The Mystery of Safed Bulan
Safed Bulan Shah Fazyl is a memorial complex in Jalalabat Province, in south Kyrgyzstan. This complex is situated 200 km from Jalalabat in Kyrgyzstan and 350 km from Uzbekistan's capital Tashkent.
It consists of Shah Fazyl's Mausoleum, which dates back to the 11th century, and the Kallakhana Mausoleum .•.here the heads of shaheed, or martyrs, are nought to be buried. The beheaded bodies are ouried in a mass grave at another part of the complex, 700 meters from the mausoleum. ~he shaheed were Arabs who came to the area = ong the Great Silk Road; they were members of the 12,000 strong army led by Muhammad "arir from Medina. They built a mosque in the 2rea and converted the local people to Islam. The local ruler of the Kypchaks (also spelled as Kipczaks, Qipchaqs, Qypchaqs) fought •vith them; his warriors beheaded the Arabs during their Friday namaz prayer in the mid--rh century.
A local girl named Bulan was friendly with '■1 jhammad Jarir's wife. After the carnage she carried the heads up to the river and washed ~em on a large stone slab. She looked for larir's head but he was not among the victims. ■Vith the remainder of his army he had ~ianaged to return to Arabia. The girl washed 1 772 heads of the Prophet's warriors. After =ne had done it, though dark-skinned by birth, зпе became white. That was why they began calling her Safed Bulan ('White Bulan'). She may have developed the skin disease Vitiligo si:er what she had experienced but the legend daims it was a reward from Allah. We do not
in history. Islam came to the area to remain there for centuries. It was here that the first Central Asian mosque was built, where Islam began developing in this part of the world.
A few dozen years after the tragedy Arabs returned to the place and gained a foothold there. The local population converted to Islam. The shaheed graveyard became a pilgrimage site for Central Asian Muslims The village at the site is called Safetbulan (situated in Ferghana Valley on the border between Kyrgyzstan's Jalalabat Province and Uzbekistan's Namangan Province).
In Kyrgyzstan's capital Bishkek in September 2006, an international conference 'Central Asian Muslims and Their Contribution to Civilization' was held, initiated by the Muslim World League. The history of Safed Bulan was given a lot of attention at the conference. They pointed out that Safed Bulan was the first place Muslim Arabs arrived at in the region. In his talk the conference participant Dr. Favvaz Ben Ali Dhasa, a Muslim History teacher at Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, said that according to the scholar and historian Ali Al Bara's memoirs, 2,772 shaheed, including some of the Sahaba and Taabin sent by Caliph Uthman ibn Affan, were truly buried in Safed Bulan in today's Kyrgyzstan.
The Safed Bulan burial site has certainly always held much interest for historians and archeologists. In Islamic tradition the remains of the dead should not be disturbed which is why Arabs did not carry out any excavations at the site; they only worshipped it, and lived and died at it. Many tombstones still kept in the memorial complex provide evidence of this.
Most inscriptions on the tombstones are Arabic, a few are in Persian. The inscriptions of the noble dead were carved on the tombstones; such inscriptions last forever. Scholars began studying these inscriptions in the 1880s - the exact date is December 6, 1884: the scholar A. N. Arvanitaki copied them out and submitted a report about it to Ferghana Valley Military Governor (the region was then part of the Russian Empire). Later the famous Russian orientalist N. I. Veselovski confirmed that the inscriptions were made in the 12th - 14th centuries.
The studies continued in Soviet times. In 1925 the Academician V. V. Bartold proved that the inscription on one of the stones referred to Sheikh Muhammad ibn Daud's grave. Later the scholar M. M. Dyakonov worked at deciphering the inscriptions, and some Soviet archeologists carried out excavations at the site. The archeologists counted the sculls in the Kallakhana Mausoleum. But they were not allowed to finish their job. The Communist Party authorities declared the site a 'prohibited area', and foreigners were not allowed access for many years.
There were several dozen tombstones; some are now in Saint Petersburg, some in Tashkent and some belong to local people. There are twelve left in the complex itself. These stones are of unique historical value; one of them contains sensational information that would have been top-secret during the Russian Empire and Soviet Communist Party's dictatorship. The inscription says that there lie the remains of Mohammed the Prophet's direct relative. This tombstone is registered under number 17; the complex administrators guard it very closely.
This is the grave of the great sheikh, great imam, beloved human, wise man, outstanding scholar, the great man of the great who embodied high respectability and happiness Jalaluddin al-Muhaddis.
His Father, the Great Sheikh and Imam, ^ scholar and faithful to Islam, pride of the whole world's hajji, pride of the whole world's great Prophet Alauddin AH bin Abul Hasan bin Abul Ukayl al-Makkiy (let Allah brighten his grave).
The inscription was deciphered only recently by the orientalist Professor Muhammad Hussein from Chicago University in the USA. The inscription was made in the 12th century, when the Caliphate flourished; it is clear evidence that in the area of Safed Bulan Sheikh Jalaluddin al-Muhaddis, Mohammed the Prophet's successor was buried. If a tombstone can be considered a document, then this is fact. And such a fact can be made public with no limitations in today's times of independence.
This latest discovery helped to solve one of the great Safed Bulan mysteries. And there will undoubtedly be more discoveries at the site. Nowadays anyone can visit it. Tens of thousands of people come to the site every year. Among recent visitors were employees of the US Embassy in Kyrgyzstan, as well as Professor Marta Olcott, a representative of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the famous Russian scholar and orientalist, Aleksey Malashenko, and other researchers from different countries. In 1999 the Public Revival Fund of Safed Bulan Shah Fazyl Complex was established. The fund manager Erkin Begimkulov has initiated restoration activities at the site. In 1999 the complex was put on the pending list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.