What are we in Uzbekistan to see? The answer, mostly, Blue-tiled things. And what a marvel they are. My friends and I spent much of our time wandering the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis, a series of elaborate graves that are over 900 years old. Legend has it that a cousin of the Prophet Muhammed is buried here. One can easily spend a couple of hours aimlessly walking around the necropolis, gazing at ceiling inscriptions and intricate carvings. The name "Necrop
The Bibi-Khanym Mosque, completed in 1404, was one of the finest examples of Islamic architecture in the Timurid Empire. The beauty is in the intricacies. With no agenda but the admiration of blue-tiled buildings, we lay on the grass outside of the mosque and just let our eyes wander around the structure. We counted the many different kinds of awe-inspiring Arabic calligraphy, tirelessly painted and carved into every wall, crevice and cranny of the mosque.
Later on in the trip, we came across a 14th century Koran, and I rubbed together my two brain cells to try and animate the fossilised memories of one-and-a-half years of Arabic study. I recognised the Surah as Surah Al-Fatiha, recited during opening prayers in Islam and stumbled through a reading of it.
I waver constantly between the tradeoff of accessibility and poetry when it comes to religious texts. Some friends at Bible Study read from Bible translations that are intentionally designed to be accessible to a layperson with no seminary background in plain and simple English. I think there's beauty in that and I don't think there's much utility to a theology shrouded behind layers of academic abstraction. However, in that moment, I found myself transported across time, my eyes following the six-hundred year-old cursive of a prayer that is still recited by hundreds of millions of people around the world. How do I reconcile the inherent tension between accessibility and mystery?
The Gospel of John begins with the idea that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1 NRSV). I feel like that ethos is captured in Islamic Calligraphy. In this moment, I felt words so sacred and so eternal they were committed to tile and preserved for hundreds and hundreds of years. My friend, Ivan, suggested many years ago to me that architecture is a form of prayer. Religious structures offer an opportunity for a civilisation to commit what it holds sacred to stone. He gave the example of Tibetan Prayer Wheels, incorporated seamlessly into cities so people can always be reminded of the spirit and ethos of Buddhism. A Sikh Uber Driver once told me: "we are a drop of water and God is the ocean". I guess, at Bibi-Khanym, I felt what was sacred was a reverence for the word, patterns and wonder. From afar, the patterns and tesselations come together in a cohesive whole. Walk up close, and there are endless little journeys the eye can take. God is in a word. God is in a paragraph. God is in a book. God is in an encyclopedic volume.