A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

248 A history of Inner Asia
atheism, failed on the popular level.The faithful continued to flock there
throughout the Soviet period, and in 1978 a Soviet scholar decried the
importance of pilgrimage to the place “under the cover of tourism,”
which included public prayers and sacrifices.The Uzbek writer K.
Yashen even describes in his novel Hamza a Yasavi zikr performed there. 9
All the government could do was to curb such manifestations of the true
purpose of the ziyarats, devotional visits, on the more explicit or intellectual
level.In this latter respect they have been fairly successful: to foreign
or less initiated observers and visitors, the genuine nature of the site
became unknown, and Hamzaabad acquired a public identity as a
shrine worshiping a Bolshevik saint.The cycle is closing in the post-
Soviet period, however: according to the British journalist C.Thubron,
local old-timers now assert that Niyazi was killed not by fanatical
mullahs but by two brothers avenging their sister who had been dishonored
by the womanizing Communist. 10
From among the multitude of other mazars in Central Asia, the following
deserve at least a brief mention: Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi’s mausoleum
in Yasi (Turkestan), Khwaja Baha al-Din Naqshband’s shrine
near Bukhara, and Najm al-Din Kubra’s tomb near Urgench.These
three Sufis, the reader may recall, founded the three great tariqas named
after them in their Central Asian homeland.Their tombs subsequently
gave rise to major shrines, mazars visited by the Muslim faithful down
to our own day.As in the case of other such sites, the Soviet government
tried different methods to combat these centers of enduring religious
cults.Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi’s mausoleum was declared an
important architectural monument and the government financed its
restoration, while transforming the mazar complex into a dom otdykha (lit.
“house of rest”) “something between an anti-religious museum and a
culture park.” The mazar of Baha al-Din Naqshband, less impressive
architecturally, received no such attention, and the government may
have long been successful in isolating the sanctuary.Once glasnost set in,
however, the shrine reasserted its role, and “in 1987, during abortive
demonstrations, it was to this forbidden tomb that the Bukhara protesters
had marched, as if to the last symbol of purity in their city.” As in
its pre-modern past, the shrine of Baha al-Din Naqshband has again
received veneration from the mighty and humble alike: in 1993 the
9 Cited by Bennigsen, Le soufi et le commissaire, p.213; two chapters of the novel appeared in Nauka
i religiya (1982), nos.5 and 7. 10 The Lost Heart of Asia, pp.242–43.