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?
