Herat & the West

Herat is one of the oldest cities of the Iranian world: the Aria of the Achaemenid Persians and the Alexandria of Aria founded, or refounded, by Alexander the Great, whose fortress tradition places beneath the present citadel. The irrigated Hari valley made it rich, and it passed through Persian, Kushan, Sasanian and early Islamic hands. In the 12th century the Ghurids, a dynasty from the mountains of Ghor, built an empire reaching into northern India; their summer capital, Firozkoh, is thought to have stood around the Minaret of Jam, and in Herat they founded the Friday Mosque. Genghis Khan's armies sacked the city in the 1220s.

Herat's golden age came under the Timurids. Shah Rukh, son of Timur, made it his capital in the early 15th century, and his wife Gawhar Shad built the Musalla complex of mosque and madrasa. Under Sultan Husayn Bayqara, late in the century, the court gathered the poet Jami, the Turkic poet Ali-Shir Nava'i and the painter Behzad, whose miniatures defined the Herat school.

Safavid Persia and then Ahmad Shah Durrani's kingdom fought over the city, and Persia besieged it again in the 19th century before it was settled within Afghanistan. In 1885, fearing a Russian advance, British and Afghan engineers demolished most of the Musalla to clear a field of fire. The March 1979 Herat uprising against the communist government was crushed with heavy loss of life, the deadliest episode before the Soviet invasion that December. The Taliban took Herat in 1995, lost it in 2001, and took it again in 2021.

The west is Persian in speech and outlook. Dari, in a Herati accent close to the Persian of eastern Iran, is the common language, and Herat has deep family, trade and religious ties across the border. Most people in the city are Tajiks, with Pashtun, Hazara and other minorities, and Pashtuns form the majority in Farah. Ghor and Badghis are home to Aimaq peoples, Persian-speaking and semi-nomadic, and Nimruz to Baloch communities.

Herat thinks of itself as the country's cultural capital, with a line of poets, calligraphers and painters running back to the Timurids and a Sufi tradition centred on the shrine of Khwaja Abdullah Ansari. The Chishti Sufi order, later so important in India, takes its name from Chisht-e Sharif in the east of the province.

Crafts run deep: the city's textiles were already noted in the Abbasid era, carpets are still woven, and the Friday Mosque's walls have been re-covered with glazed tiles in the Timurid style. Guests are received with tea, dried fruit and nuts.

Herat, with some 670,000 people, is the country's third city and the commercial capital of the west: a grid of old-city lanes around the citadel and the Friday Mosque, with newer districts spreading across the valley floor. The provincial towns are much smaller — Qala-e Naw in Badghis, Chaghcharan in Ghor, Farah, and Zaranj in Nimruz, which lives on trade across the Iranian border.

Trade with Iran and Turkmenistan through Islam Qala and Torghundi, farming in the Hari valley, carpets and crafts support the city. Saffron is grown around Herat, and Badghis is a leading producer of pistachios. The Salma Dam on the Hari river, completed with Indian funding in 2016, supplies power and irrigation. The outer provinces are among the poorest in the country, dependent on rain-fed farming and herding and hit hard by drought.

The day runs on bread from the neighbourhood oven and tea, with bazaars busiest in the morning and after the afternoon heat. Large numbers of Afghans deported or returning from Iran pass through Islam Qala, and the restrictions on women's education and work weigh on a city once known for its schools and women's professions.

Western cooking shares much with Iran. Rice dishes lead: Kabuli palaw at gatherings, and chalaw, plain white rice, with qorma, a stew of meat, onions and fruit or vegetables. Kebabs of lamb are grilled in the bazaar, and aush, a noodle soup with herbs and beans, is common fare across the region.

Herat is orchard and garden country. Its grapes are famous, many of them dried into raisins, and pomegranates, melons, figs and apricots come from the valley; saffron from Herat's fields flavours rice and sweets. The pistachios of Badghis are a western speciality, and dried fruit and nuts fill the bowls set out for guests.

Sweets include firni, a milk pudding scented with cardamom and rosewater. Drinks are green tea, doogh — salted yoghurt with water and mint — and sharbat fruit syrups in summer. Alcohol is prohibited.

Herat's old city holds the sights. The Citadel of Herat, Qala Ikhtiyaruddin, rises on its mound above the bazaars, destroyed and rebuilt many times and restored, with its museum, between 2006 and 2011. Nearby, Herat's Friday Mosque, the Masjid-i Jami, has a vast courtyard framed by iwans covered in blue, turquoise and white tilework, with a surviving Ghurid portal. To the north the Musalla minarets lean over a park beside the ribbed dome of Gawhar Shad's mausoleum, and on the hills beyond, Gazur Gah shelters the tomb of Khwaja Abdullah Ansari in a walled garden.

East of the city the Hari valley climbs into Ghor. There, in a narrow gorge where the Jam river meets the Hari, stands the Minaret of Jam: a brick tower from the late 12th century, about 65 metres high, covered in geometric brickwork and Kufic inscriptions. It was the first place in Afghanistan listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is threatened by river erosion. Chaghcharan lies further upstream, and Badghis to the north has pistachio orchards and wild pistachio in its uplands.

To the south the land drops to the deserts of Farah and Nimruz: gravel plains, dunes and the Dasht-e Margo, the "desert of death", reaching toward Helmand. On the Iranian border the Helmand and Farah rivers end in the Hamun, the seasonal lakes and reed beds of Sistan, around which lie the ruins of ancient fortified towns.