Samatar Sofia - White Mosque - Paperback

Binding: Paperback
Description: 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?
Title: White Mosque
Author(s): Samatar Sofia
Publisher: Catapult
Barcode: 9781646222032
Language: English
Publication Date: 12/5/2023