Author: Andrey Kudryashov
Photos: Anton Kovalenko
In the 13th century Central Asia and the whole Middle East endured a chain of cruel internal wars changed by the devastating invasion of Genghis Khan's hordes whose successors soon entered into implacable strife with each other while continuing to plunder and destroy ancient cities. During precisely this fatal phase of history one of the oldest districts of Tashkent inherited its own spiritual tutelary. Arriving from Baghdad, the heir of the mystical Suhrovardiya order, the young sheikh Zainutdin, settled at the ports of Kukcha in the Kuy Arifon (Hill of Sage) suburb, and spent the rest of his life until the age of 95 in an underground cell constantly praying for the welfare of others. Occasionally he came out in to the world to give a sign and deliver a wise sermon. Later the Zainutdin-bobo mausoleum was erected over his cell and tomb, which has become one of the largest hieratic centres of Uzbekistan these days. During restoration of the mausoleum in the 1990s archaeologists noted the strange arrangement of the saint's underground shelter, which turned out to be an observatory for charting the movement of celestial bodies without astronomical instruments.
THE MYSTERIOUS MISSION OF THE DERVISH
Legend has it that Zainutdin was born in 1214 in Baghdad to the family of the originator of the Suhrovardiya order, a famous sheikh called Shihabaddin Aby Havsa Omar Suhravardi, who had earned fame for his guide for Sufism mentors, "Avarif al-ma'arif" and who then became a counsellor at the court of the caliph. When Zainutdin was born, his father would have been 69 years old, but stories of the saints of that time are full of examples when children were born to very old parents. Apparently Sufism practices favoured robust health and longevity. Shihabaddin Aby Havsa Omar Suhravardi himself lived until 89 without retiring from daily pursuits as, in contrast to his legendary son, he was not a lowly hermit, but as we would say now a notable public figure of his epoch.
As early as the end of the 12th century the Arab caliphate entered a period of troubled times when temporal governors contested the power from Mohammed, spiritual leader of the Abbasid dynasty. Surges of new bedouins continued to flow into Mavorounnahr and Iran, which now had to be converted to Islam not so much by force and arms, but rather by persuasion and diplomatic tricks. Trying to recover the former power the last Baghdad caliphs sank into intrigues and political distractions. The most energetic of them - Caliph an-Nasir Dinillah - was drawn into confrontation with the Khoresm rulers and drew near to him Suhravardi, the most powerful sheikh, and assigned him to strengthen the "religious knighthood" traditions among Arab magnates. By virtue of these traditions Sufi warriors repelled a surge of crusaders in Africa for decades, and the fanatical Ismaelites kept Seldzuks in constant fear from Alamut Mountain Suhravardi himself liked philosophy and natural sciences. Among those who adapted his teachings are no outstanding military commanders but a poet named Saadi from Shiraz and a traveller - Ibn Batuta.
The caliphate was shielded from rout by lucky accidents. Having marched out to Baghdad Khoresmshah Tekesh was suddenly seized with illness on the way and died. In the autumn of 1217 his successor Muhammed Ala-ad-din sent out a formidable army from Afghanistan having captured from the sheikh Suhravardi from his embassy in order to make him the chronicler of the historical drama which as it turned out had not even started. On a mountain pass near Asadabad there was such a heavy frost and snowfall that all the horses and camels perished and thousands of soldiers lost hands and legs to chilblains.
After the failure Khoresmshah Muhammed tendered his official repentance to Caliph an-Nasir and was prohibited from mentioning him in the Friday prayers within the limits of his power. He entrusted the court theologians with substantiating the transfer of religious power from Abbasids to syuds from Ali family. In the meantime the Mongols were already drawing nearer in the north. In 1218 Genghis Khan's commander, noion Dzebe, placed under his control the tribes of Kara-kitay located west of Issyk Kul.
The excuse for war became an attack on a merchant caravan near Otrara town then located on the north-eastern border of Khoresm. Genghis Khan sent with this caravan a note with ambiguous content expressing his will "to honour Khoresmshah as much as the dearest of his sons". But apparently Muhammed discovered an impingement on sovereignty in his expression: "We order that peace is to be established between the countries and lands, and food staples are to be directed to everywhere". Some chronographers insist that Caliph an-Nasir incited Mongols to attack the ungodly ruler of Khoresm promising them to ensure the non-interference of the faithful. Most probably Genghis Khan would have directed his horde to conquer rich countries even without his invitation, where, according to his scouts' reports, there had recently been dissension and embroilment.
By the winter of 1219 the Mongols conquered and burned Otrar having slaughtered all the citizens and a year later Dzuchi, son of Genghis Khan, pulled down a dam on the Amu-Darya and flooded the ruins of the capital of Khoresm that had been defeated by him. The Mongols followed Khoresmshah and his heir Dzelal-ad-Din Manguberdi up to the borders of India in the south, went through the whole Caucasus, inflicted the first defeat on the kipchaks and Russian princes in the battle at Kalka and invaded Crimea, where they plundered Black Sea towns.
But when Caliph an-Nasir was alive, Baghdad avoided the Mongol invasion and only after forty years, in 1258 was it conquered by a grandson of Genghis Khan, ilkhan of Iran Hulagu, who murdered the then caliph together with his aulics. The caliphate had survived two and a half centuries more without pretension to temporal power at the court of Egyptian Mamelukes. In 1517 the Ottoman pasha Selim forced the last caliph Motavakkil III to officially repudiate the title of a head of the faithful in favor of the Sultans.
In exactly the year when his patron an-Nasir died (1225), or probably a little earlier, sheikh Shihabaddin Suhravardi sent his younger son to a small, then not very well-known, town at the very end of the once prosperous but now impoverished lands of Mavorounnahr. The faithful rationalize the mission of Zainutdin to Binkent, which was the then name of Tashkent, as needing to strengthen the faith in the far reaches of Moslem civilization. It was necessary to continue the promulgation of Islam among the nomadic peoples of the steppe, who had started to be converted from heathenism to true faith by such distinguished men of faith as Kaffal Shishi, Ahmad Yassavi and Zangi-ota. This good deed should not be interrupted even by such disaster as the Mongol invasion. Besides it was imperative to bring the many recently proselyting Moslems out of despair and disbelief to the wise councils and marvels of asceticism. This is the holy version completely supported by the life and deeds of sheikh Zainutdin.
Since then Tashkent has endured many new challenges and dramatic collisions through its history, and the mazar of Zainutdin-bobo at Kukcha is still not only a memorial but an operating hieratic centre and a pilgrimage reminding contemporaries of the spiritual unction of their forefathers.
However from a modern point of view it is probably impossible to understand the logic followed by Sufism mentors and men of faith in the Middle Ages. We can only make deliberate assumptions enjoying with impunity the same atmosphere of inscrutable mysteries and secrets, which due to remoteness will remain unsolved forever.
THE HILL OF SAGES
An unexpected addition to the legendary story of the Saint Zainutdin-bobo has been revealed quite recently, when some observations and findings were made during restoration of the Kukcha Mausoleum. It has been surmised that the sheikh Zainutdin had possibly come to the walls of Tashkent "not at all to an empty place". The sermon and asceticism were possibly the main but not the only gist of his mission. The gap in the verbal legend unsubstantiated by written sources means we can only guess at who the people inhabiting the Hill of Sages were, that sheltered and accorded welcome to Zainutdin most likely corresponding to his own aspirations. They were possibly not unfamiliar with the ideas of Sufism that began expanding in the Central Asia almost simultaneously with coming of Islam. In the beginning of the 13th century in Tashkent and its outskirts there were quite a lot of followers of Ahmad Yassavi. A highly honoured local Saint Zangi-ota was also a contemporary of the sheikh Zainutdin. Although his mausoleum built by Amir Temur in the end of the 14th century is 15km from the modern boundaries of the city, according to some data there was a place near Kukcha, at the gate of Samarkand Darbaza related to his memory. It is quite possible that Zainutdin-bobo and Zangi-ota met each other, though no legends about this have survived. In those times not only mystics and theologians were called sages but scientists as well, since the perception of truth through the afflatus and mind in the oriental culture did not differ and collide. Investigating an underground cell adjacent to the north wall of the Zainutdin-bobo's mausoleum, archaeologists came to the conclusion that the underground premises were built and inhabited as far back as a century before the Saint's birth - in the beginning of the 12th century. In the nearest outskirts some artifacts of more ancient origin were found, indicating a high culture of the settlement Kui Arifon. But the most interesting thing was the arrangement of the dungeon itself, which could have been an observatory or some sort of enormous calendar. The structure resembles two clay yurts placed one on the other. An ideally round dome of the upper storey where one can get by a narrow winding stairs has the only opening in the very centre. Through a narrow chap in the floor one can reach the lower storey, representing a reduced copy with the only difference that its centre is displaced to 166 cm. The lower dome is also fitted with a small opening in the form of a conic frustum directed to the opening in the upper dome. If one draws a thrust line between them it will coincide with the projection of the Tashkent meridian. The axis of the cone in the lower opening inclines to the horizontal plane exactly at 73 degrees and it has the height at which the sun rises over Tashkent on June 22, the day of the summer solstice. The sun and other heavenly bodies crossing the meridian could be observed from the lower cell only at the days and hours assigned by the movement of the Earth. Moreover one could observe the movement of the firmament without use of special astronomic instruments. The upper dome acted as a "diaphragmatic ring" enhancing the brightness of modern optical lens and at the same time played a role of a giant "sunshade", which prevented direct rays of the heavenly bodies from suppression by lateral and counter sources of light. Besides the octagonal shape, the walls of the dungeon were clearly oriented to the parts of the world as compass points. It is not certain that the underground cell at Kukcha is the most ancient structure for observing the starry heaven without astronomic instruments in Central Asia. In the territory of ancient Khorezm, for example, an ancient settlement called Koykyrylgan-kala was discovered which dated as far back as the 4th century B.C. representing, in fact, a whole city-observatory. Its spherical citadel has walls up to seven meters thick with narrow windows-embrasures exactly oriented to the rise of the heavenly bodies. Archaeologists found traces of ancient settlements with astronomically oriented structures in other regions of Uzbekistan. 
The Arab conquests brought the lunar calendar to ancient Babylon, with divisions by 7-day weeks by a number of visible with the naked eye planets including the Moon and the Sun. By the time of the Abbasid caliphate, astronomy in the Muslim world was so developed that it became possible to calculate the circumference of the Earth. In 827 on the instructions of Caliph al-Ma'mun two groups of astronomers with al-Khorezmi who gave his name to algorithms and al-Fargoni made the necessary measurement of arcs of one meridian degree. But in the period of wars and disorders of the 13th century many people and even scientists had no time for the heavenly bodies. Mirzo Ulugbek built his famous observatory in Samarkand only two centuries later - in 1428.
But it is possibly naive to suppose that sheikh Zainutdin came to Tashkent from Samarkand with the special purpose of devoting himself to astronomy. It is most probable that the ascetic mainly used the underground Chillya-khona for praying in seclusion. Although between praying and fasting the Saint could devote hours to observe the luminaries, of which the movement in horizon measured the necessary pace of living of people under his care. According to Uzbek scientists the arrangement of the underground cells in the settlement Kui-Arifon could serve as an action of the Chillya-calendar adopted in the Middle Ages by many peoples of the Central Asia along with learning of the Muslim chronology.
This calendar, reflecting the vital needs of stock-breeder and farmers had no divisions to months and weeks but a great importance was placed on seasons, two of which, the peaks of summer heat and winter hard frost, were marked out to special 40-day periods of chills, which began three days after the summer and winter solstices. This logic is obvious, since the maximum warm or cold is actually set not at the very maximum of luminary effect but a little later. The day is not hotter in the very noon but after it and the night is colder before sunrise. The Chillya-calendar combined astronomical events with real climatic conditions of the region. Herewith it was not difficult to count dates and seasons since on the day of the summer solstice - June 22 - in Tashkent latitude the sun is never covered with clouds. Even in cloudy weather the winter chillya can easily be calculated arithmetically, until now the day of its falling is considered to be December 26, and up to March 3 a farmer has nothing to do in the field and the cattle is better to be kept inside.
