The White Mosque

In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites travelled 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 traveller of the 1930s, to the first Uzbek photographer.

She explores Central Asian cinema, Christian martyrs, and her own complex upbringing as the daughter of a Swiss Mennonite and a Somali Muslim, raised as a Mennonite of colour in America. On Samatar's secular pilgrimage to both a lost village and a near-forgotten history, she traces the porous, ever-expanding borders of identity.

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?