The white mosque : a memoir / Sofia Samatar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Samatar, Sofia, author.

Language:

Undetermined

Subjects (All):

Samatar, Sofia--Travel--Silk Road.

Samatar, Sofia.

Mennonites--Khivinskoe khanstvo--History.

Mennonites.

Silk Road--Description and travel.

Silk Road.

Silk Road--History.

Silk Road--Social life and customs.

Uzbekistan--Description and travel.

Uzbekistan.

Authors, American--21st century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Manners and customs.

Travel.

Asia--Silk Road.

Genre:

Autobiographies.

History.

Travel writing.

Physical Description:

314 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm

Edition:

First imprint edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, N.Y. : Catapult, 2022.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Includes biliographical references (pages 307-311).

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Livezey Fund bookplate.

ISBN:

9781646220977

1646220978

OCLC:

1333862132