Skilfully woven account of contemporary life in a remote Silk Road town

BOOK OF THE DAY: A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk RoadBy Christopher Aslan Alexander Icon Books; 334pp; £14.99

SITTING DOWN to read A Carpet Ride to Khivaover the festive season was like entering an oasis of peace and quiet.

Khiva is a small walled town in the Uzbek desert close to the Turkmenistan border. It lies on what was once the ancient Silk Road. Christopher Aslan Alexander spent seven years there, arriving as a 24-year-old post-university volunteer and being drawn into the great Uzbek tradition of carpet-making.

During that time, he taught himself the skills of knotting carpet threads, finding designs for looms, going far out into the desert to find the plants needed for the dyes, and having the carpets made. His final triumph during his stay in Khiva was enlisting workers to dye and handweave carpets using patterns copied from 15th-century miniatures illustrating the words of the Persian poet Nizami.

Uzbekistan is the homeland of Amir Timur, known in the West as Timur the Lame. Celebrated as a fearless hero on the battlefield, Timur also had an eye for beauty. He captured artists from the cities he conquered and force-marched them to Samarkand to decorate his great palace. I have to confess to a personal grudge against Timur, as he stole from Damascus – my favourite city in the Middle East – the greatest ceramicists of the day, leaving that city bereft.

But that was then and this is now, and if anyone makes Uzbekistan come to life it is Alexander.

During a drought, when there is no water for his cold shower – an activity which horrifies the Uzbeks – Alexander takes a plastic container to the town well, where he causes consternation among the local maidens: manly men don’t draw water.

At the men’s baths, he is again stared at: Uzbek men shave their pubic and armpit hair.

Like the carpet patterns so intricately interwoven and linked, Alexander’s account of his seven years in Khiva gives us a feel for daily life looped and crisscrossed with weddings, corrupt officials, journeys in rickety buses, gossip at the looms, domestic violence and village hospitality, and all of it centering on the carpet project.

Knowing that child labour exists in Khiva, Alexander makes a rule that no one under 17 can be employed by him. Next, he goes looking for people who would normally find it difficult to get work, drawing in people with disabilities, some of whom are women with no chance of marriage. Payment is realistic and, he discovers, more than a teacher would get. But he later learns that teachers top up their meagre salaries by an ingenious system whereby students pay cash up front for good results.

Alexander has a type of double vision which allows him to see not only the beauty of tiny desert plants in bloom, the sensuous movements of an overweight woman as she dances or the excitement when a treasured carpet is finally finished, but also the cruelty to women subjected to a forced marriage, the horror of male circumcision – he gives a firsthand description of such a ritual – and the appalling list of human-rights abuses.

Alexander finally ran foul of the system when he was refused a return visa to Uzbekistan. He suspects the hand of the local mayor, who expected but did not receive the gift of a carpet.

Trying everything to get back in to Uzbekistan to at least say farewell to his many friends in Khiva, he spends no less than seven days in the airport transit lounge before finally getting on a flight home.

Or is home the right word? For the past two years he has been living in the Pamir mountains of Tajikistan, working on a knitting project making sweaters from yak down. Seems there’s no stopping him.

Mary Russell is a writer with a special interest in travel