Uzbekistan, with its crumbling mosques and swooning minarets, is in many ways a travel-writer’s dream, and has long provided grist for adventurers and visitors to the “Stans”. The country today, a geopolitical lynchpin of the five soviet republics of Central Asia, is in marked decline. Having lost its old trading significance and its informal role as Moscow’s regional watchdog, resource-rich Uzbekistan now faces serious environmental challenges, extreme poverty, and a deeply authoritarian government.
Undeterred, Christopher Aslan Alexander, an Englishman born in Turkey, heads to the exquisitely preserved city of Khiva, turned by the Soviets turned into a (somewhat sanitised) fantasy of battlements, dungeons and harems.
Arriving with boundless enthusiasm and a green parrot, Alexander is initially disappointed by shabby, post-Soviet Uzbekistan, so distant from the storybooks. Nevertheless, he’s excited enough by Islamic art and design to found a carpet workshop, hoping to improve on the shiny factory-made produce that most Uzbeks now opt for. He welds looms out of scrap metal, procures copper dyeing pots in the bazaar, and heads to Mazar-i Sharif in search of madder root and oak gall – two of the key dye-making ingredients. He employs a local workforce, and is careful to call it a ‘carpet school’ to avoid the attentions of local officials. Alexander confronts his many obstacles – political in-fighting, endemic corruption, and a state that has no appetite for private enterprise – with brio and good humour. Even local tourist guides are a risk, angling for a cut of each sale and dangerous when refused.
Alexander is at his best describing the everyday oddities of life in Uzbekistan, and helping the reader understand how it got that way. The country took its greatest knock in modern times with the formation of the Soviet Union. The old Bukharan Emirate, corrupt and feudal, had languished under the laissez-faire rule of the tsarists since the 1860s, only to be shocked into Bolshevik discipline following the Russian Revolution. Thereafter, commissars would turn Uzbekistan on its head, bringing (among other things) female empowerment, atheism, and alcohol. The result would be an acute identity problem, that Alexander delights in showing us: religious feasts clinking with vodka bottles; prudish segregation of the sexes followed by the husbands’ rampant whoring; meals of pork that end with the amin, a Muslim ritual prayer; fully-clothed female staff working in nude all-male homoms, or bath-houses.
The author skilfully draws the nation’s complex and ambivalent view of Islam, and the state’s Big Brother-ish attempts to control it. Despite its tolerance in a mild, nationalist-based form, the government is so jealous of its own power that the merest signs of opposition (religious or not) are summarily dealt with. Youths take care not to grow beards lest they be lumped in with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan or Hezb-ut Tahrir – Islamist movements seeking to do away with the presidency in favour of an Islamic caliphate.
Until 2005, the Uzbek regime’s inhumane treatment of its opponents – systematic torture, kidnapping and even death by boiling – was largely overlooked by the West, anxious not to lose an ally on the War on Terror (the Karshi airbase is only a stone’s throw from Afghanistan). But support would finally turn when President Islom Karimov’s men massacred up to 700 unarmed civilians in Andijan during an anti-government protest. Unrepentant, Karimov struck back at foreign workers, denying them visas, and retreating further into semi-feudalism and pariah status. It would change the status of the workshop from foreign curiosity to foreign nuisance, and eventually to the author’s own forced exit.
A tall, blond, vegetarian, near-teetotal Christian, Alexander cuts an unusual figure in gritty Uzbekistan. And he’s gutsy too: his honesty frequently pits him against unscrupulous colleagues and rapacious policeman. But his incorruptibility is ultimately his undoing. Alexander fails to show due deference to the Mayor of Khiva, who swings by the workshop one evening in pursuit of a gift for the President’s daughter. The author’s visa is not only withdrawn, but he is blacklisted, and everything he has worked for over seven years is lost.
Too many travel writers visit Central Asia in a hurry, bulking out their own misadventures with slices of the region’s colourful history. But the strength of this eminently readable book derives from the author’s patience: after seven years in Uzbekistan Alexander has provided a frank and penetrating portrayal of the country, with all its contradictions and absurdities. He writes with clear-eyed observation and courage, never failing to emphasise the engrained hospitality and random acts of kindness that remind us that in spite of everything, Central Asia is still an exceptionally alluring place.
