Jacksonville Public Library

The white mosque, a memoir, Sofia Samatar

eng

Includes biliographical references (pages 307-311)

autobiography

illustrationsmaps

no index present

non fiction

The white mosque

bibliography

1333862132

Sofia Samatar

a memoir

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

Part one: wanderers. Tashkent: a more dazzling vison -- The hunger steppe: to transform the world into signs -- Samarkand: I have set before thee an open door -- Part two: home-ache. Kok Ota: sad comedy at the border -- Bukhara: safely to arrive at home -- The desert: the wall is no more, nor those who daubed it -- Part three: the place of refuge. Khiva: all in a pale and ghostly light -- Ak Metchet: the world didn'd end -- Tashkent: a land gleams at us from afar

adult