Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

knew lay ahead. It was trivial in itself, but it was one of a thousand seeds of rebellion that were scattered across the plain of Central Asia, ready to sprout. This particular incident began early in the afternoon when a group of Uzbek farmers walked down the road from the bazaar to the holy shrine of Ibn Abbas, the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin.

It happened quickly, almost as an act of guerrilla theater. The group climbed the long stairway up to the tomb. Inside, the small room was crowded with a busload of Russian tourists, listening to a lecture on native folklore from an officious Armenian guide. They tromped about the room in their heavy Russian shoes, with no thought that they were in a mosque, walking upon holy ground. To them it was a curiosity, a relic of the pagan past that made Central Asia a quaint tourist attraction.

The Uzbek group gave way and stood aside, staring reverently at the wooden screen that shielded the tomb—but blocked from it by the Russians with their cameras and their loud talk and their guide telling amusing anecdotes about the religious practices of the Moslems. The act of sedition came in the wink of an eye. As the Russian group began to leave the room, one Uzbek man motioned to his brothers and sisters to sit down. They squatted on their haunches with their backs against the north wall, the women in the group squatting just apart from the men, as the Koran commanded. The chant began the moment they were in place.

“Allahu akhbar,” sang the mullah. He was in fact an ordinary farmer, a graduate of no madrassah; almost certainly he did not own a Koran; almost certainly he could not have read it if he did. But that day, in that moment, he was a mullah, calling his people to prayer.

“Ashhadu anna la ilaha illa-Llah.” I bear witness that there is no god but God. The tiny congregation, squatting against the wall, murmured a response.

“Ashhadu anna Muhammadan rasulu-Llah.” I bear witness that Mohammed is the messenger of God.

He prayed quickly. The next Russian tour group would be arriving any minute from the front gate, from the bookstore where they sold atheist literature and anti-Islamic tracts. The mullah hurried. The name of God was no less powerful if it was said quickly.

“Allahu akhbar,” he began again, repeating the call to prayer.

“Ashhadu anna la ilaha illa-Llah.”

The untutored mullah recited the fatiha, the first sura of the Koran. He was racing now:

“Praise belongs to God, Lord of the Worlds,

The Compassionate, the Merciful,

King of the Day of Judgment,

It is Thee we worship and Thee we ask for help.

Guide us on the straight path,

The path of those whom Thou has favored,

Not the path of those who incur Thine anger

nor of those who go astray.”

The men and women put their hands to their faces, bowed, put their hands to their faces again. In the small room the sound echoed and reverberated, so that it began to sound like a great chorus of Moslems, rather than eight dusty Uzbek farmers. An old Turkman appeared at the door in a blue coat and white turban, his eyes alight with pleasure to hear the sound of prayer. He put his hands to his face the moment he entered the room and followed along. A few more old men arrived and joined in the chant, but the sound of heavy shoes and Russian voices was approaching.

It ended as suddenly as it had begun. The mullah broke off at the last verse, stood up and led his little band out the door single file, into the world of God’s grace, and Soviet power.

It was nearly a month before an account of these events in Uzbekistan—and a half dozen more that told the same story—made its way back to Edward Stone in Washington. The delay wasn’t surprising, given the route the news traveled. It might have been borne by the Pathan horse trader Mahbub Ali, who roamed the strange land that Kipling called “the back of Beyond.” A visiting trader in the marketplace at Samarkand made his way by rickety Russian bus down the road to Termez, at the southern border of Uzbekistan, stopping overnight in Karshi, and two nights in Sherabad. When he reached Termez, the man found his way to the back room of a particular coffeehouse, and chatted with a particular old Uzbek gentleman who had relatives living in Kabul. And somehow—better never to ask exactly how—the news traveled across the supposedly impermeable Soviet border, till it was the talk of Mazar-i-Sharif and Baghlan, and then down the great highway to Kabul. And from there it flowed steadily, like water tracing its course downhill, through the peaks and valleys of southern Afghanistan and across the frontier into Pakistan. And when the news reached Peshawar, it came to the attention of a very particular friend of Edward Stone’s, a Pakistani gentleman who worked for an organization with the bland title Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and who was, like Stone himself, a player of the Great Game.

And when it finally reached Stone’s desk, the news brought a smile, a long moment of contemplation and the consideration of new ventures for the future.

   II

AMOS B. GARRETT

ISTANBUL / WASHINGTON

JANUARY 23–26, 1979

4

The American consulate in Istanbul at least looked as if it belonged to a superpower. It occupied a fine old marble building in the center of town, and on a sunny day, with the American flag flapping in the breeze off the Golden Horn, it looked rather grand. Not quite as grand as the Soviet consulate, a salmon-pink palace a few blocks away. But entirely adequate to the American purpose in that part of the world, which in the late 1970s rested on less secure foundations than its diplomatic real estate.

The consulate building had been constructed in the 1870s by a Genoese shipowner named Corpi. He had spared no expense, importing marble and