Sojourner in Islamic Lands

Russell Fraser

Description

Sojourner in Islamic Lands takes us on a journey from Kazakhstan in the far north of Central Asia, across the mountains to the former Soviet Union, then south to Iran just below the Caspian Sea. Russell Fraser follows the ancient Silk Road wherever possible. For centuries the Silk Road was the primary commercial link between Europe and Asia, with much of it over desert sands and accessible only by camel. Building on history and personal experience, Fraser's narrative describes this vast territory with an eye to geography, artistic culture, and religion over more than two thousand years.

The book that he gives us depends first of all on travel, but the author's eye is on an interior landscape, and he focuses on the influence of religious ideology on the cultural landscape of Central Asia. Delving deeply into art and architecture, he takes them to be Islam's most significant creative expressions. Although Islam is currently the predominant religion in the region, the book also examines the two other belief systems with modern-day followers—Christianity and an antireligious sect Fraser calls secular progressivism.

His aim is to present Islam to Western readers by describing its achievements during the High Middle Ages and comparing and contrasting them with those of modern Islam. The book offers insights into the history of a major world religion through the eyes of a well-known literary scholar on a journey through exotic parts of the world. He steeps us in the latter, inviting the reader to share the journey with him and participate in the sensations it gives rise to.

Sujets

• Mahoma
• Nader Shah
• The Sufis
• Sassanid Empire
• Islamic culture
• Reza Abbasi
• Hajji
• Mahmud of Ghazni
• Islamic Golden Age
• Islamic architecture
• Ab? Ray??n al-B?r?n?
• Muslim world
• Islamic art
• Travel
• General officer
• Umayyad Caliphate
• Shia Islam
• Mosque
• Muhammad
• Ibn Battuta
• Central
• General
• Allahverdi Khan
• Islam
• Asia
• Riza 'Abbasi
• Nâdir Shâh
• Al-Biruni
• Mohamed

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 06 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611173178
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sojourner in Islamic Lands
Russell Fraser

The University of South Carolina Press
 
 
 
© 2014 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fraser, Russell A.
Sojourner in Islamic lands / Russell Fraser.
    pages cm
 ISBN 978-1-61117-316-1 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-61117-317-8 (ebook) 1. Asia, Central—Description and travel. 2. Islamic countries—Description and travel. 3. Fraser, Russell A.—Travel—Asia, Central. I. Title.
DS327.8.F74 2013
915.804'43—dc23                                                                                                     2013024195
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
 
  1  Islam Past and Present
  2  The Roof of the World
  3  Looking for Tamburlaine
  4  Shakhrisabz and the Once and Future King
  5  Medea's Magic Bath
  6  Thieves of Mercy
  7  The Storks of Bukhara
  8  Khiva and the Pot of Basil
  9  Ashkabad, City of Love
10  The Return of the Mongols
11  Persia of the Ages
12  The Pattern of the World
13  The Pilgrim of the Heart
Illustrations
Maps
China
Kyrgyzstan
Uzb-Kyr
Iran
Figures
Wall map of the Silk Road
Statue of Tamburlaine in Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Pamir Mountains between China and the “Stans”
Shir Dor Madrassa, seventeenth century, Registan, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
Registan, Samarkand
 
Tower of Silence, outside Yazd, Iran
Qanats and wind tunnels, Yazd, Iran
Tomb of Cyrus the Great, Pasargadae, Iran
Warrior, from eastern stairway, Persepolis, Iran
Delegations bearing gifts, from eastern stairway, Persepolis, Iran
Pishtaq Arch and Ablution Pool, Isfahan, Iran
Chehel Sotum Palace, Isfahan, Iran
Imam Mosque and Square, Isfahan, Iran
Preface
Sojourner in Islamic Lands , as its title suggests, tells of time spent in Islam. It is more than a travel book, however. Its primary concern is with Islamic history and culture, in particular art and architecture. I became interested in Islam a generation ago when I went to Constantinople (Istanbul) to write The Three Romes (1985). The First Rome, taking in all things Italian—history, culture, art, language, food and drink—had long stimulated both my heart and head. Constantinople I had known only from books as the Second Rome, the preserver of eastern Christianity after the fall of Rome. The modern city, becoming part of Islam when it fell to the Turks in 1453, now begot my ongoing interest in the Muslim world. My Islam is an umbrella term, comprehending a wide range of meanings. Central Asia's ancient cities, for example, Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, put most of them before us. They mix heart-stopping beauty with deeply shocking evil, a living oxymoron that still resonates long after I've come away.
The structure of the book is linear, an account of travels from Kazakhstan in the far north of Central Asia to Iran in the south, just below the Caspian Sea. A brief coda brings the narrative back to Italy, the conventional end point (terminus ad quem) of the Silk Road. I had thought to include, as bookends to the narrative, Mughal India to the east and Andalusian Spain to the west. But I have trimmed my sails, while remaining at least aware of the presence of these cultural and ideological outriders. In moving from place to place, I follow the line of the Silk Road wherever possible. This great network, much of it over desert sands and accessible only by camel, was the primary commercial link between Europe and Asia from the first and second centuries B.C . to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries A.D ., when the opening of maritime routes to the East made land travel obsolete.
The book centers on Islam but is much engaged with Christianity and with the secular progressive faith that aims to supplant it. Harking back to my Three Romes , I think of this faith as the Third Rome, initially Moscow, or in its twentieth-century version, Stalin's Third International. It aroused a young man's indiscriminate enthusiasm, sorely tried when I first went to Russia in the 1960s. What remains of that long-ago time is a skeptical state of mind, especially regarding secular progressivism, which I define as the belief that all our problems are open to contractual solutions. Skepticism on matters social and political is central to my identity, and so intense that I must make room for a quotation from Dr. Johnson, who encapsulates my point of view better than anyone else:
How little, of all the ills that human hearts endure, That part which laws, or kings, can cause, or cure.
The Christian and secular panels of my “triptych” are like reflector characters in the fiction of Henry James. They set off the primary object of interest, illuminating it by comparison and contrast. Inevitably this back-and-forth suggests a point of view. Mine toward Islam mixes praise and blame. I don't have an ax to grind and have found good in people everywhere, whatever their religious persuasion. That said, there is an area over which the accepted ideology is deeply influential, sometimes in unfortunate ways. I think it important to explore that area, and I look at it closely. Perhaps some will bridle at what I see. But coming to conclusions, founded, let it be said, on the scrutiny of particulars, is the salt of what I've written.
My traveling is intentional. I seek to recover Islam and present it to the Western mind. This means describing things as they were at the height of the Islamic achievement in the High Middle Ages, and saying by contrast how they are now. The intention is complex and entails meditation on the rise and decline of a great civilization. I am out for something more than simple narration and want to say not only how and when things happened but also why. Meditation slows the pace of my narrative. There are “grace notes”: some of my traveling is reminiscent, that is, I interpolate into my account journeys I made in the past, for example to Western China. Also the teller's eye is prone to wandering. I like to “expatiate and confer,” a phrase of John Milton's, who interrupts Paradise Lost with frequent meanders, like a river in its leisurely course to the sea. The meanders are consequential, and eventually the river finds its way again.
I'd be sorry were the reader not to experience, as I have, something of the thrill of Central Asia, its vastness and endless variety. Sir Aurel Stein, to me the most impressive of the intrepid men who opened up this region a hundred years ago, wrote of standing at the summit of snowy peaks and glaciers, looking down on Bactria (Afghanistan) and the Upper Valley of the Oxus. He said “a strange and joyful sensation” overcame him. In imagination I share it, standing with him on the eastern threshold of that distant land.
I am grateful to Jane Eckelman of Manoa Mapworks, Inc., for the maps. A master of Islamic scholarship, the late Oleg Grabar of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, gave me help I couldn't have dispensed with. I hope the result seems worth his pains. Part of my material appeared originally in the Yale Review , and I thank the editor for permission to reuse it.
Like some other books of mine, this one is for Mary, without whose intriguing presence I might have finished sooner.
RUSSELL FRASER
HONOLULU, 2012
 
1
Islam Past and Present
A loose and baggy monster, Asia sprawls like Tolstoy's novels, but its Islamic heartland imparts a shape to the whole. If I run my eye over the map, beginning to the east of the mountains in China, it runs west to the Caspian Sea. Along the way the eye takes in the five “Stans” on the western side of the Chinese border. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, these former Soviet client states lie like peas in a pod. They each have their separate identity, though, and I aim to say what that is. Move the eye south from the border of Uzbekistan, and it lights on Persia, now resuming its old name, Iran. This gives the periphery of the area I mean to explore. I have more than physical exploring in mind, though. I want to sort out the ideas that have governed for much of my life as I near the end of it.
Sometimes I think my branch of the family clan has a gene for wanderlust. Fighting on the losing side against the English at Culloden in 1746, many of them migrated to the New World. A nineteenth-century ancestor, Cmdr. Alexander Fraser, sailed aroun