Ann Marlowe

Originally published in the Asian Wall Street Journal, 9/17/2009

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204518504574419183123052314.html

Restoring Afghanistan:
A tour of Asheqan wa Arefan.

BY ANN MARLOWE

Afghanistan is not quite ready for tourists. But when it is they will stand here, at the edge of Kabul’s Old City, preparing to explore the area of a couple of square miles known as Asheqan wa Arefan. Though from a distance Asheqan wa Arefan looks downtrodden, on closer inspection it contains many lovely 18th- and 19th- century wooden houses, sensitively renovated over the last seven years by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

Home to about 22,000 mainly poor Afghans, the neighborhood in central Kabul, like much of the city, has ancient roots. It bears the name of two brothers whose grave dates from the ninth century. On the steep hillside above is an old Islamic period mausoleum and, higher still, the remnants of a Buddhist stupa.

“The municipality thinks it is a slum,” says Jolyon Leslie, the head of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC). In the absence of tourism in the Old City, the AKTC, a nonprofit founded by a hereditary leader of one of the largest Shia Muslim sects, is working to preserve Afghanistan’s heritage for those who live among it. Afghan architects have done the design work, supervising Afghan artisans.

The AKTC is best known for its restoration of Baghe-Babur, or Babur’s Gardens, now once again a popular Kabuli park with as many as 60,000 visitors monthly in the summer. This high-profile project provided one million man days of labor and trained 100 skilled workers.

But the AKTC has been working quietly south of the Kabul River on projects that few besides the residents of the neighborhood see. After the artisans finish, the houses are simply returned to their owners, with the stipulation that they take care of them. This is more radical than it sounds, for Afghanistan is a low-trust society where no one gives—or expects—something for nothing.
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 http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/279tznqi.asp?pg=2

03/23/2009, Volume 014, Issue 26

I turned carefully to scan the horizon. Nearby, French archeologists had recently uncovered 40 stupas and three Buddhist monasteries, but I couldn’t see them. With just a foot of crumbling mud brick separating me from a 60-foot fall, I didn’t push my luck.

I was on top of the Minar-i-Zadyan, Afghanistan’s oldest minaret, also known as the Minaret of Daulatabad, 20 miles from Balkh. I’d allowed my Afghan friends’ kids to climb the dark, steep internal stairway with me and a voluble young Afghan archaeology buff, Reza Hossaini. But the minaret is missing as much as a third of its original height, coming to an end in broken masonry rather than a platform from which the call to prayer would have sounded. I was worried that seven-year-old Leeza, who has no fear of heights, would lose her balance as she shifted around to examine the view.

Although it was first documented in 1938 by the Western researcher Eric Schroeder, the minaret was not surveyed until 1952 and is not described in any of the classic travel books on Afghanistan, not even in Nancy Hatch Dupree’s comprehensive 1977 guide. The only web reference is on the site of a preservation organization Dupree founded in 1994, the Society for the Preservation of Afghan Cultural Heritage (SPACH).

The obscurity of the minaret is explained by the fact that, until recently, getting there from Balkh took three hours on an appalling road, enough to deter all but the most fanatic devotees of medieval Islamic architecture. It was only a year ago that a spanking new asphalt road reduced the travel time between Balkh and Daulatabad, 27.5 kilometers away, from more than two hours to 10 minutes.

A further half-hour over 14 kilometers of dirt road, winding around storybook mud brick Turkmen villages, brings you to Zadyan, the village that contains the minaret. The men and women who live in the surrounding villages still wear the striking national dress–pointed hats with headscarves for the women, vibrantly colored handwoven caps for the men and boys–and weave carpets for a living. If you don’t look too hard, it can seem as though time stopped here when the minaret was built–around 1108-09, according to the Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan. (more…)

Originally Published in 02138 Magazine, Winter 2007

There aren’t many blank spots left on the map that run half a degree of latitude wide, even in Afghanistan. Nimroz Province, a Tennessee-sized chunk of prairie and desert that’s home to 149,000 Afghans, is one such area.

I set out with a photographer friend, John Murphy, to satisfy a craving to see the massive centuries-old ruins of Shahr-i-Gholghola, a city that must once have covered the same area as Manhattan. An American traveling from Kandahar to Nimroz had seen them from his car and e-mailed me his photos; they bore out the description of Nancy Hatch Dupree, the dean of Afghan archaeology, as “the greatest assemblage of 15th-century A.D. architecture anywhere in the Middle East.” Abandoned around 1407 to the ravages of summer sandstorms and winter flash flooding from the nearby Helmand River, the site has not been explored since a Smithsonian Institution expedition left in 1976. (more…)