Drinking Arak off an Ayatollah's Beard

Of all the poets with whom Ferdowsi could have rubbed shoulders in Herat, by far the most significant wouldn’t have been tall enough to tug the poet’s beard. His name was Abdullah Ansari and he was the four-year-old son of a shopkeeper. Although the lack of children in the Shahnameh suggests Ferdowsi wouldn’t have been especially alert to his potential, it would have been clear he was a child of exceptional promise—only a couple of years later, he had succeeded in learning the whole of the Quran by heart. Encouraged by his father, who didn’t envisage a future for him stacking shelves at the family store, he tramped around Khorasan visiting the great Sufi mystics of his age. Inspired by these experiences, he composed the first mystical verses to be written in Persian ⁴⁸—dramatic, visual poems that captured the public imagination:

I see breasts scorched by the burning separation from you;
I see eyes weeping in love’s agony.
Dancing down the lane of blame and censure,
Your lovers cry out, “Poverty is my source of pride!”

“A Sufi,” Ansari wrote, “is something that neither harms the soles of the feet nor leaves a trail of dust behind.” The tracks to their origin are certainly hard to trace. Some scholars connect them to neoPlatonism or ancient India. Ferdowsi agrees with the latter, linking them in the Shahnameh to the ascetics who hung around with Alexander the Great. But it is with Islam they are intimately associated, as the mystical expression of that faith. Although, since mysticism and orthodoxy have never been great friends, they have often found themselves in conflict with more literal-minded theologians.

Ansari was accused of anthropomorphism and banned from teaching by an assembly of sheikhs—the Taliban of their day. He was also exiled and spent a short period in prison. But he was back in favor toward the end of his life—invested with a robe of honor by the caliph and the title “sheikh of Islam.” He retired to Herat and there, in a convent built by one of his own teachers, he died. And it’s there, as I am about to discover, that his memory lives on.

The smell of resin is pinching my nose, wafting out of the umbrella pines soaring over the taxi. A plain of powdery white sand spreads underneath us, like we’re sliding into a giant sugar bowl. About three kilometers away is Mount Gazurgah, hunched over a pastry-colored tomb complex as if it’s made out of hard blocks of toffee.

Marble headstones fill the court, framed in a horseshoe of brickwork with a hundred-foot iwan rising out of its groin. I clamber around the graves, toward a tree on which stones have been tied and nails driven into the branches, the latter ritual carried out as a traditional remedy for toothache. I can hear a tremendous grunt—a deep “aghhh!” Behind the tree is a group of dervishes, all dressed in dusty brown shalwar qameez. They are holding hands in a circle, and one of them is singing in counterpoint to the grunts. The “agh!” slows and stretches, an “l” forming between two vowels, and eventually clarifies as the word they are repeating: “Allah.”

I’ve come across Sufis before, a few years earlier in Turkey—the Whirling Dervishes, who wore cone-shaped camel-hair hats and pirouetted in a sophisticated and dizzying dance. But these Afghan Sufis are much earthier (if one can describe a process designed to heighten your spiritual senses as earthy). There is no discernible art to what they are doing, instead an extreme concentration—a detachment from everything around them. This is Sufism at its most raw.

At the foot of the iwan, decorative tendrils climb toward the stalactite drum of a carved headstone. The dry, silvery branches of an ilex tree reach out over it, to the worshippers who perch on the ledges of the graves, raising their hands, prayer beads, and voices, and bowing to the tomb of Ansari.

One of them is reciting from a beat-up copy of Ansari’s most popular work, The Intimate Conversations,⁴⁹ but his words are drowned by the grunt thickening beside him. It is coming from an old man with an enormous gray beard, who is rocking between a pair of headstones. His cheeks are smudged with tears as he repeats “Allah, Allah, Allah,” the words shooting so fast he barely has time to breathe. His torso is swinging so hard that he’s in danger of being knocked out by his own beard.

What is going through his mind? There is no opportunity to ask: he has cocooned himself in the world of meditation and for him at least it is soundproof. But as he swings to the name of God, I think of a contemporary of Ansari’s, Abu Sa’id, who described how his “breast was opened” by hearing that same word in a Sufi convent. “Whenever drowsiness of inattention arising from the weakness of human nature came over me,” he related, “a soldier with a fiery spear—the most terrible and alarming figure that can possibly be imagined—appeared in front of the niche and shouted at me, saying, ‘Abu Sa’id, say Allah!’ The dread of that apparition used to keep me burning and traveling for whole days and nights, so that I did not again fall asleep or become inattentive; and at last every atom of me began to cry aloud, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’”

All around me, men are reciting it: “Allah! Allah! Allaghh! Alaghh! Aaghh! Agh! Agh!” If Ferdowsi had visited this convent a thousand years ago—and with his range of interests it’s tempting to imagine he could have done—this is the same sight and sound he would have encountered. I sit down on a headstone, switching on my Dictaphone to record the recitals and jotting in my notebook. But it’s hard to write, because several men are crowding behind me, apparently as intrigued by my scrawl of Roman script as I am by the clustered dots and coils of Persian and Arabic on the headstones.

“You came here,” one of them asks, “to pray to Ansari?”

“Well . . . ”

“You have a problem with the law?”

“Why would? . . .”

“You are going on a difficult journey?”

“Well . . . Yes! Yes, that’s it.”

He is called Abdul Aziz. Around the same age as me, in his late twenties, he has more beard than me but less hair on top. Smiling with soft, watery eyes, he takes me by the hand and leads me into a small mud-brick hut near the entrance to the compound, where we cross our legs on the earthy floor and drink black tea sweetened with lumps of fudge. From the other side of the room, the fruity smell of a water pipe is seeping into our nostrils.

“Really,” he says, “you are praying to Ansari? This is wonderful! I also pray to him when I have a problem. Many people here do, but I never met a foreigner who did this.”

I am about to confess: “Well, I wasn’t exactly . . . ”

But Abdul Aziz is not to be deterred. “You saw a man with no hair?” he says. “Under the iwan by Ansari’s tomb? He is a thief. You understand? This place is closed; you cannot be arrested if you are with Ansari.”

He places his tea glass on the ground and takes my hand, smiling gently as he tells me how this thousand-year-ago poet has affected his own life:

“Ansari did a miracle for me.”

I’m pretty blasé about miracles by now. In Iran, I was told about paraplegics who were given back the use of their legs through the personal intercession of Imam Ali, while the Professor often laughed about the War Propaganda Office’s claims that tulips had miraculously sprouted from soil irrigated by the blood of “martyrs” in the Iran-Iraq war. Abdul Aziz’s is a less ambitious, smaller scale sort of miracle—and all the more convincing for it.

“Last year,” he says, “I had a car accident. I was working for a construction company and I did not have a good experience with their vehicles. One day I turned onto the road too fast and I hit someone, he didn’t die but he went to hospital and he still has a problem with his legs. Well, I was very nervous about this. The man who I hit, his father wanted to put me in jail. So I came here, I came to the tomb of Ansari. It wasn’t like today, it was late at night, so there were only the men who are always here. I knew the police could not take me if I was with Ansari, but this was not the reason I was here. You see, I wanted to ask Ansari for advice. So I sat down beside his tomb and I prayed for his help. And do you know what happened when I got home? It was a miracle! Because when I got home, I found out that my father had spoken to this man—the man who wanted to put me in jail—and he had agreed to drop the charges.”

Abdul Aziz shakes his head in disbelief, as if it has only just happened and he is still recovering from the shock.

“How could this fortune not shine on me,” he says, “if it is not for the blessing of Ansari?”

“You mean,” I say, “Ansari actually saved you?”

An eleventh-century Sufi poet—credited with keeping a man out of jail. Even if I’m skeptical about the poet’s involvement, I can’t doubt Abdul Aziz’s belief in it. It is this—his unshakeable faith in the Sufi poet’s intercession—that represents such a striking connection with the past. And how typical of Persian culture to produce a poet—a man remembered not for any great political acts but for the verses he wrote—who is also regarded as a saint. If Abdul Aziz was alone, I might put his story down as an intriguing oddity. But what is striking, as he guides me around the compound, is how many others echo his experience.

“Oh yes,” says a robust-looking man on the other side of the hut, laying down his pipe and offering it to us with the nozzle facing away, in accordance with accepted water-pipe etiquette. “I too have benefited through the blessed Ansari. I am a builder, so I have to climb a lot of high walls. Well, two years ago, I fell off a wall and lost consciousness. My family was at the hospital talking to the doctors, and they were sure I was going to die. My sons came here to light some sticks and pray to Ansari, because they knew this was the only chance. And now look at me! I am in good health and I have seen the birth of three grandchildren.”

There is more. Outside one of the tombs, we meet a man who works for the Catholic Relief Services—a job he insists he wouldn’t have secured “if Ansari did not make this happen.” And there is a middle-aged man in a suit, quietly reading The Intimate Conversations , who tells us his house was set on fire by the Taliban.

“It was at night,” he explains. “None of us could have survived. But the day before, my wife prayed here to Ansari, and because of this we lived.”

“I think you don’t believe these people,” says Abdul Aziz, squeezing alongside me in the bus back to the city.

The women are at the front and the men at the back—dozens of us, squashed so tightly together we can feel each other’s hipbones.

“But tell me,” says Abdul Aziz, “you saw some bullet holes in Ansari’s tomb place?”

“Well, no . . . ”

“You see? This place is protected. We have had so much fighting in the last few years and all the places in Herat were destroyed, but not this place. God was protecting it.”⁵⁰

I’m fascinated by people’s willingness to attribute their good luck to Ansari—there’s something deeply self-effacing about it. Whereas in the West we are inclined to claim credit for ourselves, many of the people I’ve met are eager to put it all down to a man from the past.

But it isn’t only Ansari who helped people—during the Taliban era, the Sufis were helping themselves—as I learn the next day when Abdul Aziz takes me to a caravanserai in the city center—an old merchants’ rest house converted into a school. One of the teachers, who has been instructing Abdul Aziz in English, is also a Sufi poet.

“The Taliban didn’t like us at all,” he says.

His name is Hamid. Tall and bearded, he has a moon-shaped face, beaming out as he pours black tea in the staff room.

“One day when they were in power,” he continues, “they broke up our assembly at the Friday Mosque. But after this, hundreds of Sufis came together at the mosque and we said if the Taliban act against us we will withstand them. The Taliban knew they could not defeat us, so they backed down and didn’t give us any trouble again. You see—in Herat the Sufis are very powerful.”

I think of Ali Hujwiri, who wrote the first Persian treatise on Sufism in the eleventh century. “The sun of love and the fortune of the Sufi path,” he declared, “is in the ascendant in Khorasan.” Judging from what I have seen and heard in Herat, it still is.

My encounter with Abdul Aziz turns out to be one of those chances on which a visit to a new city often depends. Over the next few days, he takes me on a tour of Herat’s most famous mausolea. We stand under the shade of an ancient pistachio tree, listening to an old “white-beard” reciting stories of kings and beggars by the marble slab where the fifteenth-century poet Abdur-Rahman Jami lies. It’s said the city’s ruler of the time, Sultan Hussain, spent hours shedding tears of grief over the grave—a hint of the close relationship between artists and the authorities of the time, which recent history has been so far from emulating.

In another corner of the city, we chat with a French diplomat under a dome the color of the sky, which crowns the resting place of Jami’s sponsor Gowhar Shad—the Happy Jewel, whose patronage was such a spur to the city’s fifteenth-century artists. And one afternoon we end up on our backs at the “Rolling Tomb,” where men spin across the pebbles in imitation of Baba Qaltan, a medieval Sufi who, on setting out to visit Jami, decided to roll rather than walk. You place your head on a gravestone, close your eyes, and recite a prayer about the oneness of God; if you roll a good distance, it’s deemed to be proof that your prayers will be well-received. Unfortunately, my own effort is both stilted and short, prompting one of the onlookers to announce, “This is because he is an unbeliever”—which isn’t especially reassuring in light of my coming journey.

In between the tombs, we stroll around the bazaar, under wooden domes and high vaults where grit and plaster pour onto the tracks, loosened by a wheelbarrow of beans or a donkey cart carrying a sack of peanuts. The smell of hot freshly baked bread oozes out of the bakeries, where teenage boys are using long wooden paddles to scoop the flats of dough from the underground ovens, distracted from their work by the sight of a brightly dressed girl whose exceptional deportment is being tested by the water jug on her head.

There’s noise all around us—a chapan seller is calling out the prices for his rainbow-colored gowns; the metalworkers are hammering at their aluminum sheets; there are cobblers with horseshoes and a cheerful swordsmith, his gold tooth gleaming, chiseling a gazelle-horn scabbard over a mound of chippings the same ashen color as his beard. In between advice about the steel (when it’s clean it smells like an onion, he explains, and “if it’s good, it becomes soft like wax and the dirt skims off it just like a dry onion”), he recites from the Shahnameh : “Not lion nor dragon nor div can evade/ The terrible edge of my well-sharpened blade.” The verse, he tells me, reminds him of the importance of swordmaking “for our people for thousands of years.”

One evening, when I’ve just woken from a nap after my excursions with Abdul Aziz, he turns up at the Hotel Successful in a cauliflower of dust.

“Again, come on!” he shouts, leaning forward on the hemp saddlebag of his Honda motorcycle. “My father invites you for dinner.”

Behind a high adobe wall is the first Afghan house I’ve visited. We step inside a metal gate, passing a satellite dish impaled in the concrete of the courtyard.

“We couldn’t put the dish on our roof,” says Abdul Aziz, “because the Taliban would have seen it.”

Ahead of us, a frayed brown rug stretches across the concrete floor of a large unfurnished room. There’s a pile of mattresses in a corner, presumably for guests to sleep on, and a picture of the Ka’aba of Mecca is hanging on the wall, under a clock.

“God is kind,” says Abdul Aziz’s thin, scraggly bearded father, as he offers me his hand.

God, I will soon be told, is also wise, powerful, and clement—the reason not only for my being here but also for the meal we are about to be served. His instruments in this instance are Abdul Aziz’s mother and sisters, who are hard at work in the kitchen. When I ask if I can meet them, it’s suggested that I eat more of the rice, which is slithered with carrot and dripped in sheep’s fat, served on a single platter into which we all dig. Having been prepared by their hands, it is the closest I will come to an encounter with the women themselves.

The meal is conducted mostly in silence—every time I’m about to open my mouth to speak, Abdul Aziz’s father gestures for me to eat more. But with the dish wiped almost clean, he starts pouring out his questions.

“You know our poetry?” he asks.

I tell him I’m especially interested in the Shahnameh, which prompts a warm smile.

“Agar juz bikam-e man ayaad javaab,” he recites, “man u gurz u maidan u Afrasiyaab.” And should this reply with my wish not accord, / Then Afrasiyab’s field, the mace and the sword.

“This is Rostam,” he announces, one hand swiping the air, as if the warrior has just entered the room and needs to be introduced. “It is when he is fighting against the Turanians. Would you not agree he is the greatest of the heroes in Shahnameh?”

I wonder if he’s a scholar; but when he tells me he runs a shop (one of a row of metal shipping containers on the road to the musalla minarets), it’s no surprise. This is another example of how the Shahnameh resonates among ordinary Persian speakers. Listening to him, I’m sure the scholars I’ve met are right—that the same literary Persian culture survives on both sides of the border.

There is a creak behind me. I turn to see two thin black-clad arms stretching through the door. A tray is held between them, which is taken by Abdul Aziz and set on the rug. The tea is lemon-scented, served in tapering tulip-shaped glasses with silver rims. Beside it is a bowl of fresh fruit—grapes of several different colors, a couple of burst pomegranates, their seeds glistening like rubies in a cave, and a pair of blush apples, which Abdul Aziz peels with a knife, forming spirals out of the paper-white flesh and the shiny green rind.

“Ismail Khan was good for us,” says his father—we have moved on to politics now. “He fought against the Taliban; they were our enemy.”

“Because of their repressions?” I ask.

“Because they are Pashtun.”

He strokes his beard, greasing it with the sheep’s fat dripping off his fingers.

“We are not Pashtun, so why must they rule us? [President Hamid] Karzai is the same. You know our poetry, so you understand. We are a cultured people, but what did the Pashtuns ever create? What poetry did they write?”

Given what he thinks of the Pashtuns, I’m not surprised when he advises me to change my travel plans. He spits a grape seed into his hand and lets out a grunt as he shifts his belly over his crossed legs.

“You must not go south of Herat,” he says. “If you want to see Kabul you must take an airplane. But you must not go south, because you will meet the Pashtuns. And you do not need me to tell you how foolish that would be.”

I play it Persian: nodding to what he has said, agreeing that he has given me excellent advice (to do anything else would be to cause offense—especially in front of his son) and making up my mind to go ahead with my plans anyway.

“Wisdom is a gift from God,” he declares.

He’s smiling, even though I’m sure I can see in his eyes that he knows what I’m thinking: The code of Persian etiquette has designated a role for both of us, and we’re acting to the script.

He pushes the fruit bowl toward me, gesturing with an expansive palm. “Have a pomegranate. According to our great scientist Ibn Sina, it is good for the digestion.”

The next day, Abdul Aziz turns up at the Hotel Successful once again.

“My father was very interested to meet you,” he says. “He invites you to come for supper any time you wish.”

“Thank you!” I reply. But I know this is the politeness code I’ve come across so many times in recent months. One meal is enough—the worst kind of guest is the one who keeps turning up.

This morning we have a particular mission, and having a local like Abdul Aziz is going to be an enormous help. He escorts me a few minutes from the city center, to a broad metal gate set between marble-tiled columns. Stocks rattle as a group of sentinels raise their Kalashnikovs.

“No journalists!” one of them shouts.

“I’m not a journalist,” I reply. “I’m a—well, I’m writing a book about history. The history of Herat. And if I can’t include—er—Governor Khan—well, it won’t look very good. I mean, people might think he’s not very important.”

The soldier takes a moment to flex his brow, then he leads us inside the gate, where we stand in front of enough Toyota Land Cruisers to set up a showroom.

“Stay here!” he barks, before disappearing into a rose garden.

Just to meet Ismail Khan would be exciting enough. Not only is he the most famous man in Herat—he’s an icon of modern Afghanistan, his biography an illustration of how topsy-turvy political life here can be. As a major in the Afghan army in 1979, he refused to fire on the local rebels when they massacred the Soviet advisers and their families—instead he took his men to the hills. A ten-year war between Khan and the Russians had begun.⁵¹

Within three years of its conclusion, after the Russian withdrawal in 1989, Khan declared himself “amir of Western Afghanistan.” But he was weakened when Herat was bombed by General Dostum, a rival mujahid, and a later Taliban assault forced him back into the hills. Dostum continued to be a thorn in Khan’s side: A year on, his deputy lured him into a Taliban trap. He was chained to a pipe in Kandahar, and for three years he lived on a single piece of bread a day. Even when a sympathetic guard helped him escape, he was still haunted by bad luck: His getaway car hit an anti-tank mine and his legs were broken. But he kept going, thanks to a rescue mission by his own loyalists, and was smuggled into the safe haven of Iran.

He didn’t take back Herat until 2001, assisted by the US bombing campaign. As governor, he rebuilt schools, roads, and parks, establishing the city as the safest and most prosperous in the whole country, and held public meetings where his subjects could petition him for favors, like the best of the ancient shahs. But Khan is no longer in charge. Accused of treating the province as his personal fiefdom, of arbitrary arrests, illegal detentions, and a moral code not much more lenient than the Taliban’s⁵² (and—more crucially for President Karzai’s central government—of failing to hand over tax and customs revenues, along with refusing to grant the U.S. an air base), he has lost his job amid mayhem on the streets. UN offices were set on fire and demonstrators chanted “Death to Karzai” (although conversations in Herat show Khan has plenty of opponents too, hoping his removal will bring them greater freedom). But even though he’s lost his handle on power, I imagine he has kept some of the trappings—and I’m eager to glimpse what is left of his court.

“Come!”

The soldier whisks us into the rose garden. Grape branches tunnel over our heads, while pink tiles slide under our feet and more pink appears in the stuccoed columns on either side of us. This I certainly didn’t expect: an Afghan warlord’s lair, looking like it’s been done up by Dame Barbara Cartland.

Men with waistcoats over their shalwar qameez are sitting on benches between the columns. A line of them gives way to a stocky man dressed entirely in white: skullcap, sleeveless shirt, trousers, beard, and even his prayer beads—as if he’s the guardian of a tacky TV version of heaven. Only the arch of Khan’s eyebrows betrays a more devious side. Others are keen to talk to him, so we’re nudged farther along to mingle with the mujahideen. We sit down at the end of a bench, next to a glum-looking man who shows us the stitches on his calf.

“Gunshot wounds,” he says nonchalantly. “Fighting against the Soviets.”

I ask him about his experiences with Khan: the “how do you know the host” question you ask at a party when you can’t think of anything else.

“We were in Kandahar together,” he says, his lips rising for a nostalgic smile, as if he’s about to set off on a fond trip down memory lane. “In a Taliban jail,” he adds, “chained to the pipes.”

More mujahideen sit around us, with turbans, long beards, and the obligatory Kalashnikovs, cross-legged on the carpet since there is no more space on the benches. Glasses of tea are proffered on a silver tray, and as they are being drained, a man stands up to recite a speech in praise of Khan. He has a deep, bombastic voice, which he hurls at his audience like he’s trying to knock us off the benches. Although he is speaking in Persian, I find his words difficult to understand, so I turn to Abdul Aziz for help.

“He says,” explains Abdul Aziz in a matter-of-fact whisper, “the problem for Afghanistan is foreigners. He says they try to exploit us and Islam is the only true religion.”

“Oh.” I smile weakly at the men on the bench opposite, but they only give me stony looks in reply.

When the man has finished his speech, he takes Khan’s right hand in his, and presses it to his lips, which prompts a click of Abdul Aziz’s teeth.

“Tskk!” he hisses. “What this man is doing is wrong. In Islam, you should only kiss the hand of your mother, your father, or your teacher.”

Had I wanted to kiss Khan’s hand myself, when I am summoned to sit beside him, the look of it would have turned me off. It’s hairless and alarmingly pink, as if its outer skin has peeled away.

“We fought against the Russians,” he says, gesturing with that hand to include most of the gathering, “because we were against Communism. We were Afghans, and Muslims, and we wanted freedom.”

“But why,” I ask, thinking of my conversation with the poet Jalali, “didn’t you stop fighting when you had your freedom?”

“Because as soon as the Russians collapsed, Pakistan interfered. They didn’t accept for Afghanistan to be a strong military country. And we were strong, because we had weapons from the Russians, so Pakistan was afraid we would hurt it.”

He is referring to the Taliban, who were created under Pakistani auspices and are seen by many Afghans, especially the non-Pashtuns, as representative not of their own country but of their meddling neighbor.

“It is very hard to live under the power of ignorant people,” says Khan, “especially for us here in Herat, because this is the most cultured province in our country. They hanged our people on the lampposts, they took away our education so now we have many young men who are illiterate, but the people of Herat are resourceful. Whether they were distributing pamphlets or secret poems, they never allowed the Taliban to control us.”

It’s a surreal conversation. One moment he’s fulminating against the Pakistani secret service. The next we are debating the gender of pronouns in application to countries (can you call Afghanistan a “she”?). I bring up Ferdowsi, hoping he’ll quote from one of the poet’s battle stories, but he gives a brief smile before enumerating what he’s achieved for the culture of Herat.

“We have done a lot,” he says. “In the war many streets and homes were damaged, but we rebuilt the schools and now we have ten faculties and our own books.”

When I mention the rumors he was funded by Iran, he responds with an arch of brow and a flash of eye.

“There are a million Afghan refugees in Iran, and we share a long border. Of course we should have good relations. But we are different—our culture is different. We are Afghanistan!”

So much for the cultural unity suggested by the writers I’ve met: With politicians, it’s all about the differences.

There is one more thing I want from Khan—advice for my forthcoming journey. A battle-hardened war hero like him—he should be able to give me all sorts of useful information. Maybe it will be the magic detail that could end up saving my life. But he is still in politician mode and is reticent about dishing out advice.

“There are still many Taliban making difficulties,” he says. “There is peace in some provinces. But not in all of them.”

This has already been confirmed by one of his mujahideen. Tea glass chiming against his rifle’s stock, he inquires where I am planning to go next.

“Ghazni!”

The word is passed along the row like a live grenade.

“But that’s in Pashtun country,” he says. “You must wear Afghan clothes or they will shoot you.”

“Don’t listen to him,” says another mujahid, shaking his head. “He’s just trying to scare you. They will only kidnap you and ask for some money.”

For my plans to be considered dangerous by men who fought the Russians, and bear the wounds to prove it, is a little disconcerting. But as I wander around Herat in search of advice for the journey to Ghazni, these turn out to be some of the most positive appraisals I receive.

“If you go to the places you are talking about,” says one of the teachers at Abdul Aziz’s school, “then they will kill you. If the evil ones see you or hear about you, they will kill you.”

I am sitting in the staff room with several of the teachers. Having just taken a class, I’m hoping for their goodwill—but I’m struggling to receive any encouragement for my journey.

“What if I find someone to go with me?” I ask.

“And where,” comes the response, “will you find anyone crazy enough to do that?”

“You know,” says Hamid, the Sufi poet I chatted with a few days ago, “the Taliban are offering a free motorbike to anyone who helps them kill a foreigner?”

“A free motorbike!” declares another of the teachers, called Javed, his bright eyes flashing. “I could do with a motorbike. Maybe I should give them a call!”

He bursts into the sort of roar you might expect from an especially amused lion.

“I’m a war child,” he adds, to explain his carefree attitude. “I’m from Kabul. People here in Herat, they had it easy. I saw people burned alive, I saw nails hammered into people’s fingertips. I used to go on the rooftop and watch the Scud B’s shooting into the city. My father got so angry, he’d shout at me, ‘Get down from there!’ I never did! I wasn’t scared.”

“Your point being?” I snap. I’m having something of a humor bypass at this point.

“Do you believe in destiny?” says Javed. “We Muslims—we believe in destiny. If it’s your turn to die, then if you aren’t shot by the Taliban, you will be hit by a car.”

That sounds like Ferdowsi. Fate, he tells us, is like a polo stick: “We, bandied each way / By profit and loss, are the same as the ball.” Maybe this is the time to pull to the side and stop, to follow the advice I’ve been given and call it a day. But I know I won’t. Something has been tugging me toward Ghazni for several months now—ever since the Professor narrated the story of Ferdowsi’s visit to the court of the miserly Sultan Mahmud. Even if there is a bullet with my name on it, waiting in a bandolier somewhere out in Helmand, I’ve come too far to turn back.⁵³ So I decide to do something pragmatic: I send off an e-mail and the next day a note turns up on my door at the Hotel Successful:

Nick, Where are you? Call me—Fereydoun

I have contacted the Sunday Times correspondent, Christina Lamb, who’s put me in touch with her old fixer. He comes along to dinner the next day, in the hotel restaurant, and over oily chunks of lamb kebab I tell him about my plans.

“Really, you are interested in Shahnameh?” he says. “This is wonderful. I met many Westerners, but no one is ever interested in Ferdowsi.”

It’s going well, and we seem to be establishing a rapport: Surely I have found myself a guide! Surely, one more time, Ferdowsi has turned out to be the key.

“I want to help you,” says Fereydoun, wiping his mouth with a napkin, which he drops onto his emptied plate, “because you are a guest in my country. You are a friend of my friend and you are writing about Ferdowsi, who is from my country.”

But then comes a blow.

“I am training to be a doctor,” he says, “so I’ve stopped working as a fixer. I’d love to come with you—but I can’t.”

I can feel a lead weight navigating its slow plunge through my innards. Will I have to go it alone? The thought of traveling unassisted through the Taliban heartland is doing strange things to my stomach. I trudge beside Fereydoun back to his jeep. He turns the ignition, reaches for the handbrake, and as I’m lifting a hand to wave him off, he leans out of the window:

“You know, there is someone who . . . Wait for tomorrow, but I can’t promise . . . ”

What does he mean? What is he talking about? Someone who what? I’ll have to wait until six in the morning. . . .

A rap on my door. Behind it is a man in shalwar qameez, like most Afghans. But there’s something different about this one. Maybe it’s the polished black brogues on his feet, or the signet ring flashing on his right hand, or the shiny-buttoned blazer he’s wearing over his knee-length shirt.

“I come before you,” he announces in a high rolling voice like a circus ringmaster, “by the hand of Ferrrrreydoun.”

Hassan-Gul hardly looks like the ideal guide for the Afghan badlands. His blazer and the wax on his mustache suggest a dandy, which isn’t helped by his habit, as we sit over breakfast, of dabbing the crumbs off his blazer with a spotted handkerchief. I’ve met plenty of Iranians who were obsessed with their appearance, but the people I’ve encountered in Herat seemed to be a hardier bunch—more Afghan hounds than Persian cats.

Or so I thought. I certainly never expected to meet an Afghan with a spotted hanky. And the fact that the second part of his name, “gul,” means “flower,” doesn’t bode well in a country run by the gun. Is he really the right man to guide me into “Taliban country”? To cross the terrifying wastes of Helmand and set out for the final stretch to Ghazni? A single word confirms that he is:

“Pashto.”

“You speak it?” I ask.

“Thanks to God, Mr. Nicholas, my tongue is in languages like a bird in flight!”

As I will discover—and as his dress sense implies—Hassan-Gul isn’t impartial to the odd poetic flourish.

“I have many friends in that part of the country,” he says. “When we reach Farah, I want us to place ourselves at the house of my friend Nasrullah.”

“So you speak Pashto and Dari?”⁵⁴

He wipes another crumb off his mustache and neatly folds up the handkerchief, before fitting it in the top pocket of his blazer. “If I did not,” he says, “then how could you place your feet in your destination?”

We spend breakfast discussing the itinerary and haggling over his fee. Since he is training to be a doctor and has an exam to write in two weeks’ time, he insists on leaving the next morning.

“We must think about your appearance,” he adds, leaning forward to scrutinize my face. Fortunately, I’ve spent long enough in this part of the world for my usual pasty complexion to attract a little color, and my nose is large enough to pass as an Afghan’s. But, Hassan-Gul concludes, there is still plenty of work to do.

“It is possible for you to look like us,” he decides at last, “but you must wear our clothes. And of course you must put your glasses away.”

“My glasses?”

“Yes—you didn’t notice, Mr. Nicholas? Afghan people never wear glasses.”

I take them off and he responds with an encouraging tilt of his head.

“This is much better, is it not?” he says, adding, “and it is good that your hair is dark. And you have a beard, so this is also good. Although I must tell you, Mr. Nicholas, it is not very thick.”

“But you haven’t got a beard at all.”

“That is correct, but it is you who people will be suspicious about—especially when they hear you speaking. . . . In fact, it is better if you don’t speak at all.”

“What? Pretend I’m a mute?”

“A . . . ? Oh yes, Mr. Nicholas, a mute! Yes, this is an excellent idea, this is exactly what you must do. Otherwise they will know you are a foreigner—and I must tell you, that would not be good.”

He looks me up and down once more, like a new suit he’s thinking of trying on, then gives a satisfied nod.

“Your heart is trembling?”

“Nnnno!”

“But if you are afraid, then why are you doing this journey?”

“I’m not afraid!”

He leans forward, patting my wrist with what must be the most manicured male hand in Herat.

“I promise you, Mr. Nicholas, if you do what I say you will be safe.”

To travel incognito . . . there’s something strangely attractive about that—and authentic too. I think of Sarah Hobson, who wandered around Iran in the early ’70s dressed as a man, or Robert Byron, a few years before World War II, daubing his face with burnt cork to visit a shrine in Mashhad. Or even the BBC correspondent John Simpson, scuttling into Afghanistan in a burka on the eve of the American invasion. In a land so full of secrets, Westerners have often turned to secrecy themselves to make their way through it.

Early next morning, the call to prayer has still to be sung when I tie the cord of my trousers and pull on a shirt as long as a nightgown. I wind a turban around my head, strap on a pair of plastic sandals, and wrap my backpack in a bedsheet to look like a local’s bundle. A glance in the mirror in the unlit corridor shows the silhouette, at least, of an Afghan, ready for the journey to the troubled south.

In the taxi to the transport terminal, the driver is chatting away to Hassan-Gul.

“Your friend is quiet,” he says.

His sharp eyes glance at me in the rearview mirror.

“He is my cousin,” replies Hassan-Gul. “He has not spoken since he was a small boy, when the Russians burned down his father’s house.”

He turns to me: “Is that not the truth, Abbas?”

I nod.