SAMARKAND/Uzbekistan, MAY 12 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — On a warm spring day, queues snake down the steps along the hillside of Samarkand’s Hazrat Khizr Mosque. The line is made up of men, women and children, some whole families. They are waiting to pay their respects to the late President of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, who died on Sept. 2 2016.
Born in Samarkand, he is now buried here too and his final surroundings are certainly grand, and holy. The Hazrat Khizr Mosque, considered by many to be Samarkand’s most beautiful mosque, lies next to the famous necropolis, Shah-i-Zinda, a major tourist attraction and an important Islamic holy site.
Policemen stagger the crowds, letting a few up at a time. Any day soon the site will be closed as a more permanent mausoleum is built, and many are eager to come now, while they can.
One man, from Jizzakh, a two- hour drive away, had rushed to get here with his whole family in tow. “We know it’ll close so we wanted to come now. We don’t know how long the building work will last for,” he says.
He then adds: “We feel anxious about the future now the President is gone.”
Another man, an elder, or aksakal (white beard), wearing a long chapan (cloak) a red neck scarf, says that he met Karimov several times and had traveled from a village 150km away to come here. He’d also visited the Shah-i-Zinda that morning, and was heading to the Bibi-Khanym Mosque across the road afterwards.
Karimov’s grave is becoming part of the tourism circuit.
At the top, a mullah, sitting in a glass policeman’s box, reads out prayers through loud speakers. Looking crestfallen, most kneel and sit to pray while policemen look on unsmilingly, and bored. Slowly, the circle continues with more arriving and leaving, a continual cycle of muted grief and uncertainty about the future.
ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)
