I recently posted on an ancient book of Afghan history, and mentioned that I also had a more modern work on hand. At last, I’ve got around to reading it, courtesy of a splendid train journey to Edinburgh. It’s The Khyber Pass by Paddy Docherty - a modern study (2007) of this essential route between Afghanistan and Pakistan (as they are now called, though we must always be careful of reading our current situation backwards in history). Frankly, it’s a confusing, poorly structured and rather half-baked disappointment.
The idea is good – that the Khyber is one of the great strategic points of the world, comparable to Gibraltar or the Bosporus, and movement between India and Central Asia and the west, and between India and China, has historically almost entirely been through this route, which continues to have local importance to this day. So we can stand in the Khyber Pass and watch the tide of history flow in and out. And what a tide it is – Persian conquest, Alexander the Great, Chandragupta, the Kushans, the export of Buddhism to Afghanistan and China, new Persian conquests, the arrival of Islam, Genghis Khan, Timur, Babur founding the Moghul empire by sweeping down from the north, the Sikhs, the British Raj getting its bloody nose in the C19th, and the recent Taliban-Pakistan imbroglio – and I’ve missed a lot out, I assure you.
Sadly, Docherty doesn’t give us this in any coherent way. He gives very little information about the pass itself, and attempts sweeping pieces of history with barely a mention of the Khyber – so we get quite an account of the rise of Cyrus and Darius far to the west in modern Iran (and there are plenty of other examples), but little sense of the role the Khyber played in limiting their ambitions or creating difficulties to be overcome. So we hear more about Alexander crossing the Indus than we do about him coming through the pass. It’s as if you wrote a history of Europe, with discursions into India and Africa when you felt like it, and called it The English Channel. Finally – and this is hard to avoid – it’s a complete nightmare of unfamiliar names and phrases, inadequately explained and not properly supported with good maps, indexes, glossaries et cetera. A great disappointment, so I have just picked two key themes.
Buddhism moved out of India through the Khyber and into Afghanistan in the early centuries of the Christian era, and thence into the lands to the east – in China it almost merged with Taoism to produce ‘Pure Land’ Buddhism, and in Japan it produced Zen – both a long way from the traditional, monastic Hinayana (lesser vehicle) form of Buddhism. Nowadays, no Buddhism survives in the lands of the Khyber, either north or south, but the two mighty Buddhas of Bamian, carved out of the cliffs by monks in – perhaps – the second or third centuries AD survived until destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Although this was a cultural tragedy and an act of fierce bigotry, Robert Byron, in The Road to Oxiana, was less than impressed from an aesthetic viewpoint: "Neither has any artistic value. But one could bear that; it is their negation of sense, the lack of pride in their monstrous flaccid bulk, that sickens".
And a few centuries later, Islam arrived in the other direction, shaping the region to this day. Islam came about gradually, but Mahmud’s Ghazni invasion in 1001 was the point from which there was no turning back. Though it might not have seemed that way with the great invasions of Genghis Khan is 1221 and Timur in 1398; but in 1525, a relatively obscure descendant of them both, Babur, raised in Fergana in modern Uzbekistan and then ruling the kingdom of Caboul (Kabul) passed through, and founded the glorious Muslim empire of the Moghuls, based round cities like Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. Out of this invasion came the lasting Islamic religion of the north-west of India and what is now Pakistan, the wonderful architecture of the Taj Mahal and Jaipur, and decorative arts of great sophistication and beauty. Babur, incidentally, left an autobiography, which he undoubtedly wrote himself, detailing his politics and his wars, and his passion for gardens, poetry and wine – the Baburnama.
Nowadays, the Khyber Pass remains important for trade and insurgency, but it is no longer the strategic bottleneck it once was. US and NATO forces in Afghanistan flew in, largely ignoring the land routes, and it is unlikely that the pass will ever be as important as it once was. But it’s still a mighty impressive place to visit or to dream about.
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