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The White Mosque: A Memoir

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The White Mosque: A Memoir

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Overview

Longlisted 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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646222032
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	12/05/2023
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	192,019
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

SOFIA SAMATAR is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection, Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Sofia’s work has received the William L. Crawford Award, the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She has also been a finalist for the Locus Award, the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Italo Calvino Prize. Her work has appeared in several year’s-best anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Sofia holds a PhD in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she currently teaches African literature, Arabic literature in translation, world literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.

Part 1 Wanderers

1 Tashkent-a more dazzling vision 3

Begin with the glow

Pilgrims

Beautiful error

The implausible story

A magpie existence

Corrective (Un)homelike

Shakhrisahz

2 The Hunger Steppe-to transform the world into signs 27

The raven's claw

Shadows of earthly things

3 Samarkand-I have set before thee an open door 61

Ancient versus modern

Heroes

Turkestan Album

The crows

How sweet you are, you hitter life!

The German sense of order

The missionary effect

These two drops

The place of hunger

Star catalogue

Part 2 Home-ache

4 Kok Ota-sad comedy of the border 89

Blue Grandfather

Eat this book

The Home in the East

The outsider comes in

The insider goes out

The taste of love

Who we are

5 Bukhara-safely to arrive at home 115

Halfway

The ethnic ghost

The photograph

Cultural show

Alphabet of bone

Writing coming home

The supplicants

La vie immédiate

The dreamers

6 The Desert-the wall is no more, nor those who daubed it 151

Claas Epp syndrome

All or none Revisions

Elementary German homework

Other deserts, other endings

Interviews with converts

A few conclusions

Your stories, my elders

Apocalyptic Mirror

Sight

Voice

Paradoxes of martyrdom

Elizabeth's dragon

A swollen book

The words of departure

Part 3 The Place of Refuge

7 Khiva-all in a pale and ghostly light 205

Algorithm

Eisegesis

Photography and the angels

Grandfather Lantern

The light thief

The lone curator

Everyone shines

Saturated

I'm not local

Love story

8 Ak Metchet-the world didn't end 249

This is our valley

The historians

Love story (second draft)

Prayer

The returnee

The leaky caravanserai

Stories of brown girlhood

9 Tashkent-a land gleams at us from afar 287

From the B&N Reads Blog

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Editorial Reviews

Winner of the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir (Midland Authors Book Award)

Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Kirkus Reviews, A Best Book of The Year
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year

"An enthralling memoir." —Laura Zornosa, A Time Best Book of the Month

"Samatar, the child of a Swiss German Mennonite mother and a Somali Muslim father, constructs a travel memoir out of acts of pilgrimage. In Uzbekistan she retraces the journey of 19th century Mennonites to Samarkand, where the 'white mosque' of the title—a Mennonite church—leads her to unpack her own identity and sense of wanderlust. What begins as a 'palimpsestic' journey becomes a stunning mosaic of history, memoir and reportage." —Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times

"Samatar blends travelogue with a larger meditation on faith, community, and colonization." —The New Yorker

"The term memoir doesn’t seem capacious enough to capture what Samatar has achieved with her latest: This book is simultaneously a deep study of faith, identity, art, and the enduring power of stories. It is a grand achievement, and with it, Samatar has cemented her status as one of our most alluring and essential thinkers." —Tope Folarin, Vulture, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Fall

"A luminous exploration of personal and cultural history." —Kelly Link, Elle

"An expansive voyage worth taking." —Tobias Carroll, InsideHook

"Few of us can match [Samatar's] education in contemporary Mennonite identity. None of us can make those issues more universal, poetic and prophetic . . . [The White Mosque] should be required reading . . . Samatar makes innovations in the field of memoir." —Shirley Hershey Showalter, Anabaptist World

"It is delightful to follow Samatar on rabbit trails through remnants of the Ak Metchet Mennonites." —Amy Frykholm, The Christian Century

"Samatar’s mind is a marvel in this book; it has an expansive way of making connections between seemingly unconnected bits of history both cultural and personal . . . This is an important book for those of us who find ourselves in the liminal spaces between two religions or races, two ways of being, and two cultures." —Cate Desjardins, The Englewood Review of Books

"Piercing . . . Samatar’s prose . . . has all the sensory pleasure of an illuminated manuscript . . . The White Mosque is a Rubik’s cube of a book—a memoir but also an intricately researched cultural history and a work of theory." —Franziska Lee, Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism

"What makes The White Mosque an important book is that its eclecticism and intellectual restlessness are fine-tuned for the purposes of cultural intervention—into North American Mennonite culture in particular and the settler-colonial culture of the United States in general . . . If The White Mosque has an argument, it is that these convenient angles of approach will not do. It is as if good reading will reveal the fragmentary nature of everyone—even a prophet. In a manner reminiscent of W. E. B. Du Bois in his biography of John Brown, Samatar sees too keenly to paint the minister as hero or heretic." —Safwan Khatib, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Good reading . . . [Samatar] uses the brilliant imagination that has led to her prize-winning success as a writer of speculative fiction to perceive the connectedness of all experience and thought." —Ervin Beck, Mennonite Quarterly Review

"Brilliant . . . The book is a stylistic feat. Every sentence sings, and its structure is as unpredictable as its premises . . . The White Mosque is not only a masterful excavation of religious and familial identity, it is also a powerful cure for literary nihilism." —Elizabeth Hall, Full Stop

"At once an intimately diaristic travelogue, a stirring personal inquiry, and a captivating, meticulously researched history . . . In the end Samatar abandoned any precise formula for moving neatly into and out of others’ stories. Instead she built something far more alive: this extravagance of branches and threads and gleaming details, bursting with the kind of treasures yielded only by boundless curiosity." —Megan Milks, 4Columns

"[Samatar] excels in inviting readers to experience life through others' eyes: placing readers alongside her for the journey." —Booklist

"[A] thoughtful, gorgeously written account of a tour [Samatar] took retracing the trekkers’ challenging path to their new settlement, where they lived for some 50 years. But her pleasantly digressive book encompasses much more." —Anne Bartlett, BookPage

"If you’re the kind of reader who enjoys genre-blending nonfiction, this is a book to look out for." —Laura Sackton, Book Riot

"Complex and gorgeously written, this memoir invites readers on a journey to the ever expanding borders of human compassion." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Voluptuous with imagery and lush with language, this gorgeous memoir of travel and discovery is a perfect summer read . . . Filled with lyrical meditations on faith and community, plus beautiful descriptions of Uzbekistan, Samatar has created something almost transcendent . . . [Her] writing is engaging, enticing, and a gift. This is not only a great book but also an important one. Not to be missed." —Library Journal (starred review)

"Fascinating . . . 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 . . . 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." —Publishers Weekly

“This is a perfect memoir: a mosaic (or as Samatar calls it, 'a shattering') of self that elevates the genre of nonfiction to new heights, and an exploration of what it means to stand in the illuminated intersection of history and identity, and bring precise language to the diffuse and unknowable. It is my dearest hope that this book brings Sofia Samatar into the wider public consciousness, something we have not earned, but which she so very richly deserves." —Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

From the Publisher

05/30/2022
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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 08/01/2022
Voluptuous with imagery and lush with language, this gorgeous memoir of travel and discovery is a perfect summer read. Award-winning fantasy novelist Samatar (The Winged Histories) explores the even more magical and mysterious world of memory and history. Taking readers along on her trip to Uzbekistan in search of a particularly prophetic piece of her family's Mennonite past, she comes to see herself, her family, and her world in a new light. Her mother, a Mennonite missionary from North Dakota, and her father, a Somali shepherd who taught Somali to missionaries, remind readers that no one is as simple as they seem. Filled with lyrical meditations on faith and community, plus beautiful descriptions of Uzbekistan, Samatar has created something almost transcendent. On her journey, she reveals the mystery of the Mennonite minister Claas Epp Jr., who convinced a group of Russian Mennonites to follow him into the deserts of Central Asia to await the second coming of Christ. Samatar's writing is engaging, enticing, and a gift. This is not only a great book but also an important one. Not to be missed. VERDICT Essential for public, academic, and school libraries.—Herman Sutter

Library Journal

★ 2022-08-17
An exploration of religious and cultural identity through the lens of an ill-fated pilgrimage into Central Asia in the late 19th century.
In the 1880s, a group of German-speaking Mennonites known as the Bride Community followed the charismatic visionary Claas Epp on a harrowing journey into pre-Soviet Uzbekistan, where Epp predicted Christ would return. Despite losing many followers to death or disillusionment, the core group reached the Muslim khanate of Khiva and founded the Christian community known as Ak Metchet—the White Mosque—a village that survived 50 years before its dissolution by the Bolsheviks. Embarking on a Mennonite heritage tour through Uzbekistan, Samatar—fantasy novelist, professor of African and Arabic literature, and daughter of Swiss Mennonite and Somali Muslim parents—chronicles her journey through the century-old footsteps of the Bride Community in an attempt to see this beautiful, alien region through their eyes. In addition to the community’s path, the author traces their intersections with the Muslim people of the region, whose generosity carried the Christian pilgrims to their destination. Samatar interweaves this historical narrative with her own personal history and a litany of religious, literary, and philosophical texts, stitching together a multifaceted account of faith, identity, and acceptance. “It’s the contrast, the incongruity, that delights,” she writes. “Beyond the initial shock of the story of reckless prophecy, this story that makes my listeners shake their heads, recoil, or laugh, there’s the reverberation of Mennonites in Uzbekistan. Rendered in the author’s vivid prose, Uzbekistan—a place unknown to most Western readers—feels like a fantastic land of deep history, stunning architecture, and uniquely diverse culture. The author devotes the same careful attention to Mennonite theology and society, depicting the complicated international religious and ethnic community with a caring but critical eye. Reaching beyond all state and religious boundaries, Samatar is “always saying we,” incorporating more and more of humanity into a growing inner circle.
Complex and gorgeously written, this memoir invites readers on a journey to the ever expanding borders of human compassion.

Kirkus Reviews

The White Mosque: A Memoir

The White Mosque: A Memoir

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