A Trip to Dushanbe via Tehran on the First Anniversary of 9/11

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Today, as we mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, my thoughts return to a journey I made exactly a year after those attacks. On 11 September 2002 I was travelling from Delhi to Dushanbe in Tajikistan, via Tehran. At the time it seemed merely an inconvenient date on which to undertake an international journey, but looking back after nearly a quarter of a century, the date has become inseparable from my memories of the trip.

We were quite a large academic group. Among my companions were Professor Ishtiaq Ahmad Zilli, our revered teacher; Professor Azhar Ansari; Professor Azermi Dukht Naheed Safavi; several other colleagues from the Persian stream; Dr Iqbal Ghani Khan; Najaf Haider; and myself. There were others whose names, after all these years, I no longer recall with equal certainty. The moment we entered Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi, it became apparent that we had chosen the wrong date to travel, because it was the exact first anniversary of the attacks in the United States and the airport was tense, with extra security everywhere. Zilli Sahib surveyed the situation and gave us some very sensible advice: we should be cautious, he said, and under no circumstances do anything that might attract unnecessary attention towards ourselves. We dutifully joined the queue for baggage check-in.

Najaf handed over his luggage before me. I checked in my suitcase, received my boarding pass and had just begun walking away when Zilli Sahib called out to me; he wanted me to wait for him. All hell broke loose. Here was a bearded gentleman in a sherwani, looking every inch a traditional Maulana, calling out to a passenger who had just handed over his luggage, and that too on the first anniversary of 9/11. Security personnel immediately stopped me, my suitcase, which had already disappeared behind the counter, was retrieved, and I was asked to identify it, open it, and submit its contents to a particularly thorough examination. Later, when we reached the security check, I could see that poor Zilli Sahib himself was receiving perhaps the most intensive scrutiny of us all. So much for his excellent advice that we should avoid attracting attention.

Our journey took us first to Tehran, where we had to spend a few days before catching our connecting flight to Dushanbe. As we landed at Mehrabad Airport, those of us from History were rather excited. It was my first visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and for some of us Iran was still an unfamiliar world, while our colleagues from the Persian Department were perfectly cool, having travelled there several times before and being quite happy to remind us of the fact. Najaf, I. G. Khan and I decided that we should have coffee. I confidently announced that I possessed Iranian currency, a 500-rial note, which I assumed would comfortably take care of our requirements. It turned out that my great reserve of Iranian currency could buy us precisely one cup of coffee. I. G. Bhai immediately came to our rescue, because he had a few sachets of tea in his carry bag; he walked confidently to the tea shop and asked how much they charged for hot water. “Free,” he was told, and so we obtained our hot water, produced the tea sachets, and sat at Mehrabad Airport enjoying cups of tea which at that particular moment tasted better than anything we might have purchased.

One episode in Tehran has remained particularly vivid in my memory. Najaf and I had to visit Tehran University, for which we needed a taxi, so naturally we turned to Zilli Sahib. He was madrasa educated and had an impressive command of classical Persian, and we asked him to summon a taxi and explain to the driver exactly where we wished to go. Zilli Sahib did what, to Najaf and me, appeared to be an admirable job, speaking at some length in fluent, chaste Persian and carefully explaining our destination. The taxi driver listened patiently, then turned towards me and said, “Āqā, man Hindustāni nemidānam,” which meant, “Sir, I don’t know Hindustani.” For a moment Najaf and I were taken aback, then we realised what had happened. Zilli Sahib was certainly speaking Persian, but it was the Persian of the Indian scholarly tradition, preserved in our madrasas and inherited from the Indo-Persian world of the Sultanate and Mughal periods; its pronunciation, cadence and even aspects of its vocabulary were far removed from the everyday Persian spoken in the streets of contemporary Tehran. To our taxi driver, Zilli Sahib’s magnificent Persian apparently sounded like some variety of Hindustani: and why not? After all it had been the official language in India for a thousand years!

I had already encountered the same linguistic divide in our guest house. Iranian television serials were being shown, but however hard I tried, I could barely follow the dialogue, because the rapid colloquial Persian of ordinary conversation defeated me. Then a Mullah would appear on television and begin delivering a sermon, and suddenly I could understand him. The Mullah had moved into a more formal register, with vocabulary, constructions and rhetorical conventions much closer to the Persian with which we in India, specially those used to majlis tradition, were familiar. I could not understand the lovers quarrelling in an Iranian television serial, but I could understand the cleric telling them how they ought to live.

The taxi ride, however, had another surprise for us. Once the driver realised that I understood at least some Persian, (I having been exposed to Iranians coming home since my childhood and my father conversing with them), he began speaking to me slowly and asked my name. I told him, and he immediately asked, “Shomā Sayyid hastid?”, meaning, “Are you a Saiyid?” I confirmed that I was. “Husaini Saiyid?” I said Rezavi, and he appeared pleased; then he looked into his rear-view mirror at Zilli Sahib, studied our revered teacher for a moment, and delivered his judgement: “Kheyli makrūh!” I had no answer, because the casual sectarian prejudice behind the remark was obvious. In the course of a single taxi ride we had encountered both the linguistic distance separating Indo-Persian from modern spoken Iranian Persian and some of the sectarian assumptions through which strangers could still read one another.

In Tehran we were lodged in a guest house belonging to Danishgah-i Nur, with four or five of us sharing a suite. I. G. Bhai, meanwhile, had a problem of a different sort. On our way to the guest house he expressed a desire for a drink, and we informed him that this was the Islamic Republic of Iran and that his chances were not particularly promising. We had underestimated both I. G. Bhai and the Islamic Republic, because by evening he had somehow managed to discover and wrest a bottle from the university’s PVC, who otherwise appeared to be a bearded and exceedingly pious gentleman. Thus, while some of us were discovering Iran, I. G. Bhai was discovering its exceptions, and he thoroughly enjoyed his stay in the Islamic Republic.

After a few days in Tehran we flew onwards to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. As our plane, an Aeroflot, entered and landed at Dushanbe International Airport, a few quite Russian-looking officers entered the plane and in a very authoritative order barked at us to come with our passports in our hands. As we queued out, our passports were literally snatched from us. Out of the plane, we were made to board a bus and taken to a large iron gate with many military personnel with guns standing there. There was no shade, except a tree which could shelter us from the scorching sun above, and here we were made to stand for what appeared an hour before the gate was clanged opened. Once again a fierce-looking army officer appeared, and this time he would call out a name and the person had to scramble towards him; he would push the passport in his face and bark, “Enter!” It all appeared to be straight from some old Russian war movie. Once one entered the dark iron gate, there was a shed to one side from where we were supposed to claim our baggage from a static belt, but once outside the airport finally, it was then that the natural and the maintained beauty of Dushanbe would hit you.

There were certain things about Dushanbe which struck me almost immediately. The first was its cleanliness: the roads appeared spotlessly clean, and I saw neither beggars nor vagabonds wandering along them. There were covered markets where people could buy and sell their goods with considerable ease and order, but what impressed me most were the children. Every schoolchild appeared to have a uniform, and those uniforms were spotless; during school hours the children were in school, and I do not remember seeing children loitering in the markets or performing odd jobs when they should have been studying. Tajikistan had been independent for only about eleven years, and the destructive civil war that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union had ended only a few years earlier, yet in the ordered streets, the organised markets and, above all, the visible place given to schooling, reminiscences of the old Soviet era still lingered. Of course, a visitor spending a few days in a city sees only its surface, and I could not pretend to know the realities of poverty, employment or education in Tajik society from such a short visit; but these were my impressions of Dushanbe in 2002, and they have stayed with me.

Our accommodation was in what was described as a five-star hotel. It was comfortable enough, but two features of the room have remained fixed in my memory. The first was the plumbing: the toilet seat and the bathtub seemed to depend upon a single water tap, and one simply turned it in whichever direction one required the water. It was ingenious and economical, although not quite what I had expected in a five-star hotel. The second surprise was the television, because among the channels available in the room was an adult channel, accompanied, if my memory serves me correctly, by an indication that a certain kind of room service could also be arranged should the guest so desire. My Maulana companion was quite scandalised.

Dushanbe also solved a historical problem for me. I had, of course, read the Baburnama, and one of the things that repeatedly strikes a reader is Babur’s longing for Central Asia after he had established himself in India. He had conquered Hindustan and acquired an empire, but he continued to pine for the things he had left behind: its climate, its gardens, its fruits and, very particularly, its melons. Sitting in India and reading these passages, one understands Babur intellectually, but one can also wonder why a man who had just conquered an empire should become quite so emotional about a kharbuza. Then I tasted the Central Asian kharbuza and tarbuz, and only then did I understand Babur. They were something else, and their flavour and sweetness have to be experienced before one understands why Babur remembered them so fondly after reaching Hindustan. There are some historical sources, it seems, which require a rather unusual form of fieldwork, because to understand certain passages of the Baburnama one really ought to taste a Central Asian melon. Four and a half centuries after Babur wrote of the fruits he had left behind, there I was in Dushanbe thinking that I now understood why the man complained.

One evening we were invited to a grand official banquet. The gathering seemed to include the entire who’s who of Dushanbe, senior officials, scholars, dignitaries and religious figures, and among them was the Imam-i Juma, who immediately reminded me in appearance of the senior Imam Bukhari of Delhi’s Jama Masjid. The seating arrangements produced very different reactions among members of our group. I. G. Bhai discovered, with considerable satisfaction, that he had been seated safely at some distance from the Imam, while Zilli Sahib, on the other hand, was delighted to find that his seat was beside the revered religious gentleman. He turned towards me with evident satisfaction and said, “Nadeem Miyan, we are sitting next to the revered man. Thus we will be saved from the haram drinks!” His reasoning appeared impeccable, because if there was one table at an official banquet in Muslim Central Asia where alcohol was unlikely to appear, surely it would be the table at which the Imam-i Juma himself was seated. Events proved otherwise. As the banquet progressed, wine began to flow, and indeed, to our increasing astonishment, the table where it seemed to flow most freely was ours. Poor Zilli Sahib remained steadfast, and although glasses were being filled all around him, he would not touch the grape wonder flowing so generously across our table. Eventually the Imam noticed, and he looked at Zilli Sahib, apparently puzzled by this strange Indian Maulana who persistently refused what everyone else around him was happily drinking. Then came the question: “Āqā, shomā Musalmān nist?”, meaning, “Sir, are you not a Muslim?” One had to see Zilli Sahib’s face at that moment to understand his plight, because the man who had happily taken his seat beside the Imam in the confident belief that proximity to a revered religious figure would save him from haram drinks was now being asked by that very Imam whether his refusal to drink meant that he was not a Muslim. There was very little any of us could add, and Dushanbe had once again overturned our assumptions.

Academic conferences have hazards of their own. Unfortunately for I. G. Bhai, I was asked to chair the session in which he was presenting his paper, and before the session began he came to me with a very clear instruction that I was to give him sufficient time. I did, and indeed I gave him as much time as I reasonably could, but eventually the responsibilities of the chair prevailed and I rang the bell signalling that he should conclude. Without pausing, without losing his rhythm and without changing his expression, I. G. Bhai smoothly shifted into Urdu; since apparently nobody else in the room understood the language, he inserted a private communication into his scholarly presentation: “Saaley, waapas chal, bataunga!” Then, just as smoothly, he returned to his paper. It was extraordinarily difficult not to laugh, while the audience remained completely unaware that anything unusual had happened.

The historian in me found his greatest reward during our visit to Qalaʿ-i Hisor, outside Dushanbe. The qalaʿ, or fort, stands upon a hill overlooking the surrounding landscape, and immediately below it are a number of structures, including several tombs associated with Naqshbandi saints and a large sarai. The moment I saw the sarai, I experienced an extraordinary sense of familiarity, because it reminded me immediately of the sarai of Shaikh Chilli at Thanesar in India. The resemblance was remarkable, and indeed my feeling at the time was that if someone familiar with one of the two buildings were blindfolded, taken to the other and then asked where he was, he might genuinely be confused, because they appeared almost like replicas of one another. For me this was much more than an architectural curiosity. As historians of Mughal India, we routinely speak of Central Asian architectural influences, and we use terms such as Timurid, Central Asian and Persianate while tracing the movement of arches, domes, courtyard plans, decorative forms and building techniques; but standing before that sarai at Hisor was different, because here was the architectural relationship between Central Asia and India suddenly made tangible. Of course, architectural influence does not mean that one building was simply copied from another, since forms travelled with craftsmen, merchants, Sufis, soldiers, political elites and patrons, and once they reached India they were adapted to local materials, requirements and aesthetic traditions. India did not merely copy Central Asian architecture, because it absorbed and transformed it, yet the resemblance between the Hisor sarai and that of Shaikh Chilli at Thanesar was so striking that, for me, the Central Asian connection was no longer an abstraction in an architectural history; it stood there in brick and mortar.

But Hisor had another surprise awaiting me. Below the fort gate was a platform associated with a tree and a spring or fountain, known as Shajar-i Sher ʿAli and Chashma-i Sher ʿAli. When I first heard the name Sher ʿAli, I naturally thought of the famous poet and statesman ʿAli Sher Nawaʾi, but I was wrong, because I was informed that Sher ʿAli was none other than Imam ʿAli ibn Abi Talib. The local tradition was extraordinary. Imam ʿAli, I was told, had come personally to this region, and it was at his hands that the Turks here had become Muslims; the spring itself was one of his miracles, because when Imam ʿAli struck the ground with his foot, water gushed forth, and the tree had grown to provide shade for him while he rested. What fascinated me even more was that this was not simply an old story being recounted for the benefit of visitors. People came reverentially to the spot, drank water from the Chashma-i Sher ʿAli, ate a leaf from the Shajar-i Sher ʿAli, and carried away some of the water and leaves as tabarruk. As a historian, I knew that Imam ʿAli had never travelled to Tajikistan and had not personally converted the Turks of Central Asia, but in a sense that was beside the point. What I was witnessing was the historical geography of sacred memory, because here was ʿAli, transported by collective memory hundreds of miles beyond the geographical limits of his actual life, transformed into the miraculous bringer of Islam to Central Asia; a spring, a tree and an entire local landscape had absorbed him into their sacred history.

There was something else which made the experience particularly striking. This was a region deeply associated with Sunni Islam and the Naqshbandi tradition, and we were standing close to the tombs of Naqshbandi saints, yet people were reverentially drinking water and consuming leaves associated with Imam ʿAli, carrying them home as tabarruk. It was a vivid reminder that popular Islam has never observed sectarian boundaries quite as rigidly as theologians, and sometimes historians, would have us imagine, because reverence for ʿAli could travel easily across Sunni and Shiʿi divisions, just as saints, shrines, springs, trees and local sacred landscapes acquired lives of their own. Hisor therefore offered me two very different connections between Central Asia and India. One was material and architectural, embodied in the extraordinary resemblance between its sarai and that of Shaikh Chilli at Thanesar, while the other belonged to sacred memory and popular belief, where stories and forms of devotion had travelled across enormous distances and become thoroughly localised.

There was yet another Central Asia waiting for us in the museum at Dushanbe. Among its attractions were images of the Buddha, votive stupas and remains associated with the Buddhist past of the region. For someone accustomed to thinking about Central Asia principally through its Persianate, Turkic and Islamic history, these objects were a powerful reminder of a much older world. Long before the coming of Islam, Central Asia had formed part of the great networks through which Buddhism travelled from the Indian subcontinent and Afghanistan into the regions beyond, and eventually towards China; monks, merchants, pilgrims, texts and artistic forms had moved along these routes for centuries. Within a few days in and around Dushanbe, therefore, one could encounter several Central Asias: Buddhist, Iranian, Turkic, Islamic, Sufi, Soviet and post-Soviet. None had entirely erased what came before it.

Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since that journey, and oddly enough it is not the formal conference proceedings that I remember most clearly. I remember the tense atmosphere at Delhi airport on 11 September 2002, and Zilli Sahib warning us not to attract attention, only to call out to me moments later and inadvertently ensure that security took a very special interest in my suitcase. I remember arriving at Mehrabad with my magnificent 500 rials and discovering that my fortune would purchase only one cup of coffee, and I remember I. G. Bhai triumphantly producing his tea sachets and discovering that hot water was free. I remember a Tehran taxi driver listening patiently to Zilli Sahib’s chaste Persian before turning to me and saying, “Sir, I don’t know Hindustani.” I remember my discovery that I could not understand an Iranian television serial but could quite comfortably follow the Mullah’s sermon. I remember I. G. Bhai’s remarkable ability to procure a drink in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I remember the spotless roads of Dushanbe, its covered markets and the children going to school in their immaculate uniforms, and in them I could still see something of the old Soviet order lingering in a newly independent country. I remember tasting the melons of Central Asia and finally understanding a complaint Babur had made nearly five hundred years earlier. I remember Zilli Sahib happily sitting beside the Imam-i Juma in the belief that the holy man’s presence would protect him from haram drinks, only to discover that the wine flowed most freely at our table, and I remember the expression on his face when the Imam himself, puzzled by his abstinence, asked, “Āqā, shomā Musalmān nist?” I remember I. G. Bhai’s threat, delivered seamlessly in Urdu in the middle of his academic paper when I had the temerity to ring the chairman’s bell. I remember the peculiar plumbing of our five-star hotel and my Maulana companion’s horror at discovering what other forms of room service were apparently available. But above all, perhaps, I remember Hisor.

I remember standing before a Central Asian sarai and seeing Thanesar in India. I remember a tree and a spring below an old fortress, and people gathering around them because they believed that Imam ʿAli had once rested there. I remember Buddhist remains in a museum reminding me that the Islamic Central Asia I had come to see was itself only one layer of a much older historical landscape. Perhaps that is what travel does to a historian. We travel carrying books in our heads, and places then begin to correct, complicate, illuminate and occasionally laugh at what those books have taught us. Babur’s melons cease to be a literary trope once one has tasted them, and Central Asian influence on Indian architecture ceases to be a textbook phrase when one stands before a sarai at Hisor and sees Shaikh Chilli’s sarai at Thanesar. Indo-Persian reveals the distance it has travelled when a Tehran taxi driver mistakes it for Hindustani, and assumptions about Muslim practice collapse when an Imam asks a teetotal Maulana why he is not drinking. The Soviet past survives not simply in political histories but in a clean street, a covered market and the uniform of a schoolchild, while Imam ʿAli’s presence in Central Asia survives not in a chronicle but in a tree, a spring and the faith of those who still approach them for tabarruk. That was my Dushanbe of September 2002, reached on a journey begun on the first anniversary of 9/11, a trip of scholarship and friendship, anxiety and laughter, history and legend; above all, it was one of those journeys in which history repeatedly escaped from the books and confronted us in the most unexpected places.