The White Mosque: A Silk Road Memoir
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In the late 1800s, a group of German-speaking Mennonites fled Russia for Muslim Central Asia, to await Christ’s return.
Over a century later, Sofia Samatar traces their gruelling journey across desert and mountains, and its improbable fruit: a small Christian settlement inside the Khanate of Khiva. Named ‘The White Mosque’ after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village—a community of peace, prophecy, music and martyrs—lasted fifty years.
Within this curious tale, Sofia discovers a tapestry of characters connected by the ancient Silk Road: a fifteenth-century astronomer-king; an intrepid Swiss woman traveller; the first Uzbek photographer; a free spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. Along the way, in a voice both warm and wise, she explores her own complex upbringing as an American Mennonite of colour, the daughter of a Swiss-American Christian and a Somali Muslim.
On this pilgrimage to a lost village and a near-forgotten history, Samatar traces the porous borders of identity and narrative. When you leave your tribe, what remains? How do we enter the stories of others? And how, out of life’s buried archives and startling connections, does a person construct a self?
Sofia Samatar
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. She is the recipient of the William L. Crawford Award, the Astounding Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches Arabic literature, African literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.
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The White Mosque - Sofia Samatar
PART ONE
Wanderers
ONE
Tashkent
a more dazzling vision
Begin with the glow
Begin with the glow: the faint beam of a half-forgotten history. In this darkened hotel room, a trace of ochre outlines the curtains. Push them aside and a fawn-colored radiance blooms against my arms, revealing the city below, the dust and juniper trees, the loops of traffic. The light seems to flow from the streets as much as the sky, a tint in the air, less a brightness than a universal softening of the atmosphere, it appears to have no single source, it arrives everywhere at once, from all the ends of the earth, from the future and the past.
Rumpled sheets. Silky, patterned walls. A decorative chair in the corner, rigid and remote, like a lady-in-waiting. I’ve traveled before—as a tourist, a student, a volunteer English teacher—but never for research, never as a pilgrim.
Outside, a bus called Golden Dragon. Tree trunks painted white. The heat of June. And the vastness of Tashkent, its miles of tended parks, the giant mosques that seem akin to the lonely Soviet structures, buildings marooned in the sky, much taller than the trees. The larger everything is, the smaller I feel, the more I sense the glow. My insignificance brings me close to stray, discarded things, to the story that brought me here, to this blade of grass I pluck by the statue of Amir Timur, the conqueror, guarded by angels, born with his fists full of blood.
Pilgrims
Lunch with Kholid. The restaurant, curtained off from the midday glare, seems like a cavern at first, then slowly the tablecloths emerge from the gloom, the glint of teapots, the red and purple and rose-pink of the cushions, dizzying patterns that ought to clash, but it all looks wonderful. Kholid is a PhD student in history. We discuss Edward Said’s Orientalism, drinking cup after cup of tea. Kholid accompanies the tour as a local expert; he’s courteous and assured in his role, his shirt pressed, his purpose clear. And me, I’m the traveler, earnest, sweaty, disheveled, sipping beef soup, eating the dollops of cream cheese sprinkled with paprika, the Uzbek samosas out of a basket (samosas, Kholid informs me, originated in Uzbekistan, not India), consuming everything with the haphazard, distracted air of a person flung through the atmosphere, sleep-deprived, cockeyed with jet lag, with that peculiar weightlessness and tension, that sensation of being both empty and distended, like a balloon, that translates itself as a headache. A languid, buzzing headache, streaked with currents of elation. In 1941, Kholid tells me, Stalin sent an expedition to open the tomb of Timur, the fourteenth-century military giant known in the West as Tamerlane. Ignoring the warning inscription—Whoever disturbs my tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I am!
—a team of scientists broke into the sarcophagus. Two days later, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Moreover, the grave robbers’ crane mysteriously broke down, their lights went out, and the odor of musk issuing from the coffin knocked the whole team unconscious.
The sweetness welling from the past can knock you flat. It can hurl you across the planet. Now the plov arrives, the national dish, studded with raisins, each grain of rice gleaming darkly with oil and spices. Plov tastes best eaten with the fingers, Kholid remarks, but he eats it with a fork, so I do too. He tells me that, as a child, Amir Timur—the title Amir means prince—was visited by the ghost of Alexander the Great. This must have happened at the conqueror’s birthplace, Shakhrisabz. I’ve read of this city, and of the residence Timur built there, Ak Saray, the White Palace, of which a Spanish ambassador wrote, The workmanship of this palace was so rich that it would be impossible to describe it, without gazing and walking over everything, with slow steps.
I want to walk over everything with slow steps. But this is a tour; we have a schedule to keep. I can’t stop for the man in the park to sketch my portrait, can’t linger in the shade of the bridge where young couples stroll together near the Museum of the Victims of Repression. Our tour guide, Usmon, explains how a mass grave was discovered here when the ground was dug up for a tennis court—tennis being the favorite sport of Islam Karimov, who became the first president of independent Uzbekistan in 1991. He’s still president now, in the summer of 2016. The domes of the museum throb against the sky, they’re the same strong, fresh blue as the dome of Timur’s museum, a turquoise I will come to associate indelibly with Uzbekistan, a blue with the vitality of a leaf. In the hot summer sky, this blue exudes a coolness almost green. A railway line runs nearby. In Stalin’s time, says Usmon, people were brought to this place at night, transported secretly from concentration camps in Kazakhstan, and murdered under the noise of passing trains.
Legends of the conquerors, preserved in pride and fear. Timur’s tomb, the one he built for himself, stands empty at Shakhrisabz; instead he was buried in Samarkand beneath a slab of jade. The site was discovered when a child fell into the crypt. I write these stories in my notebook, occasionally adding a star to mark the moments when the great tide of history merges with my own, when my research flashes up, the wayward tributary that’s brought me to this place, for this is a double tour, a palimpsestic quest. On the one hand, it’s a visit to the major sites of Uzbekistan; Usmon is our leader in this area. On the other hand, it’s a Mennonite heritage tour, reconstructing the journey of a group of Mennonites who moved here from southern Russia, now Ukraine, in the 1880s. Kholid, whose father is writing a monograph on the Mennonites, joins us to comment on this minor history. And we have a third leader, as well: Frank, an American Mennonite historian, an expert on that strange, small story.
I write in my notebook: Shakhrisabz. Mark it with a star.
Most of the people on the tour are descendants of the Mennonites who settled here more than a century ago. They have come to see where their ancestors walked, to taste the air, the fruit, to photograph any traces that remain. They are Americans and Canadians. Like their ancestors who migrated here from Russia, they have pale skin, Germanic surnames, and roots in Central Europe. There are also two Uzbek bus drivers on this trip, and our guides, Usmon and Kholid. There’s Nozli, a young Uzbek woman, a tour guide in training. And then there’s me.
Beautiful error
What brought me here? In a way, I’ve arrived by accident. I’m haunted by a little piece of history, the story of a small, hardy, stubborn group of people who traveled here more than a hundred years ago. I am haunted by a photograph of their church, blanched with whitewash, standing among the poplars of an arid village square. When I first saw it, I imagined its thick walls were made of crystal, that its surface would taste of salt, and that it could contain more than was physically possible, like a word.
Because I saw this church in a photograph, I felt I could hold it in my hand. Because the photograph was a century old, I felt I was holding my century, the one in which I was born, the twentieth century. Because the church was located in Central Asia, in what is now Uzbekistan, a place I had never seen and of which I knew practically nothing, I felt it was very foreign. Because the church was a Mennonite church, belonging to my own denomination, the faith tradition of my mother’s family, I felt it was very close.
To be very close to the very foreign is one definition of haunting. As the most prominent landmark of the village where it stood, the church in the photograph gave the place its name: Ak Metchet, the White Mosque. To the local population, largely Muslim, the church was a white mosque.
Beautiful error, radiant mistake! Whether one is Christian or Muslim or neither, churches and mosques form nodes of powerful feeling. Passions cluster about them. Some perceive them as violently opposed, charged in such a way that they must repel one another. Others would place them together, as representatives of the same monotheistic, extremist, world-conquering impulse. But whether you see the forces these places emit as wildly different in character, generating worldviews that can never touch, or whether you see them as unified at a deep level, amplifying one another in a sizzling sibling rivalry, or whether your opinion partakes of both notions, I’m in this electrical storm. My mother’s family are Swiss-German Mennonites, my father’s Somali Muslims. I stand amid this lightning which, here in the twenty-first century, only seems to be growing more intense.
And so I wished to go inside the church that was a mosque. Its simplicity. Its almost blinding pallor.
The church crumbled decades ago. It no longer exists.
A pilgrimage, then, to error, to ghosts, to the accidental, to the glow.
The implausible story
The first time I came across the story of the Mennonites of Ak Metchet, I hardly noticed it. I was sixteen then, a student at Lancaster Mennonite School in Pennsylvania, taking the required course in Mennonite history. This history began with an immense amount of flogging, tongue screws, and burning at the stake. The Mennonites, we learned, were persecuted to pieces by both Catholics and Protestants because they rejected infant baptism, which is why they are known as Anabaptists, or re-baptizers, since people like Menno Simons, for whom the denomination is named, went around baptizing adults in the ponds of the Dutch provinces. Mennonites also rejected violence—Menno was appalled by the behavior of some of the other Anabaptists of his day, like the notorious Jan van Leyden, who took over the city of Münster, practiced polygamy, abolished property, and ran around stark naked. Menno was a far less exciting figure, but he had a certain sly charm, like the hero of a folktale. According to legend, he was once stopped on the road by some Anabaptist-hunters who demanded to know if Menno Simons was in the coach.
Menno happened to be driving the coach. He leaned down and asked the people inside, Is Menno in there?
No!
was the answer. Thus he got out of his predicament without lying. He wrote a book with the marvelous title Why I Do Not Cease Teaching and Writing, died peacefully, and was buried in his garden.
When the class began, it was easy to pay attention: there were so many grisly stories of martyrdom, of Mennonites living in hiding like underground revolutionaries. But then it was spring, the classroom got hotter, the atmosphere soporific, Mennonite history so boring, just people leaving their homes time after time. Usually, they got into trouble for refusing to join the army of whatever country they happened to be in. Then they’d be forced to move again: to Prussia, Russia, the Americas. We had to memorize all the treks for the final exam. Outside, the parking lot simmered. Flies bumped the windows. Our textbook was a terrible chalky pink, the color of bathroom tile. In the catalogue of miseries and migrations, the Mennonite journey to Central Asia was almost buried, mentioned only briefly, and with disapproval. The group that made that journey had been led, I read, by a false prophet, a man named Claas Epp Jr., who had dared to predict the date of Christ’s return. His prophecies failed, of course. The book described the trek as a sad misstep, a monument of warning.
A repetitive history, flat like a plain, like wheat. I yawned my way through it, fanning myself with a piece of notebook paper. And yet, years later, the story of this trek would leap out to me. I was in Nairobi, on my way to take up a teaching position in South Sudan, when my father-in-law gave me a book: The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia, 1880–1884. I remember reading it there, in the small room with the plywood wardrobe, under fluorescent light. Before you got into bed there was the ritual mosquito hunt. They were so fast your hand couldn’t possibly hit them. We smacked them with our pillows. Walls and pillowcases dotted with blood, and the book in my hands, a tale of wonder and terror, pilgrimage and exile, apocalyptic fervor and failure, a story removed from me in time and space yet calling out with its domed cityscapes, camels, German hymns, and snow. By that time, I was accustomed to living a fragmentary life. I was a Mennonite, a Somali American, a recent student of African literature, and a writer of as-yet-unpublished fantasy novels, and I had learned that these things, while they might stand beside one another, could never be combined. There was really no way to put them together, except as mosaic: that is, as a shattering. I learned this whenever I was questioned about my origins, or, as people said with careful emphasis, my ethnic background
—an experience I had, and still have, almost daily. Meeting a new person requires an explanation of who I am, and how I came to exist, so prolonged and elaborate it feels like a fantasy novel. How my mother, a Mennonite of Swiss ancestry from North Dakota, traveled to Somalia as a missionary English teacher. How she met my father, who taught the Somali language to the missionaries, who had grown up herding livestock in the desert. He was raised on meat and milk. His primary school met under a tree. He had memorized the Qur’an. She wore, on her hair, which was coiled into a bun, the traditional Mennonite covering, a soft curve of white netting. The more I tell it, the more implausible it sounds. I wonder about the effects of telling repeatedly, over a lifetime, a story this odd, of having to make an identity out of such a story, and of seeing, again and again, on the faces of listeners, expressions of wonderment: slack mouths, wide eyes, the brief shocked laughter. I think it might make someone feel like a mistake, a cosmic gaffe. It might make a person feel like a sort of traveling theater, exotic and ephemeral, pitching camp in the scrub where the forest meets the road, belonging to no town. It might make you feel like a carnival mask, too gaudy for everyday use. It might make you love such things. You might become a devotee of the bizarre. The tale that provokes a gasp of disbelief might feel like yours. You might become happiest, most at home, with the implausible.
I began to read the story of the Mennonite trek from Russia to Central Asia, and then I began to tell it. I told it everywhere, in airplanes, in cafés, at job interviews, at academic conferences, in churches. Everywhere, it received the same expression of astonishment, the same amazed shake of the head, laced with curiosity or skepticism, that had always greeted my own story. This gave me an obscure and childlike pleasure. I would describe how the Mennonites settled in what was then the Khanate of Khiva, how they were cast up at the edge of the desert on the winds of prophecy, how their village persisted there for fifty years.
Every three days they would go into town to sell their butter, the fruit from the trees they had planted. In the bustling market of Khiva, wearing their dark suits and hats. I see them with their wagons, the local arbas with large spokes. Around them the maze of languages: Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh, Russian.
It’s the contrast, the incongruity, that delights. 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. Many of my listeners are Mennonites who have never heard this story, or who think they have never heard it, just as I thought, having forgotten my high school textbook, that I’d never heard it when I picked up The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia. Other listeners are people who have never, or very infrequently, heard of Mennonites. They want to know, first, what a Mennonite is, and I give them my quick summary: Europe, Radical Reformation, adult baptism, pacifism, farmers, missionaries, kinship with the Amish. These bits of information, mixed with a few images gleaned from popular culture, such as Kelly McGillis in her bonnet in the movie Witness, and overlaid with the sound of the word Mennonite itself, which, like Israelite or Luddite, carries a dogmatic, tribal, and cultish aura, is enough to impress on my audience how extremely weird it is that a group of such people should wind up in Uzbekistan. For Uzbekistan, usually even foggier to my listeners than Mennonites, signifies the East, the Silk Road, and Genghis Khan. Uzbekistan is the golden road to Samarkand.
It’s there, somewhere, among the other -stans,
in the cartographic rubble left behind by the Soviet Union.
We are, of course, in the realm of stereotypes. But what’s significant here is the conjunction of clichés. When two sets of images, assumed to be fixed and separate, nonetheless come together, it suggests that a third term is possible. This is the source of light.
A magpie existence
Around the time I first read about the Mennonite trek to Central Asia, only to forget it completely, I also read Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha.
I read this story on high alert. It was my first time reading about a mixed person like myself, and I was ready to seize all the wisdom it divulged. My English teacher said Melanctha
was considered the best story in Three Lives, at which I felt gratified, as if I were somehow responsible for its success, as if I’d personally assisted Melanctha in beating both the Good Anna and the Gentle Lena, two dull ladies of German extraction. Melanctha, I noticed, had no defining adjective, only her name—a brownish, pensive, unpronounceable appellation, which seemed to presage great trials in her future. And in fact, though her subtitle, Each One as She May,
sounded promising, Melanctha turned out to be a figure of sorrow. According to my teacher, she represented the tragic mulatto,
or, in this case, the tragic mulatta,
who can never fit into any American society, Black or white, but is doomed to founder between them. Mulatto comes from mule, because mules are sterile. This is a way of saying that mixed people have no future. I worried about this, especially because I felt someone could easily describe me just as Gertrude Stein described Melanctha. I, too, was a graceful, pale yellow, good looking, attractive negress, a little mysterious sometimes in my ways, and always good and pleasant, and always ready to do things for people. Also, I was complex with desire. The end of this paragraph should describe how I’ve changed, but I am still the same.
To say it’s just fiction
is useless; there’s nothing more powerful than a story, especially if one encounters it in an open, impressionable state. Today, I’m aware of the dangers of taking Melanctha as a model, but the thought of her still occasionally gives me a superstitious chill, because she was always seeking rest and quiet, but all she could do was make trouble for herself, flitting from place to place until she died of TB. In Tashkent, I photograph the immense portal of a sixteenth-century madrasa, its terracotta surface inlaid with blue glazed tiles, a cross-stitch pattern rising from a vast expanse of grayish brick that seems designed to represent a desert. Heat boils up from this modern, well-swept wasteland. On the opposite side, in the Muyi Mubarak Museum, named for the Blessed Hair
of the Prophet, my tour group views the world’s oldest Qur’an, written in heavy Kufic script on gazelle skin swollen with age. The Qur’an belonged to the Caliph Uthman, who was stabbed to death while reading it; his blood flecks a page like the shadow of a moth. It was this caliph, Usmon explains, who ordered the verses revealed by the Prophet to be compiled into the Qur’an, instead of just memorized or passed around on pieces of camel bone. Now the huge book, each page as long as my arm, reclines under glass in a climate-controlled sarcophagus imported from Germany. I remember, when I took my first Arabic class, I was enraptured by the thought of a script both ancient and alive. I’d found a form of writing preserved so immaculately and so long that a literate person today can read poetry written down in the eighth century. Try reading English poetry from the eighth century sometime. I had tried this in an Anglo-Saxon class, and it was brutal. It’s worth noting that I did not need to take an Anglo-Saxon class, as I was majoring in Swahili. I didn’t need to take an Arabic class, either, but in the end it didn’t much matter, because during a study abroad program, I ran across an old college boyfriend in Zanzibar, married him a few months later, quit my PhD program, and moved to South Sudan.
A magpie existence. Never in the same place for more than five years—I managed that stretch in New Jersey, as a child. The decision to teach Swahili, no, Arabic, no, English, no, Arabic after all, but then no, English. The career as a scholar, or else a novelist. Can’t I do both at once? Of course, do as many things as you like—but you’ll do them badly. So I tell myself in my more dejected moments, for example while sewing up the arm of a couch from which my husband has extracted a dead mouse. The mouse got into the couch and died, it rotted there for days, and instead of throwing the couch away once our son had located the tiny corpse, we cut open the arm, replaced the foam, and scrubbed the fabric, hiding the whole process from our sensitive, animal-loving daughter. Repairing the arm of this shabby, mouse-colored, bargain-basement couch, purchased from one of those ill-lit dens where each stick of remaindered furniture mourns the fall of its tribe, I can’t help reflecting that people who’ve been raised in a single tradition may be predisposed toward a stable and organized life. I know some of these people, cousins on both sides of my family, and it seems to me that they are not plagued by mice, fruit flies, or poison ivy, that their days have a regular rhythm, structured around the church or mosque, and that their basement pumps don’t mysteriously shoot out more water than any other house on the street. These people have solid careers, because each of them has selected just one. They keep track of crucial meetings at their children’s schools, they know when it’s picture day, they remember when to turn in the box tops, they have actually taken the trouble to collect the box tops, while we lumber after the school bus, waving forgotten backpacks and yelling. My husband is Swiss-American, the grandson of Mennonite missionaries, raised in Nairobi, multilingual, a total rootless cosmopolitan. We’re both secular Mennonites, but he’s a staunch atheist, while I, in accordance with my magpie disposition, pick and choose: I go to church every Sunday, I love the music, I sing, I drift, I take notes on the church bulletin, I lose myself, I write. Our children are being raised with no religious tradition to speak of, but sometimes we test them at dinner; suddenly we’re scared they’ll be cultural nitwits. Hey, we demand, what’s the story of Samson? Can anybody tell me the story of Joseph and his brothers? This, not for religious reasons, but so they’ll be able to understand Western literature. We’ve taken such care not to oppress them with a sense of identity, we don’t know who they’ll be. When a friend asked my ten-year-old daughter what race she was, my daughter said, I’m a fruit pie.
Once, the Arabic language seemed to promise me a certain stability: I thought I’d spend my life immersed in the splendor of its grammar, in a labyrinth of literature extensive enough to satisfy even me. If I’d really concentrated on Arabic for all these years, what skills I’d possess! But I can’t read the block-like script of the Caliph Uthman’s Qur’an, I can only pick out a few letters, I’m not even sure about all of those, I shouldn’t be here, I should be home, something always goes wrong when I’m away, I communicate poorly, I mix up dates, when I went to that academic conference the kids missed a birthday party, we’d bought a present, I cried on the train, if I’m going to travel it should at least be for reasons related to my career, but a photograph caught my eye and here I am. Here I am, peering at words so precious they were passed from hand to hand, repeated until their shapes were set in the mind like jewels, held close in the body before the book. Words my father knew by heart. And that feathery stain, the print of blood.
It’s the mental disorderliness that worries me most of all. My suitcase crammed with notes. When I first began to read about Claas Epp Jr., the preacher who led the Mennonites into Central Asia, I was fascinated by his prophecies, but even more by his singleness of purpose. This was a man who knew what he had to do. His firmness exerted a power over others. He’d ride up and down the Mennonite farms of southern Russia, handing out copies of his treatise The Unsealed Prophecy of the Prophet Daniel and the Meaning of the Revelation of Jesus Christ.