A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Soviet Central Asia 247
holy sites: its vicinity became a favorite final resting place of the elite,
and the faithful of all levels made frequent pilgrimages to it (in fact, the
people of Samarkand came twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays).
A series of magnificent mausolea arose there in the Timurid period, and
the site eventually also attracted the attention of cultural historians and
tourists.The Soviet authorities encouraged the tourists but discouraged
the pilgrims; when the present author visited the site in the final years of
Soviet rule before glasnost, however, the pilgrims gave every sign of outnumbering
the tourists – this despite the presence of an office, at the
entrance to the site, of the local chapter of “The Atheist” (Bezbozhnik).
Another memorable site is the mazar of Shahimardan, situated in a
small Uzbek enclave within Kyrgyzstan just south of the Uzbek cities of
Fergana and Margilan.According to popular belief, Ali ibn Abi Talib,
the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin, son-in-law, the fourth caliph, and the
first Shii Imam, is buried there, hence the name: for Shahimardan, literally
“The King (Shah) of men (mardan)” is one of his Persian titles.The
fact that the story has no historical basis is irrelevant (Ali’s real – or at
least principal – tomb is in the Iraqi city of Najaf), and the legend has
parallels in many other similar sites associated, in popular imagination,
with the burial of revered saints (the most famous legendary tomb of Ali,
the reader may recall, is Mazar-i Sharif in Afghanistan).In 1929,
Hamza Hakimzade Niyazi (b.1889), an Uzbek and a former jadid
teacher and playwright who had joined the Bolshevik cause, agitated
aginst the mazar and pilgrimage to it, but was murdered by “fanatical
mullahs” – or so the official Soviet version said.The government
destroyed the brick dome sheltering the tomb and punished the culprits,
but the sanctuary was rebuilt a year later by the resilient natives; in 1940
it was demolished again and replaced with a monument commemorating
the Bolshevik martyr-saint and a “Museum of Atheism.” The site
was then developed as a “Culture Park” and renamed (together with the
neighboring town) Hamzaabad, “Hamza city.” 8 The murdered writerpropagandist
thus entered the pantheon of Soviet hagiography, honored
by countless recollections such as the dastan (legend, epic)
“Shahimardan” composed in 1932 by his junior acquaintance and subsequent
stalwart of official Uzbek letters, Hamid Alimjan (1909–44).It
seems, however, that all the efforts to convert a Muslim shrine into a
Bolshevik one, and a sanctuary of Islamic devotion into one of militant
8 Khamzaabad in Cyrillic script if approached through Russian; in Uzbek Cyrillic it would be
Hamzaobod.