The Punishment of Virtue (27 page)

The Ashoka Edict is written in two languages—not the emperor's native Sanskrit, the language of his Indian heartlands, but Aramaic, the official written language of the Persian people living from Kandahar westward into Iran, and Greek, spoken in the colonies left behind by Alexander.
¹³
Kandahar, then known as Harahuraka or Arachosia (later pronounced by the Muslim Arabs as the Rukhkhaj district of Zabulistan), still marked the very northwestern reaches of the Indian empire.

But in Firdowsi's much later epic poem, the hero Rustam is not primarily preoccupied with challenges to Iran coming from India. Though his native Zabulistan borders Hindustan, the bulk of his epic struggle is with an enemy from a different quarter: the kingdom of Turan, or Central Asia and China. Rustam is forever challenging the Turanians, or rescuing his king from defeat at their hands. The poem's obsessive focus on the lands to the north and east of Iran was to prove prescient. It was from those steppes that, two hundred years after the
Shahnama
was written, the next wave of devastating conquest would crash down upon Iran: Genghis Khan and his Mongols.

Throughout his long life, Rustam of Zabulistan behaves as a model vassal to the shahs of Iran. He marches all the way to China to rescue one, though agreeing privately with a friend that the shah “had not a brain in his head.”
¹⁴
To his successor, Rustam proposes a great campaign against Turan with the aim of regaining a wayward territory.
¹⁵
The heroes always send back a generous portion of the gifts and plunder they win abroad to their liege lords, the rulers of Iran. And whenever Iran is in truly dire straits, it is to these heroes that the rulers dash off a letter of summons. And they always come.

Only once, toward the end of his long life, does Rustam disobey his king's command. The monarch of that age feared a challenge from one of his own sons, so he sent the disobedient prince on a risky mission to bring Rustam to court in chains.

For it appears that Rustam now “reckons himself no man's vassal.” He will not raise a finger for the king. When a difficulty befalls his ruler, he is far from the scene. And he never visits anymore. “For such a time as he continues to exist,” the king tells his son, “the lands of Zabulistan, Bost, Ghazni and Kabulistan belong to him.” In other words, the bent tract of southern Afghanistan running from Helmand Province west of Kandahar, turning at the city, and heading northeastward up to Kabul.

The prince does not wish to fight the admired Rustam. So he suggests a ruse to conciliate his father. What if Rustam would just allow himself to be shackled in chains for form. Then, the prince says, “I will intercede with my father and change his heart. I will let no harm come to Rustam.”

But though the hero offers to go humbly to the king, to kiss his head and foot and both his eyes and beg his forgiveness, this is one concession he cannot make. “Shame would overwhelm me…shame that would never be blotted out. No man will ever see me alive and in fetters.” The two fight, and Rustam kills the prince.
¹⁶

Thus, in the Persian epic poetry, Zabulistan—Kandahar—remains outside the royal power, an ungovernable
yaghestan
.

This theme—the incorrigible independence of Zabulistan—does indeed reflect reality. For, four hundred years before the epic authors penned their works, what is now southern and eastern Afghanistan did withstand the most important conquest of the age: the seventh-century onslaught of the Muslim Arabs, which swept one empire before it and rocked another, which within eighty years reached all the way across Africa to the shores of Spain. C. E. Bosworth's monograph confirmed the legend for me. For decades on end, the Muslims launched sterile border raids against that
yaghestan
, without being able to add it to their empire. When they hungered for India, they had to sidestep Kandahar, a few times even taking to their boats to attack the subcontinent by sea.

Thinking back over what I knew about the Bedouin Arabs, I realized that the original audience for the Prophet Muhammad's revelation resembled in many ways a bunch of Kandaharis. The Arabs' social structure was relentlessly tribal; they inhabited a trackless wilderness that supported little agriculture, so they lived off commerce arriving along the caravan routes, tolls collected on those same routes, and, of course, plunder and “protection” from plunder. For years, Arab tribes spent their leisure time raiding one another. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry is full of the exploits of the
ghazis
, bold warriors who would lead sorties against neighboring tribes, driving away rustled camels and horses—much the way the Achekzais were forever stealing their neighbors' sheep for ransom.

The very first achievement of Islam was to federate these rival Arab tribes, to unite the Bedouin and offer them a focus of allegiance other than tribe. Battles following Muhammad's death in 632 were fought against groups that broke away from the nascent Muslim community. Called the Ridda wars, the wars of apostasy, they probably had little to do with apostasy in the sense of a rejection of faith or dogma—since the content of Muslim faith and dogma had yet to be fully defined, and since many members of these recalcitrant tribes had never even put aside their own religions. They had joined the Muslims in the traditional fashion of forging a temporary alliance. The Ridda wars were aimed at countering this traditional perfidy, at enforcing a new unity of the Arabs under the leadership of Muhammad's community in Medina.

But once this unity was achieved, once it was established that Muslims should not kill Muslims—that Muslim tribes should not indulge in raids against each other—what was to be done with the energies of the
ghazis
? And where were these desert dwellers, who produced only milk and meat and rough woolen cloth and some dates, to get the surplus they needed for a decent life?

It was largely to answer these questions, as well as to carry the teaching of Muhammad to other Bedouin living outside the Arabian Peninsula, that the great campaigns of Arab conquest were launched. As one leading scholar of early Islam, Hugh Kennedy, analyzes it, “Only by directing the energies of the tribesmen against an outside enemy could the unity of the Muslim state be preserved.”
¹⁷

These Bedouin Arabs, like Kandaharis, were famously unruly. To keep them under control, a tight discipline was enforced on the military campaigns. Tribesmen were sent out under a commander, and a garrison city was usually founded to house them as they subdued the land around, or to serve as a base for further expansion. Kufa and Basra in today's Iraq were the most famous. There the Bedouin lived apart from the local population, their unity and distinctiveness reinforced by the practice of their new religion, Islam.

It was Umar, the second caliph to lead the community after Muhammad's death, who instituted a code for religious practice in the garrisons. He promoted officials on the basis of seniority: those who had converted first to Islam. He sent out Qur'an readers, men who could recite the entire revelation of Muhammad from memory and instruct their listeners in its significance. He fixed the times of the five daily prayers and upheld the ascetic simplicity of the desert as a pious standard for men sorely tempted by the riches of the lands they conquered—was intransigent, for example, on drunkenness, that scourge of soldiers everywhere. Like U.S. army bases in the Balkans or Afghanistan, the Muslim garrison towns were strictly dry. This may be the origin of one of Islam's most distinguishing obligations.
¹⁸

By the mid-650s, just twenty or so years after the death of Muhammad, the Muslim Arabs had established a foothold in the town of Zaranj, clear across the Iranian plateau from their Arabian heartland. It stands at the far eastern fringes of Iran, on modern Afghanistan's border, where it is now the capital of Nimruz Province. In another of the Persian epic poems,
The Book of Garshasp,
the hero discovers its oasis after traversing a windy desert “that lion and devil fled from; its soft earth was sand, its hard earth was salt.”
¹⁹
Garshasp brings back famous engineers and astrologers from Byzantium and India and founds the town, erecting earthen ramparts around it, building the fort inside high as the moon, and diverting springs from the Helmand River to provide water.
²⁰

When the Arabs reached it, Zaranj was indeed a sturdy city, swept by the same wind that whips dust through Kandahar some four hundred miles to the east of it. Its battlements were probably designed to hold back the gale-driven encroachments of the desert as much as the attacks of enemies. Captured with difficulty, it rebelled several times against the Muslim garrison commanders appointed to rule over it.

As Zaranj was being subdued and turned into a Muslim garrison town, the first campaigns to push yet farther eastward clashed against the ruler of the land of legend: Zabulistan. That was the name of the region from Kandahar to Kabul in truth as well as in fable, and the title of its ruler apparently sounded something like “Zunbil.”

Very little is known about this line of local princes, who spent their summers in Ghazni and their winters near Kandahar, or their subjects, except that they “inhibited the advance of Islam here for a long time to come.”
²¹
Politically and ethnically, they seem to have been the flotsam of the Hephthalite kingdom, which took over the area in the mid-fifth century in one of the innumerable southward migrations of steppe peoples. By the end of the sixth century, the kingdom's glory days were over, but some of its provincial leaders clung to the rocks around Kandahar. As was the case in this region during the Soviet invasion, it appears that it was the dissolution of government into small units with tenacious local roots that allowed it to avert conquest by a foreign empire.

For the Muslim expansion ground to a halt here for some two hundred years.

As for the pre-Islamic religion of Zabulistan, it has aroused much unsatisfied curiosity. It does not seem to have been Buddhism, which had a rich history and a continuing presence in those parts. One story has a troop of Arabs entering the main shrine to the god Zun, in 654, where they broke off the votive statue's hand and put out its ruby eyes to prove its impotence.
²²
Some scholars suggest a cult of sun worship. Another evokes a deity whose traces have come down to us in the Persian epic cycle: Rustam's father, Zal, a variant reading of whose name matches a variant reading of Zun.
²³

At times the Muslims enjoyed victories against the zunbils of Zabulistan, as in the late 660s. Commanders under orders from Basra fought in Zabulistan and finally secured the zunbil's surrender. The region was supposed to pay tribute to the Muslims ever after.

But whenever tribal factionalism or religious disputes broke out among the garrison Arabs, or during the ragged transitions from one Muslim governor to the next, the non-Muslim people of Zabulistan were quick to throw off their allegiance, sometimes even attacking westward into Muslim lands.

Thus did Bosworth, bless him, set the scene for me. But now I was getting hungry for a primary source. I wanted to know how this chronic confrontation on the Muslim frontier had actually gone down, since their protracted rebellion was such a key feature of Afghans' self-consciousness.

This time I didn't have to hunt in the back reaches of the Kabul library. Several early Muslim historians chronicled the Arab conquests year by year. I had read some of them in the text in Arabic class long before. Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari was the greatest of these historians, who were often legal scholars as well. He died in 923. Tabari, like his colleagues, is careful to trace back the version of events he describes through a scrutinized chain of transmitters to an original eyewitness—roughly in the fashion of modern footnoting. Now an excellent translation of Tabari has been published in multiple volumes, each one edited by a different scholar, all working simultaneously, so the work did not take a lifetime to complete.

In the pages of this history I found yearly updates on the status of the Arabs' never-ending war against the zunbils of Zabulistan.

The following series of episodes, disastrous for the Arabs, took place at the very end of the seventh century. This was when the whole Muslim east was ruled by one of the most formidable characters in the history of Islam, al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. This viceroy to two caliphs—brilliant general, ruthless decision maker, and assiduous nation builder—almost single-handedly held the vast empire together for a quarter century.