On the road again

Willie Nelson would like the news from Afghanistan. Still restless at 69, our grizzled country music icon “just can’t wait to get on the road again.” Willie’s signature lyric throbs and whines like a diesel in top gear. Now Afghan-style big rigs – antique- shaped, garishly painted, fume-belching Bedford trucks – may soon roll again on paved turnpikes.

“Roads,” Hamid Karzai proclaimed this month, “are the veins of Afghanistan, and its blood flows along them.” Hence the hope (if not yet the results) of three November developments: the opening of a remote but strategic bridge, the start of highway restoration between three leading cities, and the announcement of a brand new trade route proposed by controversial donors. So rev up the tour bus, Willie. As fellow “Highwayman” Johnny Cash sang in his first-ever recording session (Sun Records, early 1954), “There’ll be a wide open road.”

Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry has been called “The Mecca of Country Music.” While this publicist phrase risks trouble (between good Muslims and Bible-belt good-ole-boys), it contains an unintended appropriateness: That roads – and, more broadly, travel – have a special resonance in both traditions.

C&W fans (like myself) revel in ditties of human movement. Song protagonists are always “Movin’ On” (Hank Snow) or taking trains or driving trucks. Some verses provide local flavor. Consider “Roll On, Big Mama” (Joe Stampley)” with its twangy trucker’s itinerary: “Up through the snow and the driving rain / And the 40-below around Bangor, Maine.”

Likewise Islam. Its golden oldies all come from God (as revealed in the Qur’an) or Prophet Mohammed (in the corpus of biographical material known as Hadith). Both feature travel as a religious act and, by extension, the value of wide open roads. The Qur’an: “He who leaves home in search of knowledge / Who sets forth on the pathway of God / Who travels to find wisdom / He shall be shown Paradise.” And the famous saying of Mohammed, painstakingly authenticated and recorded in the Hadith: “Seek knowledge, even unto China.” In both instances, “knowledge” is inherently religious, inasmuch as all details of the world testify to God’s creative genius. Travel, undertaken in awe of Creation, becomes a form of worship.

The fifth of Islam’s “Five Pillars” – pilgrimage – mandates travel. Those able of body and pocket must, at least once in their lives, make the Hajj to Mecca. No other gathering on earth brings together so many people (nearly three million last year) from so many countries (effectively the whole world) for so spiritual a purpose. Now they come by 747. Pre-jet-setters depended on sea lanes and open roads.

Some pilgrims got to Mecca and kept going. Only a few centuries ago – in the blessed era before nation-states and silly boundaries – Muslims ranged half the world without ever leaving Islam: trading, serving as courtiers, visiting saints’ shrines, accumulating diplomas for religious scholarship, and thus binding together their umma (community of believers) from the Atlantic across North Africa and Asia to the Malay archipelago and beyond.

If you lived, for instance, in Spain – then part of Islamic and called by Muslims al-Andalus, Land of the [predecessor] Vandals – you’d go east. You’d heed the words of 13th century Valencia resident Ibn Jubayr, whose advice reads like 19th century Horace Greeley’s dictum in reverse:

If you are a son of this Maghrib of ours [the Westernmost side of Islam] and wish for the success, then head for the land of the East. Forsake your homeland in pursuit of knowledge…. The door to the east lies open: O you who strive after learning, enter it with a glad greeting!

One Maghribi (Westerner) who headed east was a native of Tangier, now located in the arbitrarily bounded nation-state of Morocco. His travels are described, indeed brilliantly re-created, in the best book I’ve read this year. Its title (are you ready?): “Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah.” Its author: Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a British Arabist and resident of Yemen whom one reviewer regards as “incapable of writing a dull sentence.” Its subject: Ibn Battutah (1304-1369), “the greatest traveler of the pre-mechanical age,” who covered 75,000 miles in 29 years “by horse, mule, camel, ox wagon, junk, dhow, raft, and on foot.” By comparison, Marco Polo was a befuddled, short-haul hitchhiker dependent on translators and third-hand gossip.

(Ibn is the Arabic patronymic prefix. Mackintosh-Smith explains this linguistic nicety, as well as other Arabic references, but otherwise asks a good deal of his readers. Hence this cautionary note before you buy the book: It’s enthralling and hilarious but not dumbed-down. If like me, you’ll find yourself going slowly – another blessed condition left behind by modernity. Bring your English dictionary, as I have had to do. And be prepared, as I am not, for snippets of untranslated German and French. An exquisite example from Descartes: C’est quasi la m?me chose de converser avec ceux des autres si?cles que de voyager. Mackintosh-Smith, like all great writers, takes no hostages.)

Muslim spiritual pathways were also commercial trade routes. The fabled Silk Road’s middle segment – between Christian Europe and Buddhist China – was entirely within Islam. Dynasties came and went, but universal Muslim business practice guided the world’s longest distance deals. Then, in the 16th century, European maritime advances left the Silk Route (and Afghanistan) literally high and dry. Even so, Central Asia retained its own trade patterns and powerful mercantile families. These would station male kin in (atlas open?) Samarkand, Mazar-e-Sharif, Kabul, Peshawar, Lahore, and Delhi. 20th politics – Bolshevism, then Muslim and Hindu nationalism – broke the chain. The Afghanistan links can now, potentially, be renewed.

It’s against this background that a prime Taliban boast made sense: Whatever else, they used to say, we keep Afghan roads open. And so they did…in much of the country, much of the time. Open roads are synonymous with order. And mullah-style order often came at an awful price. (Sometimes, of course, the Taliban boast proved hollow. I remember the bruises. See this column Sept. 27.) Certain rural Pashtun groups, comparatively dispossessed by the new post-Taliban order, now gripe that the roads are less safe than before. And one left-out warlord (Pacha Khan, near the Pashtun town of Khost) signaled his disaffection last summer by blocking the road to Kabul.

But November’s news of new and-or repaired travel routes is important: economically, politically and symbolically. Improved travel and transport provide stability. Note, however, that roads can also have downsides. Emblematic of security and control, they themselves can be attacked and thus must be protected. And if good things can travel them, so can bad: drugs, smugglers, warlord militias, terrorist reinforcements.

The new bridge spans an old river: antiquity’s Oxus, known locally as the Pyanj, between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Built by the Aga Khan Foundation, this bridge is the first of a series intended to re-establish ancient north-south links cut in the 1920s. It joins two of the world’s poorest countries. Will it lead to economic improvement or, as the Tajiks worry, more heroin and Islamists from Afghanistan?

The bulk ($80 million) of America’s development assistance to Afghanistan is doing what we already did 40 years ago: building – now rebuilding – the vital east-west road between Kabul, Kandahar and Herat. Its inauguration was the high point of November’s highway news. Completion and subsequent (peaceful) use would do much to re-incorporate the Pashtun South into a no longer Pashtun-dominant Afghanistan. Meanwhile this proud work-in-progress, aided also by Japan and Saudi Arabia, is also a target for jihad-minded dissidents. Who will guard its reconstruction?

Most politically intriguing is a brand new route planned by India and – gasp! – Iran. Indian goods, now blocked by sour relations with Pakistan, would come ashore in eastern Iran and then go overland into Afghanistan and the Kabul-Kandahar road. India, Iran, and Afghanistan all benefit. Pakistan – as usual since 9-11 – loses clout. And the United States? What will our diplomatic posture be toward this multi-lateral venture bringing together our newest ally (Afghanistan), an old neutral (India), and 33 percent of “The Axis of Evil” (Iran)?

Time will tell. Meanwhile, let’s be glad for these bits of good news. As the song goes, “Roll on, Big Mama. I like the way you roll.”

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.