Afghanistan Part II

As Delphine already told you, we are still staying in Afghanistan for a couple of days.
We have not seen a lot of mosques, that’s why we are visiting the second largest town of Afghanistan,  Herat!

Herat is the capital of the Herat province in Afghanistan and is situated in the valley of the Hari River. You can follow the Hari River or Harirud 1100 m from the mountains of central Afghanistan to Turkmenistan where it ends in the Kara-Kum desert.

There are almost 400,000 people living in Herat. The Persian speaking part leads with  85% followed by the Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Turkmens.

Luckily we didn’t came here in the summer, because the temperature can rise above 40 °C.  The winter is mind, snow melts as it falls and even on the mountains it does not lie long. Three year out of four it does not freeze hard enough for people to store ice.

We picked out a beautiful sunny day to visit the Friday Mosque, also known as the Jumah Mosque.
This mosque was built by the Timurids, a Central Asian Sunni Muslim dynasty who lived in modern Afghanistan as well as large parts of Pakistan and North India.

Our tour guide told us that many of the glazed tiles had been replaced, the Friday Mosque in Heart was given its present from during the closing years of the 15^th century. Herat also posseses a lot of small neighborhood mosques for daily prayer but most communities in the Islamic world have a larger mosque for Friday services with a sermon. That is why they call it the Friday Mosque.

The next day, we visited the Jihad Museum.  We were told at dinner last night that we really should take a look over there. It was kind of crazy, it had traces of civil war museums like those in any small museum in any small town. We saw what had happened years ago from the perspective of the invaders, watching the revolution.

While leaving the museum, the caretaker of the museum said, “If I had known what the future held, I wouldn’t have helped in the Inqalab (revolt against the communists in Herat). We fought so we wouldn’t be the servants of the Soviets but now we’re the servants of everyone.”

Our last stop was the Herat University. This university was build in 1988 and is now attended by approximately 3,000 students. The first thing we noticed was that there are more men than women attending this university, only 30%. Although the school has 11 faculties and is still recovering from the long period of war and chaos in the country, the reconstruction moves on fast.

Despite the stories we heard about Afghanistan, we had a great time. It really got us back with two feet on the ground and we can be blessed that we live in such a developed country as Belgium

See you!

Lies Descheemaeker