Twenty minutes' drive due west of Bukhara a massive brown dome appears on the left hand side of the road. It forms the roof of a khanaga which, when completed in the mid - 16th century, was the biggest in the world. Once center of the Nakshbandi order of dervishes, it is now part of a thriving religious center being energetically restored while the rest of Central Asia languishes. This is what happens when local Muslims rather than western tourists flock to a place. Zeal converts to cash converts to renovation, all in local currency, at local wages, with no middlemen but the mullahs.

The lure is the tomb of Sheikh Bokha ud-Din, who died in 1389 without claiming descent from the Prophet but has nevertheless been revered ever since. Khan Abdul Aziz II built a vault over the grave and a carved marble fence round it in 1544. The khanaga, currently full of wooden scaffolding and closed to visitors, was built soon afterwards. Its dome is held up by four great brick arches visible from the outside like the bendy poles of a geodesic dome tent. 

In time a pond was dug next to the sheikh's grave and an unusual sacred water vessel, with four arches and four towers like a miniature Chor Minar , went up next to the pond. Imams under mulberry trees say prayers for visitors at 50 or so rubles a prayer. Three mosques linked by colonnades separate this inner sanctum from the rest of the complex, which consists of the khanaga the graves of Khans Abdul Aziz I and II beyond it, and on its east side a minaret and small courtyard for ablutions before prayer. 

Sheikh Bokha ud-Din was a local man. His birthplace is five minutes' walk away in the grounds of another mosque which is also the burial place of his mother and two aunts. The birth is said to have happened on the walled platform under a vine trellis by the entrance to the grounds. The graves are outside the mosque's west wall. Scared teenage soon-to-be-weds come here for counseling with another imam  
under another holy mulberry tree beside another (reed-filled) pond. Without a 20th - century building or cotton field in sight, and hardly a sound bar the imam's murmuring, this is as relaxing a mosque as you could wish for. 

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