White Mosque - ComeLibros Club

English language

Published Dec. 13, 2022 by C. Hurst and Company (Publishers) Limited.

ISBN:: 978-1-78738-807-9

(1 review)

A rich history of wanderers, exiles and intruders. A haunting personal journey through Central Asia. An intimate reflection on mixed identity shaped by cultural crossings.

In the late 1800s, a group of German-speaking Mennonites fled Russia for Muslim Central Asia, to await Christ’s return.

Over a century later, Sofia Samatar traces their gruelling journey across desert and mountains, and its improbable fruit: a small Christian settlement inside the Khanate of Khiva. Named ‘The White Mosque’ after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village—a community of peace, prophecy, music and martyrs—lasted fifty years.

Within this curious tale, Sofia discovers a tapestry of characters connected by the ancient Silk Road: a fifteenth-century astronomer-king; an intrepid Swiss woman traveller; the first Uzbek photographer; a free spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. Along the way, in a voice both warm and wise, she explores her own complex upbringing as an American Mennonite of colour, the daughter …

A rich history of wanderers, exiles and intruders. A haunting personal journey through Central Asia. An intimate reflection on mixed identity shaped by cultural crossings.

In the late 1800s, a group of German-speaking Mennonites fled Russia for Muslim Central Asia, to await Christ’s return.

Over a century later, Sofia Samatar traces their gruelling journey across desert and mountains, and its improbable fruit: a small Christian settlement inside the Khanate of Khiva. Named ‘The White Mosque’ after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village—a community of peace, prophecy, music and martyrs—lasted fifty years.

Within this curious tale, Sofia discovers a tapestry of characters connected by the ancient Silk Road: a fifteenth-century astronomer-king; an intrepid Swiss woman traveller; the first Uzbek photographer; a free spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. Along the way, in a voice both warm and wise, she explores her own complex upbringing as an American Mennonite of colour, the daughter of a Swiss-American Christian and a Somali Muslim.

On this pilgrimage to a lost village and a near-forgotten history, Samatar traces the porous borders of identity and narrative. When you leave your tribe, what remains? How do we enter the stories of others? And how, out of life’s buried archives and startling connections, does a person construct a self?

3 editions

Fionnáin reviewed White Mosque by Sofia Samatar

Unearthing sidelined histories

4 stars

Sofia Samatar's unusual memoir The White Mosque is a hard book to categorise. On the surface, it could be described as a travel book of an author taking a journey through historical sites. But it is far more complex and unusual. The author is Mennonite-Muslim with German-Somali heritage, raised in the USA; her skin, education and accent identify her as 'other' in between so many liminal identities that other people place on her. The place is a pilgrimage route in Uzbekistan that was taken in the mid-1800s by Mennonites fleeing conscription in Prussia and Russia. Samatar's colleagues on the journey are the other Mennonite tourist-pilgrims and she is also accompanied by her large catalogue of biographies of those mid-19th Century travellers.

The result is wildly interesting and completely unique. Samatar's brilliant writing helps her cause in telling this story, because it is all so foreign to me that I worried …

Sofia Samatar's unusual memoir The White Mosque is a hard book to categorise. On the surface, it could be described as a travel book of an author taking a journey through historical sites. But it is far more complex and unusual. The author is Mennonite-Muslim with German-Somali heritage, raised in the USA; her skin, education and accent identify her as 'other' in between so many liminal identities that other people place on her. The place is a pilgrimage route in Uzbekistan that was taken in the mid-1800s by Mennonites fleeing conscription in Prussia and Russia. Samatar's colleagues on the journey are the other Mennonite tourist-pilgrims and she is also accompanied by her large catalogue of biographies of those mid-19th Century travellers.

The result is wildly interesting and completely unique. Samatar's brilliant writing helps her cause in telling this story, because it is all so foreign to me that I worried at the beginning I would not be able to persevere with the book, despite the interesting moments. The anecdotes and histories are beautiful but all tinged with sadness and often invaded by violence, and this makes it a hard read at times. It is also an incredible journey and gives space as a reader with little knowledge of either Uzbekistan or Mennonite culture to open up to two things in this complex multicultured world we are lucky to be part of. And for me, this is the gift of this unforgettable book.