The holy heart of Central Asia — a Silk Road oasis city so dense with mosques, madrasas, and saints that Muslims called it Bukhara the Noble, the brilliant capital of a Persianate golden age and a thousand-year center of Islamic learning, which in the modern age became, in Western imperial memory, a byword for a closed and cruel emirate.
Of Bukhara, devout Muslims liked to say that everywhere else on earth light shines down from heaven, but from Bukhara it shines up. The city earned that reverence honestly. By the tenth century it was the dazzling capital of a Persian renaissance, packed with libraries, poets, and scholars, and it produced al-Bukhari, whose hadith collection became one of Sunni Islam’s most trusted books. People called it the Dome of Islam. Yet the same city would end the nineteenth century as a watchword for cruelty, an isolated desert emirate whose ruler kept foreign envoys in a vermin-filled pit before cutting off their heads.