Architecture on the Borderline

Boundary Politics and Built Space

Anoma Pieris, Anoma Pieris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351594998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Architecture on the Borderline interrogates space and territory in a turbulent present where nation-state borders are porous to a few but impermeable to many. It asks how these uneven and conflicted social realities are embodied in the physical and material conditions imagined, produced or experienced through architecture and urbanism.

Drawing on historical, global examples, this rich collection of essays illustrates how empires, nations and cities expand their frontiers and contest boundaries, but equally how borderline identities of people and places influence or expose these processes. Empirical chapters covering Central Asia, the Asia Pacific region, the American continent, Europe and the Middle East offer multiple critical insights into the ways in which our spatial imagination is contingent on 'border-thinking'; on the ways of being and navigating frontiers, boundaries and margins, the three themes used to organise their content. The underlying premise of the book is that sensitisation to border conditions can alter our understanding of the static physical spaces that service political or cultural ideologies, and that the view from the periphery opens up new ways of understanding sovereignty. In exploring these various spaces and their transformative subjectivities, this book also reveals the unrelenting precarity of contesting and living on the margins, and related spaces and discourses that are neglected or suppressed.

Part One

Frontier

1: Eurasia’s historical space of palimpsest—desert, border, riparian and steppe

Manu P. Sobti

On my multiple journeys to the remote corners of Central Asia, only recently did I recall objectivising the desire to see what had historically constituted the purported edges of the Eurasian landmass. Where were its beginnings and endings? How were its edges (both intended or otherwise) ever defined? Since time immemorial, in viewing the totality of their vast and unbroken steppe, Central Asian nomadic hordes had marked passage, journey and promontories across this terrain, creating burial mounds (kurgan), commemorative tomb towers, elaborate tent encampments and occasionally even cities. My own search for historic border conditions across this cultural crucible via new mappings was similar to the actions of these nomads, whose annual perambulations had but acknowledged the bigger logic inherent in the Eurasian landscape. This was its unique geography within a composite of few cities and vast networks, wherein peripheries remained more important than did canonical centres—something that conventional tourist maps have still never adequately explicated. In uncovering these evocative stories of beginning and endings, of withins and withouts, I quickly discovered that city dwellers across the modern-day ‘stans’ retain no visual or nostalgic memories of the grand river Oxus (later known as the Amu Darya) that had created the very edges of their world for many millennia.¹ Also, while the urban dweller, embroiled in the predictable tribulations of the everyday no longer remembers this ‘place’ history, even the entrapment of the last surviving nomads is now woefully complete within the conundrum of arbitrary borders and boundaries drawn by the region’s current nation-states. In fact, besides ‘disappearing’ as an imperceptible line separating yet connecting two among the largest of the Central Asian Republics (Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), the Amu Darya’s contentious history has made it an anomaly within the region’s geo-politics. So, while re-imagining this waterway is an understandably gargantuan task, seeking out its true relevance as an important landscape truism, remains even more complicated.

Place: from centre to periphery

In June, of the year 632 CE, momentous news of the Prophet Mohammad’s death in the nearby city of Medina reached the unruly sodalities of nomadic tribes occupying the desert wastelands of Arabia. Following this critical missive, the truce previously afforded by the Prophet’s authority rapidly disintegrated to make way for a radical brand of internecine conflict. In the decades following, the social and militaristic unrest—termed by contemporary historians as the Riddah—spilled well beyond the borders of the Arabian Peninsula (Shoufani 1973, ch. 3; Donner 1986, 65–7). The armed hordes of the earlier expeditions moved steadily eastwards. Initially they succeeded in creating a buffer zone between the Islamic state and the powerful Sassanid and Byzantine empires. Thereafter, under Caliph Abu Bakr’s control (reign 632–34 CE), these forces moved to proselytise substantial populations.² Most importantly, they began initiating the process of urban transformation (tamsir) in the territories that were rapidly conquered, employing the armed encampment or garrison (misr) as the basis for legislating multiple new settlements.³ Upon engulfing the geographical regions of Persia and Mesopotamia, they abruptly halted deep in the east, at what had until then represented the very edges of their known world (Le Strange 1905, 460–2; Brauer 1995, 1–7). Here, within the sands of the vast and inhospitable Turkmen desert, lay the sliver of a legendary waterway that Alexander the Great had first crossed in 332 BCE (Holt 1989, 19–21). In following upon Alexander’s (or Iskandar’s) grand legacy of ‘river-crossing’ and conquest, the Arabs⁴ re-named this waterway from the original Oxus to Jayhun (or Gihon)—endorsing it as one among the four streams of paradise.

And, paradise did indeed lie on the other bank of this waterway, a salubrious Eurasian steppe dotted with prosperous oasis urbanities straddled along nomadic caravan routes. For the Arab armies, crossing the Oxus (Jayhun in Arabic) symbolised glory, unchallenged access to the prosperous region of Mawarannahr (Arabic for ‘that which is beyond the river [Jayhun]’) and a foothold to an empire in Hindustan. While signifying an evident geographical barrier within an otherwise vast landscape, the river and its flood plain had always remained an inviolate, in-between space (Spuler 1958, 233–40). With the arrival of the Arab hordes, the Oxus also strongly delineated a distinct, yet permeable cultural boundary, situated strategically at a global borderland separating Persia (more specifically Khorasan) and Central Asia. In effect, a zone of exchange between two cultural and spatial realms was created—the Arab versus the Persian, the inhospitable desert versus the friendly steppe (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1Arab arrivals from the west and the two historic ‘crossing points’ on the Amu Darya river at Chardzou (Lebap) and at Khodjeli (Urgench) [above]—connecting Merv to Bukhara (right), also Merv with the region of Khorezm (left), via Urgench, Biruni and Khodjeli (located further westwards). Trans-river movement corridors created at the trans-river crossing points 1 & 2 [below]. ©Manu P. Sobti, 2017.

Upon arriving at the Amu Darya, and spurred by the success of the Riddah raids, the Arab forces forded the riverine borderland of the Amu Darya on multiple occasions between 650 and 751 CE (Bartold 1928, 329–30). The quick forays of early years were followed by sustained expeditions by 700 CE, culminating in decisive control and habitation of the region’s several urban centres by 750 CE (Gibb 1923, 16–17; Starr 2015, ch. 4). Following the conquests of Merv in 652 CE and Bukhara in 715 CE, the Arab incursions focused on the strategic control of two major crossing points along the river’s length. The first of these was at Chardzou, situated at about the mid-length of the Amu Darya and in proximity to the medieval metropolis of Merv. Chardzou had emerged from the foundations of the traditional settlement of Amul⁵ as the crucial transit point that connected the landscape promontories between Merv with nearby Bukhara (350 kilometres to the north-east), and subsequently turning eastwards towards Samarqand, about 280 kilometres away (Le Strange 1905, 403–4). Urgench—the second crossing point highlighted in the era of the Arab crossings—was located further downstream and westwards. It connected the beginnings of the deltaic lands of the Amu Darya to the Turkmen desert near the medieval city of Beruni, serving as the beginning of a caravan route that ran south of the river, subsequently connecting eastwards to join the desert road that led to Merv (Sobti 2006, 828–9; Tolstov 1954–55, 106–33). In al-Tabari’s words, the Arabs mainly approached the river from the south-west, travelling across the bleak desert wastes from the grand oasis of Merv, the launching base for their many expeditions (Yarshater 1985–99, Vol. 23). The geographical divide was crossed at Chardzou or Urgench, ingeniously employing pontoons, platforms and boats for this purpose. So lucrative were these trans-desert routes between Merv, Bukhara and Urgench that they were afforded protection by caravanserais and defensive trade fortresses, known as rabat or ribat. Each ribat housed detachments of armed soldiers (gazi), who were ‘fighters for the faith’ and later protected merchant caravans and their travellers (Masson 1966, 9) (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2The ‘network map’ of strategic forts, cities and stopping points on both banks of the Amu Darya, connecting the Karakum and Kyzlkum deserts. Each of these sites is mentioned in al-Tabari’s accounts and confirmed by archaeological reports in the last few decades. Merv, Samarkand and Bukhara were the most important cities within this network. ©Manu P. Sobti, 2016–17.

Today, a thousand years later, both Chardzou and Urgench remain as two among four international crossing points between the modern-day nations of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan located on the opposite banks of the Amu Darya. Of course, the cultural context of Central Asia has dramatically changed, and so has the relevance of this riverine geography, thereby provoking myriad questions. How did this medieval encounter between the two culturally removed worlds—one characterised by its accretive, urban conurbations of propinquity, the other relishing detached encampments and suburbia—and suitably exaggerated by the borderland condition of the Oxus River, affect the making of cities in Central Asia? How did the Oxus contact zone—divisive locally as it was internationally—acknowledge the multiplicity of urban experiences and the agency of multiple actors? Why did the Oxus or Jayhun remain (as it still does), as the infamous and depleted Amu Darya, a border determining the geo-politics of Central Asia? Finally, would it be topical to reconsider this sliver of a riverine west–east divide between Iran and Central Asia—often positioned within the space-time continuum of early medieval Islamic history—as a ‘cultural condenser’ of historical significance? Within this conundrum of intertwined inquiries, this chapter establishes interpretations of the border and borderland for the syncretic populations who inhabited the expanding urban centres of Mawarannahr across the river. It articulates how this borderland was a site where choreographies of passage were effectively negotiated. Finally, it offers insights into how re-imagined mappings of this landscape archive could influence human histories (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3The expanse of the Amu Darya along the Karakum desert viewed from the Chilpik (Shilpik) Qala (dakhma) in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous territory situated in current-day Uzbekistan. The Chilpik dakhma (Tower of Silence) was built during the first century CE, and remained in use until the arrival of Islam in Khorezm in the seventh century. ©Manu P. Sobti, 2014.

Choreographies: negotiating the riverine crossings

Characterised by their social prowess and sheer numbers, the incoming Arab hordes crossing the river evoked reaction, acculturation and finally conversion to the socio-cultural mentalité of their conquerors among the indigenous populations of Eurasia. In effect, beyond the logistics of invasion, the trans-Oxus mobilities were also a ‘cultural’ project of sorts. The geographical details of these expeditions were also highlighted in multiple, medieval Arab and Persian histories. A case in point was Muḥammad Ibn Aḥmad al-Muqaddasi’s (945–1005 CE) exemplar compendium on the provincial geographies of the Islamic domain (al-Muqaddasi 1994, 15–22). Al-Muqaddasi’s Ahsan at-Taqasim fi Ma’rifat il-Aqalim described the iqlim of Central Asia (titled as al-Mashriq, literally ‘the Orient) within the fourteen regional (and functional) geographies identified in the Islamic world of his epoch. Compiled roughly two centuries following the Arab invasions on Central Asia, the narrative implicitly highlighted the dramatic metamorphosis of two grand metropolises—Nishapur and Samarqand. The former had served as a transit point towards Merv, the latter as a destination once the river had been crossed and Bukhara was conquered.

The Ahsan narrative was matched by the social choreographies detailed in Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari’s (838–923 CE) Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk or Tarikh al-Tabari (Yarshater 1985–99, Vol. 16). Beyond place histories, transition and arrival points within an unfamiliar cultural matrix, the Tarikh documented human mobilities as ‘thick histories’, circumscribing the progress of the Arab military at major camping and crossing points in the Amu Darya frontier zone. In its self-conscious examination of human movements across the landscape, al-Tabari’s Tarikh also illustrated the relentless process of the Arab tamsir and the proliferation of Islamic urban traditions. In summary, by imparting significance to the role of the armed hordes as agents of urban transformation, the Tarikh showed that while passage and journey across the Amu Darya and its contentious borderland were critical acts, even more imperative were arrivals on the other side of the waterway. The Ahsan and Tarikh were followed by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn al-Narshaki’s (899–959 CE) Tarikh-i Bukhara (Frye 1954). Al-Narshaki’s work extolled Arab arrivals in the cities and settlements of Mawarannahr. His engaging memoir on ‘most prosperous’ Bukhara was replete with observations describing how the incoming Arabs interacted with the local populace consisting of nomadic tribes and Turkish chieftains—a genuine synthesis of nomadic and sedentary populations, one provocatively set within the act of war. If al-Tabari’s travelogue described passage and journey for the Arab hordes in search of urban destinations, and culminated in ‘thick descriptions’ of place and time as encapsulated in al-Narshaki’s Bukharan urbanscape, this suitably contrasted with the diachronic perspective central to al-Muqaddasi’s work. Beyond the militaristic vein inherent across the three accounts, these were also potent renditions of the liminality cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Architecture on the borderline
• Part One Frontier
• Part Two Boundary
• Part Three Margin
• Index