Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

on the day before our departure, which has considerably enlarged my understanding of the
Sufi. We had a remarkable audience with an old teacher of Zafaran’s who had given me a
letter of recommendation to him.
After extensive inquires we were told that he lived outside of Samarkand. We took a
droshki and drove through a seemingly endless Islamic cemetery. Ghostly, narrow steles
tilted in all directions, dilapidated, not a tree, nor a bush. Stray dogs, their tails between
their legs, roamed between the wind-blown graves. The cemetery covered the hills for
miles, thousands of graves. A most holy place.
Behind the cemetery began a peculiar rolling terrain, here and there old walls.
The locals call the area Afra-Siab. These are the melted down ruins of Marakanda,
where Alexander the Great spent a winter, stabbed his bosom friend Klitos in a drunken
rage, and later married Roxana, the daughter of the local potentate. Djenghis Khan sacked
and destroyed the city in 1216. Timur Tamerlan built a new city right next to it, as it seems
to be the custom in Asia. The ruins of Marakanda could keep ten Schliemanns busy for
twenty years. The treasures buried in this earth are unimaginable.
The compound of El-Zafaran’s friend hid inside an inconspicuous mud wall like all
houses in Central Asia. A single gate permitted access to a large courtyard. The living
quarters, small, separate, single-story houses were glued to the inside of the wall, daily life
took place in the shade of two high Chinar trees. In summer they also sleep in this yard.
We were received at the gate by a servant who disappeared with my letter. After a
considerable time the man returned and led us into one of the houses. A fairly small room,
bare except for a few loose cushions and a precious oriental rug covering the floor. We
took off our shoes and settled crossed-legged at a low table. Tea was brought. We were
asked to wait.
In due time the master of the house appeared, a bent old man with a full white beard
and sharp, penetrating dark eyes. He wore a long black cassock lined with blue silk, a
splendid black turban on his head. His clasped hands played with the beads of an Islamic
rosary behind his back. He introduced himself as Asisan Ali Ramitani, the teacher and
friend of Anastasios El-Zafaran. A poignant figure.
With infinite kindness he bade us welcome in his house, inquired after El-Zafaran’s
health, and our plans and wishes. I told him that my interest was the history of the Sufi
orders, and because we were going to China, the relationships between the early Sufi and
the Chinese Buddhists.
Ramitami smiled, the same questions had occupied El-Zafaran’s curiosity for twenty-five
years. Because El-Zafaran did not speak Chinese, he had apparently burdened me with
this unfinished search. I assured him that it was also my own curiosity.
Well, said the old man, I had come to the right place. Many of the great Sufi
brotherhoods had been founded in Samarkand in the thirteenth century. Sufism was an
invention of the Turkish-speaking people. One of the oldest orders, the Kwadjagani, the
Masters of Wisdom, whom he belonged to, had been founded in Samarkand around 1220
by one Abd al-Khaliq Gudjuwani. One of his own ancestors had been the order’s fourth
Grandmaster a hundred years later. In the following centuries half a dozen other orders
emerged in Samarkand. At the beginning of the fifteenth century the Sufi held almost the
entire Islamic culture in their hands, poetry, jurisprudence, architecture, calligraphy,
philosophy, and, of course, the interpretation of the Koran—from Khorasan to Spain. The
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