Chronicles Of The Return

The last few weeks have been tough. I’ve been battling a recurrent infection, one that seems to crop up once a year. It’s pretty dreadful. By the time it is in full swing I am lethargic, full of malaise and generally feeling sorry for myself. I told myself, last time it occurred, that I would go to the doctor immediately once the symptoms appeared. Due to America’s horrible health-care system I had to wait two weeks to see a specialist, which was more than enough time for the symptoms to worsen. I walked into the doctor’s office with a significant gait in my left leg. He looked at me and shook his head. “Why didn’t you come earlier,” he asked.

“Had to wait for approval from my HMO. Took a week. You were booked the next week,” I said.

The doctor looked at me kindly and said, “next time call me and I’ll prescribe you something before you come in, okay?”

He’s certainly one of the best doctors I’ve ever interacted with. He has an exceptional bedside manner, listens to everything I tell him, queries me fully, often time spending upwards of thirty minutes with me. For a doctor that’s priceless.

The prescription is for a heavy anti-biotic. The kind where you spend 10 minutes in the sun and it leaves you feeling like you’ve crossed the Taklamakan without water.

As a side note, I’ve read on several occasions that ‘Taklamakan’ means ‘goes in, doesn’t come out,’ in an ancient Chinese, or possible Tokharian dialect. Having flown over the Taklamakan several times and circumambulated its edges, I have to say that I agree.

One May when my father and I were in Dun Huang, the last great oasis before the Taklamakan, I got to thinking about Xuanzang, a 7th century Buddhist monk who sneaked his way past the T’ang guards at the Jade Gate, into the Taklamakan. He then proceeded to cross it, disproving its meaning as a toponym, but no matter. He then crossed the Tien Shan, chilled at a Buddhist monastery in Samarkand–just a few years before the Arabs irrupted into Central Asia, and then did a backwards dogleg into Afghanistan and India where he spent a decade plus collecting Buddhist manuscripts to take back to China.

Buddhism was not new to China, but it’s safe to say its roots were nothing compared to those which dug deep after Xuanzang’s return to Chang’an, the capital of the T’ang empire. What course might Chinese Buddhism taken were it not for Xuanzang’s efforts at travel, discovery and exploration? And what course might my life have taken had I not been exposed to Chan Buddhism in China in 1999?

This diminutive monk spent his remaining days translating the Buddhist corpus is a spartan monastery cell, eschewing all glory and worldly goods and his good works echo down the centuries to my own time and my own debt of gratitude to him.

Now that’s a character with character. Central Asia is littered with them, from the monstrous Timur–aka Tamerlane, who left a trail of human skulls from Damascus to India–to the poignant Omar Khayyam.

I tend to think about people like Xuanzang and Polo and ibn Battutah when I am feeling sorry for myself. Sometimes it works: I feel better, realizing my pedestrian concerns, minor ailments and the general discontent I feel with my post-modern life do get the better of me.

But sometimes it fails: I want to be Polo, or Rabban Sauma, Wilfred Thesiger, people who lived a full life so far away from home. People who made the world their home, citizens of this great and tragic blue ball spinning off into eternity.

And then I get a text message and the world comes roaring right back at me.

It’s not the best shot in the world. But I had to have it. My father, Ahmad and I are hurling down the highway towards Meshed and the Holy Grail of all travelers in Persia: the tiled magnificence of the Gohar Shad, trying to make it there before dark. The day before was spent crossing the barren, lifeless Dasht-i-Kavir.

The great range of mountains in the photo is the Kuh-i-Nishapur. I was dying to go up into the hills and see the famed turquoise mines. Turquoise—the color of the Turks—that arresting faience adorning mosques and minarets from the Pillars of Hercules to the Straits of Malacca. Green may be the color of Islam but turquoise left an indelible, obsessive stain on me. The stain of blue in the harsh Central Asian heat and sun. Amidst the orchards of Samarkand and the opaque olive pools of Bukhar-i-Sharif and the summit of Persian architectural expression: the Sheikh Lutfollah mosque of Isfahan.

The mines, worked since antiquity, finally petered out in the late 19th century. Perhaps the turquoise mined here found its way onto the ring fingers of Chinese princesses and Roman potentates? Who is to say it is not so? In the grand sweep of time anything is possible. And it was a day pregnant with the possible.

Behind me was the Parthian Steppe. Just writing the words gives me chills, chills that conjure up images of those mail clad cataphracts who captured the emperor Valerian, or the wily archers who massacred a full legion of Romans and a consul—Marcus Licinius Crassus—at Carrhae in Mesopotamia, thus, dealing out fatal blow to the Triumvirate back in Rome.

“Parthian country,” I mumbled to myself as we raced across the red grass steppe. The dirt more crimson than the cereal laden grasses littering the steppe. I shook my head in the wind and heat and thought, “it is still a wild, feral land.”

A few miles East of us, set in a crease in the foothills of the Kuh-i-Nishapur, were the remains of the city itself. Jewel of Khorasan, home to Omar Khayyam and Farid al-din Attar, avatars of the great 10th-11th century blossoming of Persian science and mysticism. And then came the deluge: a new nation of wild horsemen stormed out of the Central Asian heartland, fresh from the conquest of Kwarizm, those Mongols, and Nishapur was obliterated, never to rise again.

We stopped and walked through the sun baked ruins: a wasteland. It is said that the Mongols left a mountain of skulls near a half wasted city gate as a warning: do not return.

But the ghosts did not heed the Mongols, for like a whisper, just above the breeze, I could hear them, a keening lament for a civilization lost.

One of my chief complaints on modern Central Asian scholarship is its intense focus on the Great Game era and the modern politics of the Central Asian energy corridor, Afghanistan and the like. This stuff is important, but there is so, so much more to Central Asia just under the shifting sands, hidden in the caravanserais lurking between silk road oases. One fact about Central Asia you may not know is this: there would not have been anything approaching modernity were it not for Central Asia’s Golden Age. Yes, I realize that’s a pretty cut and dry statement. But it’s nevertheless true—again, there are lots of moving parts involved in this history, but ideas like this were no doubt critical to Europe’s advancement. For example: the idea of ‘zero’ and ‘irrational numbers’ was knowledge transferred along the silk road between the 11th and 13th centuries:

The astronomer al-Khorezmi wrote a book comparing the utility of Indian numerals (and the concept of zero) with all other contenders, while others mined Indian geometry, astronomy, and even calendar systems for good ideas. Earlier Central Asians had tested various alphabets, including ones from Syria and India. Several local languages opted for an alphabet deriving from Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. It is hard to imagine a more intellectually open region ­anywhere.

And that’s not all, the list of technology transfers between East and West via the Central Asian ecumene, which to my mind is a better description of what we call the Silk Road, is long. Algebra? Yup. Algorithms? Yup. We all know about gunpowder. Perhaps most of you know the stirrup came originally from China?

A few years ago a Chinese scholar claimed that it was China who made the West what it is, via the vector of the Pax Mongolica. And Joseph Needham’s masterful series on Chinese technological advances goes a long way to validating this claim. But it’s also fanciful. There were multiple inputs into Europe’s rise from backwater to global dominance: in the aftermath of the Black Death wages for peasants had to rise, the opening of the sea route via Africa occurred, the ‘discovery’ of the New World, the combination of gunpowder and metallurgy creating cannons, the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades, and the Renaissance awakening (in no particular order). But, there is a kernel of truth to the claim as well. The Pax Mongolica did expand Europe’s intellectual horizons—and of course there were the great Medieval explores like John of Carpini (probably the most courageous and hardy of them all, insanely overweight about 65 years-old, he road a mule–whilst sick–most of the way across the Steppe, which was literally terra incognita at the time, in winter), William of Rubruck, Odoric of Pordenone, and the master himself, Marco Polo.

Alas discovery is one thing, but practical applications are another: where would we be without gunpowder? Where would we be without paper? Where would we be without the stirrup? Or even the divine right of kings—a concept originating in China that spread to the West via Persia. In the end it was the rising hunger for spices, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, pepper and silk and all the assorted goods of the East—and then using the East as a place to offload the surplus goods of the West that gave rise to Europe’s dominance. But none of it could have happened without the trans-continental pollination that Central Asia provided.

And so, when I see an essay like this is a publication like the Wilson Quarterly, it makes me smile. This essay is a good introduction into medieval Central Asia and I look forward to the book he is writing.

Back in May of 2007, then in November of 2007 and finally in December of 2007 I asked if any readers knew anything about the great An Lu-shan rebellion that nearly brought down the T’ang Dynasty of 8th century China. I’ve continued to follow the academic literature on the subject. There are now two new books discussing the subject, one at length and another that makes some riveting connections between An Lu-shan’s rebellion and other events occurring all over the Eurasian landmass at the time.

The first book is Lewis’ China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty (History of Imperial China). This is the second Lewis book I’ve read and while it is boring and dry, the information is exceptional. It also represents the first general survey of the T’ang Dynasty in English in over a hundred years. That alone merits reading, for the T’ang Dynasty was China’s most important dynasty, after the Han.

But Beckwith’s book Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present, while uber-scholarly–it simply has too many fascinating endnotes and footnotes that break up the narrative–that I’m learning a great deal from. If you are interested in the Silk Road and have a pretty good working knowledge of some of the basic texts (email me if you want a list, be warned: it’s a long one) this is a book you will want to read.

But let’s get back to An Lu-shan. Beckwith makes a compelling connection about the An Lu-shan rebellion and several others that occurred in the 8th century: that of the Iconoclasts and Iconodules in Constantinople; a rebellion in the Tibetan Empire; a rebellion in the Turk Empire in Central Asia at the time; the Abbasid Revolution in the Arab world; the Carolingian Revolution and finally that of An Lu-shan himself. Each occurred within a fifty year period of each other. It’s a hugely fascinating connection to make. Revolutions and rebellions like this occurring virtually simultaneously just don’t happen without some kind of common catalyst. As Beckwith writes, “this is something that deserves further study.”

He’s right. For too long systems theorists–poli sci historians, that is–have tried to tie together things like this, but are always looking in the wrong places. Beckwith might be on to something.