early Middle Ages. Not even the industrial capitalism of Russia had touched it; the first factory ever known in this ancient city is a silk mill opened recently by the Soviet Government.
III
The tale of the Emir’s fall and flight and of the Holy War thereafter has passed into legend, cunningly embroidered by all the Eastern tellers of tales. My story comes from the Emir’s adjutant via an Armenian journalist, and I do not guarantee anything except its picturesqueness. It may quite well be true; it carries the flavor of ancient Asia and contradicts no facts elsewhere reported.
In 1920, when the revolutionists set fire to the castle, said my informant, Emir Said-Alim-Bahadur-Khan fled away to the hills of Eastern Bokhara, where is now the Republic of the Tajiks. He left his wives to the number of a hundred, but took a few of his best-loved boys, who could travel faster and pleased him better. With him went also three thousand of his clergy officials. The Uzbeks, through whose territory he passed, had been heavily taxed and hated the Emir, so they systematically stole baggage and killed stragglers. And a whisper ran through all the peoples that ‘Emir Said-Alim rides covered with black dust’ — omen of death or ultimate disaster.
From time to time, at weary stopping places, the Emir got out his English letter of credit, indicating that fiftyfour million gold rubles cannily deposited by his father in London were still available. He remarked dismally: ‘If England does n’t pay, there is no hope, even in the next world.’ To improve immediate finances, since the London banks were very distant, the Emir sold high titles, a method of raising money which grew more effective as he neared Dushembe by the borders of Afghanistan, where the people are especially religious.
Weary with his journey, Emir SaidAlim desired to rest awhile with Avliakul-Bek, a high official of his own creation. To refuse hospitality is a thing that is not done in the East. But Avliakul, mindful of the high cost of entertaining an emir, who might remain many days, whispered abroad the rumor that the Reds were close behind in the hills. This caused SaidAlim to hurry on. At Dushembe he was well received, and rested many weeks to replenish his harem with girls brought as presents from the countryside.
More adequate means of financing his campaigns now appealed to the Emir. There were in Dushembe many wealthy Jewish merchants of Bokhara. The Emir accused them of bringing the Bolsheviki into the land; he beheaded them and took their fortunes. Thus he acquired sixty lakhs of silver, three quarters of a million dollars. The deceitfulness of Avliakul was also discovered at this time, when a reconnoitring party found no trace of Reds in the hills. So the Emir beheaded Avliakul also, annexing twenty-five lakhs of silver and all of the deceiver’s wives.
Worthy of the Arabian Nights is the tale of Ibrahim, who rose from the post of bandit chief among the Lokei tribes to be Commander of the Holy War against the Reds. Ibrahim it was whose daring raid through the hills in search of Bolsheviki first disclosed the deceitfulness of Avliakul. For this service the Emir wished to ennoble the young chieftain, and, searching for a post which demanded the least book learning, since Ibrahim was illiterate, he fixed upon the title, ‘Keeper of the Royal Stables.’ To this, however, the Emir’s advisers objected, saying that Ibrahim was by profession a horse thief, and to give him such a post would rouse nothing but mirth in all Islam. On this the Lokei tribe to which Ibrahim belonged declared their tribal honor attacked. Were they not all professional horse thieves, and honorable followers of the Prophet? The matter was settled, and the too conservative city-bred advisers discarded. Ibrahim secured the post of honor and rapidly rose to others, especially after the Emir himself left the discomforts of the hills and took up residence in Kabul.
Many are the tales reported of this young brigand of the hill tribes. Of his love for Dona Gul (the Unique Rose), a wealthy widow, and how she disdained to marry a horse thief, but answered his entreaties: ‘Come to me when you are Bek, and I will marry you. ’ Of how he sent for Dona Gul on the day when forty thousand horsemen paraded before him, one thousand armed with rifles and the rest with mountain weapons — and married thus the bride of his choice, who is still his one wife in Afghanistan, for the men of the mountain tribes are not like the city emirs.
Of how he dealt with Enver Pasha, that famous Turk, who tried to use the Bolshevist Congress of Eastern Peoples in Baku for a Pan-Turk movement, and, being rebuked by Zinoviev, fled away into Central Asia to organize the Holy War against the Reds. Enver was armed with the holiest relics of Moslem tradition, but his outward form was too European for the mountain warriors. So Ibrahim feigned to think him an impostor and imprisoned him in a cave, with a watermelon rind as his only drinking cup. This the Emir heard in far Kabul, and wrote a sharp letter addressed ‘To the Lokei Tribe and all known and unknown thieves. ’
While yet the messengers were some days from his stronghold, the news of this letter reached Ibrahim by the subtle telegraphy of the hills. So he set Enver free and made his excuses, and secured from Enver a signed paper stating that he had been treated with all courtesy. Thus, when the Emir’s envoys arrived with their letter of denouncement, Ibrahim was able to reply calmly, ‘My Lord the Emir is deceived; no one has arrested Enver Pasha; lo, here he sits in honor!’ And Enver himself sat silent, hoping to unite all forces and lead the Holy War.
However, it fitted not with Ibrahim’s plans that Enver should be leader, so he undermined him by the craft of the hills, leading him into difficult positions where the Bolsheviki beat him and his authority was lessened. So at last Enver Pasha was killed by chance in an encounter with a Bolshevist reconnoitring party, and lay many days dead before it was known that he was Enver. Then the Red soldier who had stolen the shirt from the dead body found in its pocket a gold-bound Koran, sacred gift from the Sultan, and thus was the death of the famous leader made known. After Enver’s death Ibrahim secured the title ‘Ghazi, ’ Commander of the Holy War, and kept it till the people, weary of strife, forsook him, and he also fled away to Afghanistan, where he still remains.
Such was the tale I heard of the Emir’s fall and the Holy War — a tale of an ancient Asia that has vanished in four years’ time so completely that its high priests obey the low-voiced order of a pale clerk in charge of Ancient Monuments, and disperse their last religious school.
IV
The modern voices in Old Bokhara are startlingly different. In the city palace of Emir Said-Alim, a hideous fortress shattered by bombardment, I saw in the rooms above the ancient dungeons the secretary of the Regional Executive Committee receiving delegations of peasant women. The women came unveiled, bringing petitions. In the worn stone halls were antituberculosis posters, placards of the State Fire Insurance, of the State Savings Bank, of the cooperatives, agricultural placards proclaiming the benefits of tractors, village libraries, and sanitary stations. The People’s House of Old Bokhara advertised a benefit opera ‘for the funds of the united Red Cross and Red Crescent.’ Another poster in red showed a gigantic workman and peasant standing guard over a factory and a university — twin shrines of the new regime.
Among the picturesque shop fronts and the haggling Abrahams and Noahs are the signs of the Workers Cooperatives, of the Uzbek State Trading Company, of the branches of the State Savings Bank. I note on an ancient arched door the sign of the ‘Gusar People’s Library,’ and know that the inhabitants of this street, or ‘Gusar,’ have established a library of their own. How many of them, one winders, could read four years ago? In the large shop of the Government Publishing House below my hotel I can even buy ribbons for my portable typewriter.
Just outside the ancient gate which once was shut at sundown, and where all travelers were searched before they were permitted to enter or leave the holy city, is Bokhara’s first factory, a silk filature mill, employing five hundred workers. As befits the first shrine of the new religion, it tries to be a model factory, with day nursery, new workmen’s dwellings, a dining hall, a club, a radio, a motion-picture machine, and a wall newspaper. Its young director sees in it no commonplace mechanism for producing silk thread, but civilization itself descending on Old Bokhara. He tells me how, in selecting employees, they apportioned them to as many villages as possible, ‘so that all might share the cultural stimulus of factory life.’ How the first remark of the Labor Exchange was, ‘Veiled women cannot work in factories’ — and at this the veils began to come off in even the darkest villages. The large dusty space around the factory buildings is destined, he assures me, to become a recreation park. Turning from him, I read in the wall newspaper, written by employees in both Russian and Uzbek, the new evangel: ‘Forward to industrialize the land.’
In rooms once devoted to learning the Koran by rote under the long pole of chastisement with which the watchful teacher stimulated attention, I saw ‘new style’ schools, where Uzbek boys engaged in the evening in ‘collective study’ — without a teacher, but with grave discipline explaining next day’s decimal and geometry problems to each other. In the Mothers’ Consultation I saw a procession of Uzbek mothers cutting the long sleeves from their baby’s cramping clothes under the instruction of a Russian woman physician, and when I marveled that they should accept advice so obediently the doctor answered, ‘That woman has buried her first ten babies. The eleventh comes to the Consultation — and lives.’
No wonder the dazzled native woman hearkened willingly to the magic that had wrought this wonder.
And yet, for all the saving of life by the new health measures, the population of Holy Bokhara has fallen. Not by death, but by exit. Once a trading town and a sacred capital, it is now a mere regional centre under a government which disbelieves not only in God, but even in private trade. The clergy have moved away to more and more distant villages, high renowned mudarisses contenting themselves with the post of lowly rural mullah so that they may still denounce the accursed Bolsheviki and secure tribute from believers. Even into the hills the profane invasion pursues them; the radio and the movie penetrate. In spite of the fact that drama and photography are anathema to all good Moslems, the traveling cinema has a wild success in the villages, and has led to a new proverb in Central Asia: ‘Curses don’t work against the movies.’
Competing with the old chai-khanas of Bokhara, where the tea devotees squat forever in genial converse, and passively contemplate the march of empty time down the ages, there arise the ‘Red chai-khanas,’ filled with placards and instruction and statues of Lenin.
Is it indeed possible that the East may lose its leisure, and that even tea cannot be quaffed unmixed with propaganda? In the rooms above the tea houses are classes in the Latinized alphabet, in Marx, and in stenography. The young musicians of the Uzbeks, even while they scoff at the European music scale, are humming new songs to the ancient melodies — songs in praise of the factory.
In a small stone court, flanked by tiny cells where once lived religious students, I attended the meeting of the local Gusar, or street assembly. Men, women, and children from some sixty households came together in what is to-day the lowest unit of Bokharan city government. Women sat shyly removed from men, but they were unveiled and took vociferous part in the proceedings. Discussion turned on using this ancient court for a modern school; on the fortnight’s vacation due the street water carrier by trade-union rules; on the collection of subscriptions to the new government loan. As the meeting began there sounded from the mosque across the street the voice of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Some of the group assembled looked uneasy and turned their heads; but none arose from his seat or answered the summons to pray.
Even as the mullahs and muezzins have fallen on evil days, so have the once-famed traders of Old Bokhara. For all its gorgeous color, the ancient bazaar is not so wealthy as it once was in rugs and silver and silks; as a would-be purchaser, I even found it shabby. The local merchants sadly bewailed its decline, blaming the rise of village cooperatives, which have carried trade out of the towns to the rural districts.
A one-time millionaire, introduced to me as ‘a very famous merchant of former days,’ hastened to disclaim the title; he substituted for it ‘a former revolutionist.’ Very typical this of the evil repute that has come upon private traders. Can even the centuries-old bazaar of divinely descended Bokhara prove mortal?