In my book on Tamurlane, the author spends a few pages recounting his conversation with a certain Noila, the director of the city's mosque and madrasah restoration department. Our Lonely Planet guidebook had among its listing section for Bukhara guides, the phone number for a woman named Noila. We called, and she was available to show us around. Noila, as it turns out, was not the director of restoration, but rather the curator of the museum of the Ark, in the old palace. No matter -- she was happy to give a personal tour of the city, ducking us in and out of the city's many monuments, threading us through the labyrinthine old city.
Noila was an able guide, whose mannerisms I can describe best as "Soviet" -- a love of statistics, and a hearty appreciation for all the great works of the Russians in "restoring" the mosques to something approximating their past grandeur. She herself was an ethnic Bukhari Tajik (Persian) whose family had been forced to emigrate to Dushanbe, the soviet-constructed capital of the Tajikistan region. Her family then sent her to marry a Bukhari, so as to be able to maintain some links with their ancestral home.
We saw about a dozen ancient Muslim holy sites, a fraction of the total, but enough to remind us of why Bukhara was considered to be the holiest city of central Asia, the "Heart of Islam," even before Temur. The city was home to the Imam al Bukhari, the ninth century author of the Sahih al Bukhari, generally considered to be the second holiest book of Islam (after the Koran). It is a collection of 7,275 "hadith," or sayings of the Prophet Mohammad, each given with a complete genealogy tracing its provenance back to the source. The Imam is buried, along with several of his contemporaries in the various handsome mausoleums that dot the city.
A touching site in many of the Bukhara's holy sites is a man or woman squatting quietly in the corner, waiting for wayward Muslims in need of a prayer. They are out of work imams, ready to offer their services to pilgrims who, due to the suppression of Islam during soviet times, do not know how to pray themselves. For a small fee, the imams will utter a prayer on behalf of the visitor, completing the pilgrimage. Islam, together with all religions, were dismissed as "superstition," and were actively taught against in Soviet schools. Bukhara had its hundreds of mosques turned into store rooms or, later, museums. Those Muslims living in the "Heart of Islam" who wanted to practice, had to do so in semi-underground mosques located out of sight in the back streets.
Since independence, Islam has made a very limited resurgence. President Karimov, who likes to think of himself as a modern incarnation of his Turkish cousin Ataturk, has allowed the practice of Islam, but only in a highly secular manner. Several of the mosques have been rehabilitated, and across the countries a handful of the madrasahs, or religious schools, have resumed instruction. We visited many mosques, but saw only a handful of worshipers, and nowhere in the country did we hear the voice of the muezzin, which in other Muslim cities would call the faithful to pray 5 times a day. Even the great Nadon Minaret, which stood so tall that even Genghis Khan was to spare it when razing the rest of the city, was silent.
Inside the Mir-i-arab madrasah, one of the city's prettier ancient structures, Noila told us: "You can see here that this building is laid out like a traditional madrasah. In the center is a courtyard. To the left is a mosque, and on the right is the large classroom. In the mosque, there is now a museum, and in the classroom there is now a shop." It is worth noting that that the museum was, in fact, also a shop -- indeed the shop of Akbar, the owner of our hotel. It was a nice shop, with beautiful wares.
It was possible, however, to imagine this madrasah, along with Bukhara's many others, teeming with students. Each had hundreds of alcoves spread across several stories, and each alcove would have been occupied by several students, used for sleeping, eating, praying, and studying. The mosques and markets would have been teeming, and the streets awash with the refuse of this busy crossroads town.
I read an account written by George Curzon who travelled through here right at the time of the Russian conquest, when the Emir of Bukhara was reduced to vassal status and the first Russian colonists started to appear. "For my own part," he wrote "on leaving the city I could not help rejoicing at having seen it in what might be described as the twilight epoch of its glory. Were I to go again in later years it might be to find electric light in the highways. It might be to see window panes in the houses and to meet with trousered figures in the streets. It might be to eat zakusha in a Russian restaurant and sleep in a Russian hotel; to be ushered by a Russian guide into the palace of the Ark and to climb for fifty Kopecks the Kalon Minaret. Civilization may ride in the Devil's Wagon, but the Devil has a habit of exacting his toll. What could be said for a Bukhara without a Kosh Begi, a Divan Begi, and an Inak?"
Since I know what none of those last things are, I can't say really relate to Curzon, but all the same it was nice to be able to come to Bukhara at the tail end of yet another of its many periods of history -- at the end of it's charming post-soviet renaissance, before it takes its rightful place on the established tourist circuit.
At the end of our tour, Noila took us up to the Palace of the Ark, the citadel of the former Emirs of Bukhara. We passed by the miserable dungeon pit where the British secret agents Connolly and Stoddart were kept until their deaths, and entered the museum which she had meticulously curated. I was pleased to find the section on "foreign diplomacy of Bukhara" was based almost entirely on Peter Hopkirk's book "The Great Game," which I carried with me and have read and re-read. Several of the exhibits were photocopies of photographs from the book.
That night, we had dinner prepared for us by Noila's 85 year old aunt, the maker of what is deservedly called the best Plov in central Asia. We ate in her stately courtyard home, just a hundred meters from the square where Connolly and Stoddart were executed. I left my copy of the book where Noila was quoted for her, despite her protests that she was misrepresented. It was the first time she had seen it, and I imagine she didn't like being described as having a "scholarly face".
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