stenio solinas

N.5 /2000


	Stenio Solinas
	SAMARCANDA

On travel to Shakrisabz and then to Buchara, Maksuov, whose job is as entrepreneur, explains his way the Great Game that's renews game. At Shakhrisabz Tamerlano saw the light, and you get there crossing the Zerafshan range, counterfort of Pamir, where centuries before Alexander the Great lead his army toward India and centuries after the soviet tanks clanged toward the Afghanistan. Snow-covered peaks and mountains of so an intensive green that it seems to you an Alpine landscape, bare lands, donkeys and horses on the road, warming pans along the streets, little 'soupa' where eat and rest arranged on the ridge, waiters that climb as roe deers to not make the meat cool. So then, the great game. In the XIX century the great game engaged English and Russians for the control of the region. According to the historian Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, “the Russian burst was some like a colonial enterprise, and a little, some like the American conquer of the west “. Geopolitics motivations, feelings of great power, diplomatic rivalry, single spleen and taste for challenges mixed in one of the most unbelievable game of chess of the history. The stake was high: an area that over centuries has changed name, but had keep on being the same: Sogdiana, Transoxiana, Turkestan.... Who at the end won were the men of Moscow and Centre Asia ended being controlled by them and it remained such till yesterday. The game, started just at the beginning of the year 2000, is played by much more opponents. Muksumov, that is not a politician, but a practical man, has individuated at least four of them. “There are the Turks “, he tells me. Of course, the Turkeys. Tamerlano was a Turkish. Colin Thubron tells that, once conquered Persia, he made him brought at the grave of Firdausi, the great Persian poet, and shouted: “Stand up and look at me, show me your face! A Turk in the heart of your empire. You said we were born to be slaves, and instead, look around!” “It takes four hours to get from Istanbul to Tashkent, they speak as we do, the eat what we eat. They can capitalize it over us and then they have this western approach that can work, modern and pragmatist. With them I've set up in business two little bed & breakfast hotels in Samarcanda. Then, there are the Iranians aiming to a radicalisation, pointing a lot at the religious factor as a political and ideological mean. China, naturally: it is a giant market and it is renewing its economy. And, naturally, you, the western: here there are cotton and gold, infrastructures must be built “. A complex game, even more complicated by the unruliness of the other Centre Asia Republics that found themselves independent without ever having wanted it. And without having groomed for it. The Tahikistan had his regular civil war that endured five years, and it is still in war, the Turkmenistan has strengthened the police aspect of its regime, as well as Kazakistan and Kirghisistan, the limiting Afghanistan's problems are well knows. By this point of view, the Uzbekistan is the one that had endured the best at less than ten years from its independence and six from the establishment of a autonomous currency: here, an identity, even if far, neglected and removed, existed, and left impressive traces, while for the other new republics the history before Sovietization was nomadism and raids, slavery and robberies, remote moors, inhospitable mountains,...The advertising publications related to the new Uzbeko State are a stream of data, estimations and percentages according to which one wonders why it does not have the Switzerland gross domestic income, but the message carried is that of a virgin land for whom wants to invest, with facilitations and warrants, without bureaucratic binds, administrative paralysis. In front of the Uru Beg's mausoleum, over a quarter hour a little girl is trying to sell me everything: post cards, and necklaces, carpets and hats, trinkets and local kitchen books. The mausoleum extends to the south of Registam, there, the new Samarcanda tries to make live together the giant places of the soviet period, when any chance was good for a review and a commemoration, with an utility and a meaning. Spread all over the town, the sparkling ruins of the ancient capital make a strange impression of stratagem and extraneity, almost as it were the result of a refined civilization but only as regard to the macro aspects and instead barbarian as regard to the daily life, there where it is not required a praise of marble to divinities, either heavenly or terrestrial, but the matter is building streets and houses, the town engineering covers and strengthens all. The golden age of Samarcanda, the XV century, is not referred so much to a golden age alike the European one, the Medicean Florence, the Venice of the Foscari, but to a past and violent vision of the world where the absolute power decided by itself an at his will leaving the void around. There is not the polis, there's the throne, there's the altar and the grave. Life is made of strange pulses. In Paris, ten years ago, I got intrigued by a title, Samarcanda: the author, Amin Malouf, is one of those francophone Arabic writers one can mistake each other, Lafhouz, Jelloun, Malouf, precisely... politically correct stories of misery and racism, where the progress fights always against obscurantism. “I've not read it and I don't like it “ is the opinion one can give about each of them. There are books that keep in you shelves for years, you know that sooner or later they will cater for you. I've took Samarcanda down from the shelves before departing: it's a so much novelised biography of Omar Khayamm that I asked a specialist of Persian literature if he really existed or if Malouf invented all, that would have been a proof of geniality. Malouf is not a genius and Khayamm instead is a real poet: finding him here again, in the hands of this little girl, as a scholar at school, makes me a certain impression. It does not concern only and not so much the literary underlining or the author's narcissism in discovering correspondences till then no thinkable. Khayamm is a key, surely a little key, but it can contribute to open the doors of an Islamic way of life different from the one the fundamentalism shows and the media are interested to spread. The balance the Uzbekistan proves to have is that of reconciling ethnic groups and minding not turning into a confessional state comes at bottom from the prosecution of that way that Omar Khayamm, to quote a part for the whole, pointed already a thousand years ago, according to which religion must not hamper passions, and is not enemy of diversity, faith does not veil beauty, and has his own questions. The national rediscover neither identified itself in a fideistic line of communication, nor has transformed towns into mosques open sky. Lands of markets and traders, places where caravans met, privileged way of discovering, epicentre and recollection of genius in the past, the only way to have a future is to choose now a no-dogmatic present.

SAMARCANDA