Whose tomb is this?

One tomb.
Two names for it.

“Locals call it Shah-Fazil’s tomb. Its walls name another man.”From the film

In the village of Safed-Bulan, at the north-western edge of the Fergana Valley, a brick tomb with a tall dome has been visited by pilgrims for centuries. Everyone there will tell you whose it is: Shah-Fazil’s, a hero of the tales about the coming of Islam to Fergana.

The walls disagree. Inside, three bands of carved Persian writing run around the room, and the upper two say plainly whose tomb this is: a Karakhanid ruler, Sayf al-Dawla Muhammad ibn Nasr ibn Ali. The building was raised, or at least decorated, on the orders of his son.1 The name Shah-Fazil does not appear in them.2

Neither name is wrong in its own way. One is what the stone records; the other is what the people who come here remember. This page lays them out the way the film does, on a carver’s sheet: pencil for what people say, ink for what the walls say, colour last.

Plain brick,
built around 1060.

From the road the mausoleum gives nothing away. It is a single square room of fired brick, 11.1 by 11.7 metres outside, set almost exactly to the points of the compass.1 The walls lean in slightly as they rise, like a cut-off pyramid; above them sits a stepped drum and then a high dome. Of its 15.5 metres, the walls take 5.2 and the dome 10.3. The walls are more than a metre and a half thick.2

The outside is bare. The only ornament is a pair of small panels on either side of the door, with simple geometry; one holds a six-pointed star.2 That star is the seed of every pattern on this page.

The date comes from the writing, not from a carved year: there is none. Reading the inscriptions, Nastich and Kochnev placed them between 1055 and 1059; coins of Muhammad ibn Nasr struck in 1061 then nudged that a little later, but not by much.1 In his 2019 book Nastich gives “most likely between 1055 and 1062”.3 “Around 1060” holds both readings.

Floor to dome,
carved plaster.

Step through the door and the brick disappears. At first only the niches of the octagon under the dome were dressed, with bricks laid in a herringbone. Later the whole room was plastered and carved.1 The plaster is ganch, a gypsum mix that can be cut while it sets. It covered the interior from floor to ceiling.2 The carving was tinted blue, light blue, red and yellow.1

The method was the one the film shows. Most of the ornament is cut in lines, as if traced from a drawing.4 The carver kept the pattern flat and cut the background away around it.2 A lattice of stars like this starts as circles of equal size on a grid. Their crossings give the points. Joining the points gives the stars.

Around the room run three horizontal bands of writing in Persian.1 The narrow one above the corner arches is about 25 cm high; the one below them is about 60 cm, with large raised letters. Laid end to end, the three bands come to about 130 metres. The letters have no dots and no spaces between words, and one master carver may have cut them all, though that is a guess.2

Not all of it is still there. Soviet repairs were never finished, and metal scaffolding stood inside and outside for more than forty years. For the latest restoration, the team worked from photographs taken in 1948.5 Measure the bands below and switch between the walls as carved and as they survive.

None of it says Shah-Fazil.
It names a Turkic ruler.

The Karakhanids were a Turkic dynasty that ruled much of Central Asia from the tenth century. The man in the upper bands, Muhammad ibn Nasr, is a shadowy figure. Little is known about him beyond his coins.2 The inscription gives his title, Sayf al-Dawla, “sword of the state”. It notes that his father was famous for his piety. It names the son who built or decorated the tomb, Mu‘izz al-Dawla, also called Abbas.1

One word in it has caught the eye of the authors of the 2023 study: the dead man is called shahid. That may mean he died a violent death, perhaps in the wars between Karakhanid princes in the middle of the eleventh century. That is their hypothesis, not a record.2 Sources disagree even on the years of his reign, so we leave them out.

Between the Persian bands are medallions framed by short texts in Arabic Kufic. They hold the formulas you would expect in a tomb: the basmala, the profession of faith, a verse of the Qur’an (9:33), and, again and again, al-mulk li-llah: “dominion belongs to God”.1 It is an odd sentence to repeat around a king.

So who was Shah-Fazil?
A hero of legend.

The tale is old. In the early fourteenth century the writer Jamal al-Din al-Qarshi already knew of two graves at the place then called Ispid-Bulan. One was a “grave of heads”, the other a “grave of souls”, linked to a campaign of the first warriors of Islam.1 The full story was written down in the eighteenth century as the Qissa-i Shah-Jarir.

In it Shah-Jarir, said to descend from the Prophet, comes with an army to preach, and he and his companions are killed here. A servant woman named Bulan buries the dead and turns white with grief. Safed is Persian for white. Years later his son, Shah-Fazil, returns, the people accept Islam in peace, and a tomb is raised for him.78 Historians treat these people as legendary. The first reliable Arab campaign into Fergana came in 712–713, long after the dates of the tale. But the link between this place and the first warriors of Islam formed early, probably by the time the tomb was built.1

So how did a legendary hero end up with a real king’s tomb? The best answer so far lies in the lowest band. That band runs nearest the floor and is the most damaged: about a quarter of its 72.5 metres survives.2 Its text is a moral one. In it is the Arabic word fadl, which means “virtue” or “merit”.

Abashin suggests that this word may be what tied the tomb to Shah-Fazil. Read later as a name, fadl would turn into Fazil.1 It is a hypothesis, and a good one: it needs no forgery and no mistake, only a worn word and the story people already told about this place.