The White Mosque
A Memoir
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir (Midland Authors Book Award)
Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
A historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, of students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and of the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity
In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return.
Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet, “The White Mosque,” after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years.
In pursuit of this curious history, Samatar discovers a variety of characters whose lives intersect around the ancient Silk Road, from a fifteenth-century astronomer-king, to an intrepid Swiss woman traveler of the 1930s, to the first Uzbek photographer, and explores such topics as Central Asian cinema, Mennonite martyrs, and Samatar’s own complex upbringing as the daughter of a Swiss-Mennonite and a Somali-Muslim, raised as a Mennonite of color in America.
A secular pilgrimage to a lost village and a near-forgotten history, The White Mosque traces the porous and ever-expanding borders of identity, asking: How do we enter the stories of others? And how, out of the tissue of life, with its weird incidents, buried archives, and startling connections, does a person construct a self?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sci-fi writer Samatar (The Winged Histories) strays from her imagined worlds to excavate a very real past in this fascinating look at her religious heritage. In the summer of 2016, the author—a descendant of Swiss-German Mennonites and Somali Muslims—traveled to Khiva, Uzbekistan, in a reconstruction of an 1880s pilgrimage wherein Mennonite minister Claas Epp Jr. led his followers from Russia into Central Asia, predicting that Christ would soon return. Over two weeks, Samatar, with a group of other Mennonites, traversed great distances and histories before arriving at their destination, Ak Metchet, a Mennonite church built to resemble a white mosque. What Samatar discovered within the walled garden of Ak Metchet was the story of a small but strong Christian community whose culture, traditions, and stories outlived their 50 years residing in the predominantly Muslim area. In evocative prose, Samatar captures the Odyssean sojourn and awakens the stories of the past—painting in harrowing detail the unspeakable horrors that befell the first settlers—while reckoning with her own identity, an "electrical storm" created by two religions perceived "as violently opposed... amplifying one another in a sizzling sibling rivalry." Emerging from this is a vivid mosaic that interrogates the spirit of the faithful while celebrating the beauty of storytelling. This riveting meditation on the "great tides of history" yields a wondrous take on the ways the past and present intertwine.
