A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road Read online

  Previously published in the UK in 2010

  by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

  39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

  email: [email protected]

  www.iconbooks.co.uk

  This electronic edition published in the UK in 2011 by Icon Books Ltd

  ISBN: 978-1-84831-271-5 (ePub format)

  ISBN: 978-1-84831-272-2 (Adobe ebook format)

  Printed edition (ISBN 978-184831-149-7)

  sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

  by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

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  or their agents

  Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

  by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

  Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

  Printed edition published in the USA in 2010 by Totem Books

  Inquiries to: Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

  39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP, UK

  Printed edition distributed to the trade in the USA

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  Printed edition published in Australia in 2010 by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

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  Printed edition published in Canada by Penguin Books Canada,

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  Text copyright © 2010 Christopher Aslan Alexander

  The author has asserted his moral rights.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Typeset by Marie Doherty

  Contents

  Title page

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Map of Uzbekistan

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: Tashkent transit lounge

  Chapter 1: The walled city of Khiva

  Chapter 2: A home by the harem

  Chapter 3: The madrassah

  Chapter 4: From calligraphy to carpet

  Chapter 5: Worms that changed the world

  Chapter 6: Madder from Mazar

  Chapter 7: Bukharan cunning

  Chapter 8: The dawn sweepers

  Chapter 9: A carpet called Shirin

  Chapter 10: Navruz and new beginnings

  Chapter 11: Warp and weft

  Chapter 12: Signed with a pomegranate

  Chapter 13: Carpet of corpses

  Chapter 14: My mother’s friend the warlord

  Epilogue: September 2009

  Glossary

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Christopher Aslan Alexander was born in Turkey (hence his middle name) and grew up there and in war-torn Beirut (as a boy, his understanding of a shell collection was more the weapon variety). He spent his teenage years in England before escaping for two years at sea. Chris studied media at Leicester and became the first white boy in the university gospel choir.

  After a year working for the students’ union, Chris moved to land-locked Central Asia, volunteering with Operation Mercy, a Swedish NGO. While writing a guidebook about Khiva, he fell in love with this desert oasis – which boasts the most homogeneous example of Islamic architecture in the world – and stayed.

  www.acarpetridetokhiva.com

  To my team-mates in Khiva, my Uzbek family, friends and colleagues. And especially to Madrim:

  Katta minnatdorchilik bildirib, do’stligimiz abadiy bo’lishini tilab qolaman

  Author’s note

  I have used the terms ‘carpet’ and ‘rug’ interchangeably. Pedants will argue that one is larger than the other, but this distinction is rarely acknowledged in modern-day usage.

  Most Uzbek words appear in the glossary and are generally pronounced phonetically. The exception is the ‘kh’ sound which is always pronounced the way Scots pronounce the ‘ch’ in the word ‘loch’. I have written most Uzbek words phonetically, their pronunciation often different from the same word in Farsi or Turkish.

  Technical terms from carpet-weaving and design can also be found in the glossary.

  For the most part, I have used people’s real names except when to do so might endanger them. The views held in this book are my own and in no way reflect those of Operation Mercy, UNESCO or the British Council.

  Prologue

  Tashkent transit lounge

  I’d always imagined that if I wrote a book about the carpet workshop and my time in Khiva, it would be written, or least begun, in the workshop itself. I’d sit in my office – a cell in the Jacob Bai Hoja madrassah – and write about the beginnings: the transformation of a disused and derelict madrassah into a centre for natural dye-making, silk carpet-weaving, and exploration into long-forgotten carpet designs. My laptop would be plugged into the rickety socket in my corner office cell next to the phone that rang incessantly, occasionally with carpet orders but usually with mothers passing on shopping lists to their daughters, or amorous young men unable to meet a young weaver in public but happy to court over the phone. I’d sit there typing as the light filtered through the arched plaster latticework, forming hexagonal pools of light on the stone floor. Perhaps Madrim would sit next to me, magnifying glass in hand, bent over a copy of a 15th-century manuscript, examining a carpet illustrated within its pages, partially obscured by a Shah or courtesan.

  I’d look around our small office that once accommodated students of the Koran, now filled with a carved wooden table and chairs, beautifully constructed by my friend Zafar and his brothers; the wall niche that once held a Koran, now crammed with books and laminated carpet designs; the sleeping alcove, supported by thick ceiling beams, now storage for fans or electric heaters.

  Sounds would filter through the small wooden door: the thumping of weavers’ combs on the weft threads that mark the completion of each new row of silk knots; the rhythmic pounding of oak gall being crushed in the large brass mortar by Jahongir, our chief dyer; the loud thwack of dried silk skeins beaten hard against the wall, removing the entangled remains of powdered madder root or pomegranate rind. Over this, the sound of an argument between loom-mates from one cell, laughter from another, competing Uzbek, Russian and Turkish pop music, and the voice of Aksana giving a guided tour.

  But this book will never be written in my office, or anywhere else in Khiva. Next to me, a bag full of gifts for the weavers and dyers who have become my family sits unopened. I am in the transit lounge in Tashkent. This is the furthest I can get, having been refused entry into Uzbekistan. I feel rumpled and tired, and have spent the last few nights sleeping on newspaper. More than that, I feel a crushing sense of loss, a dull ache around my heart that sometimes shifts to a constriction in my chest. I’m not sure how long I will be stuck here for, what I’ve done wrong, or whether I will ever return to the desert oasis I now call home.

  Tashkent, November 2005

  1

  The walled city of Khiva

  It was now near midnig
ht and the silent, sleeping city lay bathed in a flood of glorious moonlight. The palace was transformed. The flat mud roofs had turned into marble; the tall slender minarets rose dim and indistinct, like sceptre sentinels watching over the city … It was no longer a real city, but a leaf torn from the enchanted pages of the Arabian Nights.

  —J.A. MacGahan, Campaigning on the Oxus,

  and the Fall of Khiva, 1874

  ‘The amazing thing about working in Khiva, or anywhere else in Uzbekistan, is what you might end up doing,’ Lukas explained during a recruitment phone call. ‘You’ll find yourself doing things you’re not qualified to do and would never have the opportunity to do elsewhere. You just do them because no one else is.’

  Over the next seven years I often thought back on these words, whether holed up in the British Library poring over medieval Persian manuscripts, debating Timurid carpet designs with an Oxford professor, stripped naked and radiated at a former Soviet youth camp, crawling through worm droppings in an attempt to record the silkworm’s life-cycle, accused of drug-smuggling while attempting to bring sacks of natural dyes out of Afghanistan, or running for cover as an anti-Western riot engulfed the Kabul carpet bazaar.

  I had no background in textiles or carpet-weaving and no inkling that this would become my main focus in Khiva. In fact, my only background in carpet-weaving had been a rug-making kit I was given as a child. The rug still languishes, unfinished in an attic somewhere, after I managed to impale the weaving hook into my nose, mid-thrust. It was now 1998 and I had recently graduated from a degree in mass communications, which didn’t seem very relevant for life in a Silk Road oasis. Lukas thought otherwise, and was excited to have someone work alongside him. We would be writing the content of an online guidebook about Khiva, requested by the Mayor of Khiva to boost tourism. Lukas was working for Operation Mercy, a Christian humanitarian organisation, and they seemed happy with my qualifications.

  There were many reasons to ignore Khiva and look for volunteer possibilities in more hospitable climates. It was a remote desert oasis with freezing winters and simmering summers; I knew that conditions would be basic, and everything that I’d heard about Central Asian cuisine had been overwhelmingly negative. I would have to learn a new language and culture, and had never been particularly good at foreign languages. Operation Mercy didn’t pay volunteers – who were expected to raise their own expenses – and an initial commitment of two years felt far too long. My supportive parents reminded me of a note posted in the staff room at my old school for teachers on swimming duty: ‘Beware C. Alexander. Jumps in deep end but cannot swim!’

  I considered other options, but kept coming back to Khiva. I had been specifically invited there with a project waiting for me that fitted my skills. I appreciated the humanitarian and Christian ethos of Operation Mercy and was impressed with their current work in Khiva among the blind. There was also something very alluring about Khiva and the Silk Road.

  I was born in Turkey at one end of the Silk Road, and my parents held a fascination with China at the other end. I was intrigued by the peoples of the Silk Road, particularly those of the former Soviet Union. At school I had studied Soviet Politics, though the course was renamed halfway through due to the Soviet Union’s collapse. Before this, I had naively assumed that the term ‘Soviet Union’ was simply a Communist term for Russia, and had no idea of Tatars, Tajiks, Azeris, Kazakhs or any of the other peoples who called the USSR their home. Now I might be living among them.

  It was also at Bedford School that I first heard about Captain Frederick Burnaby. He had attended the school and there was a house named after him. Burnaby, reputedly the strongest man in the British army, was a Victorian hero. Bold, brash and assured of England’s God-given superiority over everyone else, he decided to travel to Khiva in 1876, largely because the Russian authorities had forbidden foreigners access to Central Asia, which they now considered theirs. Burnaby travelled overland on horseback in the middle of winter and narrowly avoided freezing to death en route. He was granted an audience with the Khan, who was shocked to discover that the great Britannia was ruled by a woman. Burnaby had plans to travel through the Turkmen city of Merv and into Afghanistan but was apprehended by the Russian authorities and ordered home. However, his travels gave him enough material for a bombastic bestseller: A Ride to Khiva.

  I didn’t want to travel to Khiva but to live there. I wasn’t sure what to expect and whether any of Burnaby’s encounters with ‘the natives’ would be similar to my own. In one respect, though, we were to prove similar: we were both single Englishmen in a culture of arranged marriages, which baffled Khivans as much today as it had back then.

  ‘Which do you like best, your horse or your wife?’ inquired the man.

  ‘That depends upon the woman,’ I replied; and the guide, here joining the conversation, said that in England they do not buy and sell their wives, and that I was not a married man.

  ‘What! You have not got a wife?’

  ‘No, how would I travel if I had one?’

  ‘Why, you might leave her behind and lock her up, as our merchants do with their wives when they go on a journey.’

  ‘In my country the women are never locked up.’

  ‘What a marvel!’ said the man. ‘And how can you trust them to so much temptation? They are poor weak creatures and easily led. But if one of them is unfaithful to her husband what does he do?’

  ‘He goes to our mullah, who we call a judge, and obtains a divorce, and marries someone else.’

  ‘What! You mean to say he does not cut the woman’s throat?’

  ‘No; he would be hanged himself if he did.’

  ‘What a country!’ said the host; ‘we manage things better in Khiva.’

  Captain Frederick Burnaby, A Ride to Khiva (1876)

  With Burnaby’s book to guide me, I knew what Khiva had once been like but had no idea what over a century – most of it under Soviet rule – had done to change the cultural landscape. My initial commitment of two years would extend to seven, before being cut short by deportation. A place I knew only through the eyes of a long-dead British soldier would become home. The bizarre would become familiar, and the exotic would become normal. Soon I would daily roll up my mattress on a balcony that overlooked the minarets and madrassahs of Khiva’s old city, glowing in the dawn sun, growing used to these scenes from the pages of The Arabian Nights through which I’d slipped.

  Khiva would leave a huge imprint on my life: toughening me up, humbling me with regular examples of sacrificial hospitality and kindness, broadening me with new friendships and very different perspectives on life. I would find myself not only living on the Silk Road but immersed in a world of silk, discovering indigo blue, madder red, pomegranate gold and the subtle shades of life in a desert oasis. Random strangers would become my second family and an eclectic assortment of characters would be woven together to form a thriving workshop of weavers, dyers and embroiderers. People I might simply have photographed if passing through would become the tapestry of my life. Khiva was a place I would come to love; and then, unexpectedly, Khiva was also a place that would eventually break my heart.

  * * *

  First, though, there was a compulsory two-month language course in Tashkent, the capital. I had savoured the exotic sound of this name, only to discover a drab, charmless city with no centre, no heart and little visible history. Tashkent had been levelled during an earthquake in the 1960s and rebuilt by the Soviets in swathes of concrete. There was still a sizeable Russian community in the city, making it a contrasting place of mosques and mini-skirts, Russian rap and Uzbek folk music. Tea-houses full of bearded men wearing skull-caps and shrouded in smoke from skewers of sizzling shashlik evoked a timeless image of the Silk Road. Next door, a new Korean pizza restaurant attracted upwardly mobile young Russians and Uzbeks with the Backstreet Boys blaring from the entrance over the clink of vodka glasse
s.

  I found it hard to define Tashkent Uzbeks, who seemed able to flit between traditional and more Soviet ways of thinking and living. While I was scrabbling for a towel at the presence of a female cleaner in the men’s swimming pool changing rooms, young Uzbeks around me would think nothing of sauntering past naked to collect their locker key from another female attendant. The world of sport, I learnt, was a Soviet one with no place for bashfulness. Yet these same youths got dressed, caught trolley buses or trams, and arrived home to a different world where parents planned arranged marriages for them, where food was cooked by the subservient wives of older brothers and the day began with ritual washing and dawn prayers. It was a society looking for identity, marooned somewhere between Mohammed and Marx.

  The government had moved dramatically away from the Kremlin after independence. The Russian-speaking first secretary of the Communist Party reinvented himself as President Karimov of Uzbekistan. He learnt Uzbek and, despite his initial pleas to maintain the Soviet Union, marked the first of September as Independence Day. He encouraged the building of mosques (although in the fumbling early days of independence one mosque inauguration had scandalised its Saudi patrons with vodka served by skimpily-dressed waitresses) and the revival of Uzbek history, language and culture.

  But by the time of my arrival in September 1998, the government seemed to be questioning its embrace of all things Muslim as radical Islam gained popularity, particularly in the densely inhabited Fergana valley to the east of Tashkent which made up a quarter of the population. Having served as an efficient wedge between Tashkent and Moscow, Islamism was now the largest competitor to the government and its power monopoly.

  My days were spent in language study. I had only two classmates, Catriona from Scotland – a teacher also joining Operation Mercy in Khiva – and an enthusiastic American whom we dubbed ‘omni-competent Sarah’. She had arrived in Tashkent two months previously and as far as we were concerned, was already fluent.

  We learnt phrases such as, ‘This is a pen’, and ‘Is this a pen?’, attempting to apply them practically in the teeming bazaar just outside our classroom. Hawkers of stationery nodded solemnly in agreement, ‘Indeed, it is a pen.’