Amy Frykholm: Welcome back to In Search Of, a podcast from The Christian Century, where we go in search of voices and perspectives that inform and expand a life of faith. I'm Amy Frykholm and I'm your host and companion in the search. This week in our search for truth, we’re getting personal. In my opinion, the search for truth is always personal and everything we’ve talked about so far in this season of the podcast has had personal implications for how we behave ethically in the world, for what we believe and how we believe it. But this week, we’re going to look deeply at how the personal intersects with the historical and the sociological.
My guest is Sofia Samatar, and she is a writer of speculative fiction, who undertook a weird and wonderful quest that we are going to explore in this podcast. Sofia is the author of The White Mosque, which is the intersecting story of her own family and the journey of a group of nineteenth-century Mennonites who went to Central Asia to meet Christ at what they thought was the literal end of the world.
“Who am I” meets “who are we” in Sofia’s telling. She tells a history of connections across borders and religions and ethnicities, while she also considers her own Somalian Mennonite heritage. She talks about the foundations of missionary work. She writes about the roots of missionary work in apocalyptic visions, which wasn’t really something that I had understood until I read her book. She talks about the many ways that we enter the stories of others.
One of the things I found fascinating about Sofia’s new book was how she changes the frame of reference so you can see this multilayered story that she’s developing from different angles. It’s fascinating. It’s also sometimes bewildering and we ask more questions in this trek than we answer. And of course, you know that that’s why I love it. Sofia is a person who understands how complicated truth can be when it rubs up against history, imagination, identity, memory, and belief.
AF: Sofia, welcome to In Search Of.
SS: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
AF: So we're talking about your book, The White Mosque, which if anyone who's listening would love to have a fascinating trek through Uzbekistan in search of random, I say random, we'll talk about how random they are, but obscure moments in Mennonite history, obscure at least to me and I'm guessing to most of our listeners. I wonder if you could start by just telling us a little bit about how you became interested in this moment.
SS: Yeah, sure. So this is a story that I became absolutely fascinated by, which eventually led to the book The White Mosque, and it is an historical event, a migration of Mennonites from Southern Russia, so what's now Ukraine to Central Asia, to what's now Uzbekistan, in the 1880s.
And so I grew up Mennonite. I went to a Mennonite High School. I went to a Mennonite college. But it wasn't until, you know, I was through all of that, and in fact had already done a master's degree and was actually working teaching English in South Sudan for a Mennonite organization. It wasn't until that point that I really found out about this history. So that's one of the interesting pieces, to me, is just how somebody can have this totally Mennonite upbringing and education and just miss this interesting little story about these people who followed a very charismatic preacher into Central Asia in the 1880s.
So part of my interest in it was just how curious, how surprising the story was. I received from my father-in-law as a gift, a history by a historian named Fred Belk that was written in the 1970s about this story. And I was really fascinated, but beyond just, you know, how weird the story was and how unusual it seemed to me, there was also the fact that this was an early moment of Mennonite-Muslim interaction, and I come from a family that is Mennonite on one side, on my mother's side, and Muslim on the other. My dad's side of the family are Somali Muslims, so that really kind of grabbed my interest that this is a story of Mennonite-Muslim interaction that I'd never heard of, and I became very curious as to what that was like and how it worked.
AF: So at some point you moved from being interested, being curious, reading the history, reading texts about it, to actually undertaking what, I guess I would call a kind of quest, a geographical search of maybe a slightly different order. And I wonder if you could talk about what compelled you to do that.
SS: Yeah, well I had been feeling, as I was working on the book, and it was a long process. I mean, it was about seven years that I worked on the book and I did a lot of research and I was reading memoirs of people who had been on this journey and so I relied a lot on those to kind of reconstruct this journey and to get a lot of the sort of sensory details of the place. You know, what did it smell like? What was the weather like? What was the food like?
But after a while I started to feel like, you know, what would be great is if I could just go there, even for a very brief time. And I was also wondering, you know, is there anything left? Because the Mennonites who had lived there were deported by the Bolshevik government in 1935. And so I thought, well, is there even anything there? And then I found out that there was a tour available, a Mennonite Heritage Tour of Uzbekistan, that was going to retrace the steps of this group that had migrated from Russia to Central Asia. And I said, I have got to take that trip.
AF: Absolutely. And then on a personal level, what in your mind were you looking for? Besides central details, and I definitely understand that, you know, from my own work and my own writing, how important it is to have a sense of what it tastes like, what it smells like, what it feels like, what the wind is like, what the plants are like, just how important that is as you're trying to engage something that's far away geographically and, and chronologically. But what about on a personal level?
SS: Well, I think, you know, I had personal reasons for wanting to write about this story. I felt that there would be a possibility that this story, because it sort of was proof that Mennonites and Muslims could exist together, I thought there was a possibility that it would make me feel and seem to others less weird, like less of an oddball. Because I had grown up feeling, always, you know, very, very, kind of, strange and a bit of a conundrum to other people, with my mixed ethnic heritage and in a sense my mixed religious heritage as well.
It just kind of boggles people's minds a little bit when they ask me, you know, where are you from? Which happens to me, you know, it still happens to me, I would say definitely weekly. It's like anytime I meet a new person, you know. And when I explain, then, what my background is, people are sometimes pretty flabbergasted, sort of like what, like, how, how is this possible? And so I grew up feeling sort of impossible, feeling like a person who somehow, you know, should not have existed even.
And so I was really interested in exploring this story in order to find a connection which was a historical connection and say, no, it is possible to have these two things together. It is possible for these different elements to coexist. So that was kind of part of what I was looking for as I began working on the project, and I had already been working on it for three years before I made the trip to Uzbekistan with this tour.
And so when I went on the tour, I wouldn't say that that, you know, reason for writing the book was foremost in my mind. I went with a lot of excitement and I went with a very open kind of approach and perspective. I wasn't looking for anything specific. I just wanted to see what would happen.
AF: What was it like to travel with other Mennonites and interact with their reasons to be there?
SS: It was great fun. It was great fun. So most of the people on the trip, almost all… I think there were about three of us who were (out of, we may have been 12 or 14 people) who were not descended from the Mennonites who had made this journey. So the majority, the great majority of the group were going to a place to see where their ancestors had lived.
And in fact, among the memoirs that I used for my own research on the book, is one by a woman named Elizabeth Unruh Schultz. And Elizabeth Unruh, as she was at the time, was a teenager when she went to Central Asia with her family. She was 14 years old when she started the journey and after she had grown up and was quite elderly, she wrote her memoir really just for her family, for her children. It's in libraries, but it's never been sort of officially published. And she was a fascinating character and one of her descendants was on the trip with me. So it was very special to get to interact with those people and to see sort of how meaningful this was to people who knew that this is where their people had lived at one time.
AF: In this season of In Search Of, I've been exploring truth and what it means to be in search of truth, what it means to go in search of truth. At another point in my own writing career I worked on a project about readers of the Left Behind series and I explored how they took fiction, they took something that they believed to be truth about the future, turned it into fiction, and then invested their imaginations in that fiction.
In your book, you explore the fact that these Mennonites who left Ukraine and headed toward Central Asia were inspired by a work of fiction and I would love to hear you reflect a little bit on the relationship that you see or you have come to see in this journey through the relationship between fiction and truth, and also maybe the relationship between fiction and the life of faith.
SS: Yeah. Well, I think in studying and researching the journey that these Mennonites made, one thing that becomes very clear is the necessity of an understanding of the difference between truth and fact, right?
AF: Yes, yes, yes.
SS: And I think that fiction, one of the reasons we go to fiction is for those kind of very deep truths about existence, about life, you know, they are emotional truths. They're about what accurately reflects a lived experience. It's wonderful. It's very important for people to have that experience of reading fiction and going, yeah, I recognize that, or that author has really captured something that I have felt, but I haven't been able to articulate it. It’s very satisfying when you find that somebody can put something into words that you have experienced just as a sort of nebulous and perhaps disturbing or difficult feeling. It's really, really important.
And for the Mennonites, in this group that I looked at, the novel that inspired them was called Das Heimweh, which is, it's a German book. And heimweh can be translated as nostalgia or homesickness. And it is the story of a young man who... it's modeled on Pilgrim's Progress. So it's a religious novel from the 18th century and it's a story of a young man who sort of goes on this journey and he eventually gathers with other Christians in the land of the rising sun. So, in the east, in the desert, close to Samarkand in central Asia, and that is where they meet Christ, that is where Christ is going to return.
And the author of the book, whose name was Stilling, Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, or Stilling, we can call him in English, he intended it purely as allegory. I mean, it really was supposed to be like, you know, a fictionalized version of a spiritual journey. And he was in no way talking about, you know, Christ factually coming back to Central Asia to meet the faithful Christians.
However, this is how many people, and not only this Mennonite group, but other people, ‘cause the book was extremely popular, and many different groups read it, many different Christian groups, and there were lots of people who felt like this book was prophetic. And that was completely not the perspective of the author. In fact, he writes in his autobiography that “my book is a fable and a fiction,” and he writes about, you know, people coming to his house and they're like crying and they're kissing his hands and they're so grateful to him for, you know, having written this prophecy. And he's like, this is just a novel. This is not a prophecy.
And that was part of the difficulty that these Mennonites ran into was that one of their leaders, a man who became the most prominent leader in the group, eventually. His name was Claas Epp Jr. and he was a very dynamic individual by all accounts. He really was the kind of preacher that really gathered people about him. A very, very kind of inspiring character. He was really taken with this novel and in his own book, which is a prophecy, which sets out his belief that Christ will return to meet the faithful in Central Asia. In that book, to prove what he believes is going to happen, he uses the Book of Daniel. He uses the Book of Revelation and he uses Stilling's Heimweh.
So from an outsider's perspective, somebody who's not in that group and in that moment, this is just bizarre. I mean, to me, it is just bizarre, right? And you sort of ask yourself, how did these people, how did they swallow this? How did people believe this? And in fact, many of the, or several of the memoirs that I read are by people who eventually left the group and they're asking themselves the same question. They're sort of like, how did we fall into this?
And I think part of falling into it has to do with a faulty definition or a lack of understanding of what fiction is and what fiction can do. Yes, fiction can give you truth. Yes, it can absolutely reflect a spiritual journey that you experience as completely accurate, but no, it is not factually telling you what is going to happen in the future.
AF: And so it seems like in the broader culture that you're writing about and that we are living in, we often misunderstand these relationships between truth and fact and fiction and what we're doing when we engage in imaginative projects.
SS: Yeah, I think so. And it's something that, you know… there's one point in the book where I'm sort of like, the whole book takes place in Uzbekistan on this trip. And at one point I'm sitting with the group and we're kind of having tea and I'm thinking to myself about this story of what happened to these people, and I'm thinking, oh, how could they possibly, you know, how could they accept this? And then I look up and I look around at me and these other people that are like sitting by the side of a road in Uzbekistan drinking tea, and I'm like, I'm really not in a position to pass judgment on people who do weird things because I am also on a very strange sort of quest for something that, you know, yes, there's a factual aspect to it, but there's also a lot of imagination involved.
AF: Absolutely. And then you have this wonderful line about, “what is any identity but a story that a community has swallowed whole?”
SS: Mm-mm. Yes. Yeah.
AF: And that seems to get at this issue of what are we doing when we tell ourselves these stories? Even if we don't believe them in the sense of, maybe, Claas Epp’s version of belief, they're still shaping us.
SS: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Any identity is a story and those are stories that we need. We are social beings. Identity is something that comes to be in community and in social situations. A person who is totally alone does not have an identity and doesn't need one. Right? You need it because it is how you build community with others and it is how you find common cause with other people. So it's extremely important.
But as I examine in the book, in several different ways and with several different types of identity, there is usually an aspect of it that is made up, like the relationship between identity and fact is very, very shaky.
And yet, identity is extremely important to people and for you to, you know, go to somebody and say, well, no, this isn't your, this identity isn't real and means nothing because you can't prove it or you can't base it on fact. That generally doesn't work. People reject it very strongly and say, no, this is what I identify with. Even to say that I identify with something is a way of saying that it's not a hundred percent necessary. It's not factual. It doesn't have to be that way. I am making the choice to try to claim and to embrace this identity.
AF: How does that work for you with having been raised a Mennonite and gone to Mennonite College, as you said, and high school? How does that work for you in relation to Mennonite identity?
SS: Well, one of the things that I sort of came to in the course of writing the book is how much identity has to do with lived experience, rather than, let's say, you know, your genetics and your DNA. And we are in a moment that is very DNA obsessed because we have, you know, some technological advances that have made it possible for us to, you know, go on ancestry.com or 23andme or whatever it is, and and kind of like find out who we are in this in this new way.
And I think we pay too much attention to it, to be honest. I think that what a DNA test tells you is kind of the least interesting thing about you. It tells you something that you can't do very much with. It's just like, okay, you're this percent this and you're this percent that. You know, shrug, that doesn't really say who you are. You get a lot more about who a person is from knowing, you know, what does that person love? What are that person's favorite things? How did that person grow up? What are the experiences that have shaped this person?
That's where I feel you could get to know someone. You can't get to know anybody from a DNA test. And so for myself, writing this book kind of took me through that process of recognizing actually, like yes, I do have, on my mother's side, so-called Swiss Mennonite ethnic background, but there are all kinds of questions around what that really is and if it's a real thing. And like any identity, if you dig, you find out that it's not completely a real thing, any ethnic identity I should say. But you know.
So that kind of faded into the background for me and became much less important than the experiences of being in community with other Mennonites, whether at my high school, at my college, at my church, on the journey with these other Mennonites retracing the steps of this tour, at Mennonite conferences. All of those many experiences that I've had over my lifetime of interacting with people in these spaces, that's really what makes me Mennonite, more than, say, my mom having these connections to Switzerland.
AF: Right. And you tell really interesting stories in the book about people who just said, no, thank you, I don't want this identity, I don't need it, I'm gonna go invent something else. And those are some really fascinating aspects of the book where people really take off identities like clothing. And we often think that that's not possible in our society. Like you said, at this particular moment anyway, sort of obsessed with where you come from and what your roots are or whatever. But it's fascinating to read in the story. People like Irene Worth, the actress who comes from these Mennonites, from this particular group, but doesn't claim their identity in any way.
SS: Yeah, absolutely. And who became really not recognizable as Mennonite. She was an actress. In fact, a lot of people even forgot that she was American because she had a very cultured British accent that she had kind of learned and developed for herself working on the stage in England for many years.
AF: And that raises an interesting question, which you also play with so much in this book and that I loved, and it is so much my own question so often, which is how you tell the stories of other people. How do you go about the process of entering the stories of others? And I think you ask that question really beautifully. How do you answer it in the end?
SS: I think in the end, the answer to that question is that there is no need for you to enter the stories of others. You are already there. You're already in the stories of others. There's nobody who is living cut off from the rest of humanity. You are already involved. You have so many links that connect you to so many different people all over the world.
Some of those links you're aware of; some of them you have no idea. I grew up with no clue that there was anything connecting me to Uzbekistan. I had no idea. And you know, then through the research and the writing of this book, I learned that actually there are ties there and quite strong and important ties and ties that are valuable to me. So it's less a question of going into somebody else's story than it is a question of recognizing the links between you and others and discovering what connects you to other people. Everybody's stories are entangled.
AF: Just now as you were talking about that aspect, there was an element, it seems to me, of affection as a form of tie. Would you say that that's true?
SS: Yes. I would, yes, I would. I think this is one of the things that can be sort of unexpected, but is very common about research. Really any kind of research. When you spend time with something, you develop attachments. And you develop affection. And many people, I mean, usually there's some interest that draws somebody to a research subject, but they might not necessarily love it. They might just be like, well, I'm curious about this, or, this is interesting, but it's spending time with it, especially when it takes a lot of years and people are really, you know, maybe every day kind of being with that material or that story, whatever it is that they're researching. It really can become a very, very strong and powerful attachment.
And for me, there's a parallel between that experience of spending time with a research subject and developing affection and care toward the subject of your study. There's a parallel between that and spending time with people and being in community with people, because there you also develop attachments over time, even though, you know, you may not have started caring particularly much about those particular people you may have just, you know, kind of come together because there was something you wanted to do together. But spending time creates links, creates attachments.
AF: What's an example of that for you, maybe in the context of this book, but it wouldn't necessarily have to be in the context of this book, where you fell in love with something or you came to care about something that surprised you?
SS: I would say a big example of that is the Uzbek photographer Hudaibergen Divanov who became a subject of study for me because he had a link to the Mennonites in Central Asia. There was a photographer on the trip. His name was Wilhelm Penner, and he was one of the Mennonites and he had a camera. And this is very early. I mean, it was, it was kind of 1880 to 1884 that these people were making this journey into Central Asia. So the camera was, you know, it was around, but it had not had a very long existence. And there was a young, a boy really, he was 12 years old when they met, an Uzbek boy, and he eventually became this photographer Hudaibergen Divanov and is known as the father of Uzbek Photography.
So when I found that story I thought “oh!” Like I said in the beginning, it’s like, oh that’s interesting, that’s super interesting. I need to follow this up. Who was this guy, and what was his journey and what was his path and what eventually happened to this photographer? And I became just absolutely taken with his story.
It's a fascinating story. He's the first indigenous photographer and filmmaker in Central Asia. He took beautiful photographs. He also, from about 1906 when he had gone on a trip to Paris and brought back a video camera, an early film camera.
AF: It's a really wonderful image and it is a really fascinating aspect of the book just to watch you become fascinated. This is one of the things I love about the book is the way that you invite us to become fascinated along with you and then travel in this direction, which feels a little bit like a rabbit trail, but then leads us right back into the questions that we continually are exploring throughout the book.
I did wanna talk about missionaries because missionaries, so these Mennonites who traveled to Uzbekistan were not missionaries. They were on their own prophetic journey. But your own history is rooted in, you call it the missionary effect, and in missionary activity of different kinds. And I think the listeners of this podcast anyway would be fascinated to hear you talk a little bit about how missionary activity has influenced your own perception of the world and where you have come with it.
SS: Yeah. So I come from a family that is very much rooted in mission work. I mean this is how my parents met, right? My mother went to Somalia as an English teacher with Eastern Mennonite missions and my father was working as a Somali teacher for the Mennonite missionaries. And so that's actually how they met. So, you know, without that kind of institutional history, I don't exist. So it's very, very central to my family. My husband also, you know, comes from a couple generations of Mennonite missionaries in East Africa. So that's a big part of our story.
And I think, you know, in the book, when I talk about the missionary effect, what I'm writing about is how the dynamic of servanthood, right, of wanting to be a servant and serve others, which sounds, you know, very good and certainly has some wonderful aspects, how it can also become wrapped up in, more negative narratives of who is in a position to give and what puts people in a position to give and, well, how come these people, you know, are able to give because they have this wealth and these other people are receiving because they don't have anything. What are the reasons for that?
And so there are all kinds of stories that start to be, maybe not even told, but kind of imbibed or understood in an almost subconscious way about, well, I don't know, maybe God likes these people better and that's why they have all the things. Or maybe, you know, maybe these people just know how to manage. Maybe these people are better at living, or are more intelligent, or are, you know, there are all kinds of stories that can come in there that are destructive to our ability to create community across borders.
And so one of the things that I think is very important about the story of these Mennonites in Central Asia for Mennonites is that these people were in no position to give anything. They were in a desperate situation. They were very vulnerable. They were beggars. They had to beg local people for a place to stay, especially on the journey, which, you know, is the two year journey to get at that time from southern Russia into where they eventually settled.
And they needed people and they found people. They found wonderful, generous hosts among local Muslims who invited them, who fed them, who guided them across the desert, who invited them to take shelter in their villages during the winter, which was very harsh. And who even invited several, you know, Mennonite families, in one village, in particular were invited to stay in the mosque and the group as a whole was invited to use the mosque for their church services on Sundays because the people in the village said, well, you know, we're using it on Friday, but we're not really doing that much with it on Sunday. If you wanna have, you know, your church service in this mosque, in this building go right ahead. There's a wonderful kind of openness and kindness and warmth that these Mennonites met when they were in very desperate circumstances in this part of the world. And I think that, you know, for Mennonites in North America today, that's a great story to meditate on and to think about and to cultivate gratitude for.
AF: Do you think that these Mennonites who took this journey found what they were looking for?
SS: That's a good question. I mean, you know, the first question has to be no, because they were looking for, I mean, they had been assured that Christ was coming to meet them on March 8th, 1889. They had, I mean, this preacher had calculated it down to the day. And so of course this was an absolutely massive disappointment, and it meant that they had to completely rethink their lives because they had not planned to live there. They had planned, they thought the world was ending, right? They weren't... So they had no intention...
AF: They weren't trying to set up a society.
SS: No! They had no intention of staying there for any length of time, and so this required a massive kind of rethinking of their lives and their cosmos. That must have been extremely difficult, and it's one of the things I find very admirable about them is that they managed to sort of reevaluate and reenvision their whole life in that region.
Did they find what they were looking for? Probably not, not many of us do, but we find other things. And I think that, you know, what they eventually found was a home. A home that was theirs for 50 years.
AF: And what do you think that the pilgrims on your pilgrimage found?
SS: I would say that in talking with other people who were in my group of North Americans on this journey, one thing that was really, that really struck us and came up again and again in our conversations was this hospitality that we were treated to in Uzbekistan. The kindness of our hosts from our tour guides to an Uzbek historian who came with us on the trip and gave us, you know, the benefit of his expertise and his many stories and his great knowledge about the Mennonites in Central Asia. This historian who was with us is the son of a researcher who's writing a history of the Mennonites of Central Asia in Russian.
So, yeah, it really impressed us, both that they were so kind and open to us, and also that they have taken such care, that local people in Uzbekistan have taken such care with this story. There is a Mennonite museum in Khiva, in this city, in Uzbekistan, where an Uzbek museum team of archivists and researchers have put together a collection that people can go to and can visit in order to preserve the history of this little Mennonite village that existed there for 50 years. It's a really fantastic act of generosity.
AF: And what do you think you'll carry forward from this experience and then from having undertaken this incredible project of trying to write about it with all of these different intertwining histories and meanings and searches. What do you think you will carry forward?
SS: Well, I mentioned earlier that I started, when I was researching this story, that I started from the point of wanting to find a connection that would make me feel not so weird, right? That I started by thinking, you know, if I can really figure out, you know, what happened in this place, then I will have this example of a kind of combined Mennonite-Muslim life that is not impossible. But really at the end of the day, what I found was not that I am less weird, but that everybody is much weirder than I thought. There is nobody who is not crisscrossed by all of these different varieties of connection and experience.
So I definitely felt at the end, not that I mean, just that, that, you know, my own weirdness becomes just much less important to me, or it kind of dissolves into the general strangeness of what it is to be a human being.
AF: Hmm. That's wonderful. Do you happen to have a copy of your book with you there?
SS: I do, yeah.
AF: Would you read the last paragraph?
SS: Oh, sure.
Okay: “Now the plane gathers speed. The windows shutter, and we are lifting into blue. As always, my hands tighten slightly on the arms of my airplane seat. The plane peels away from the city of Tashkent reaching toward Istanbul through a bright density like a lake, like the turquoise dome of a summer kind mosque, like the ceiling of the summer palace in Khiva, where Mennonite artists painted out of the depths of their thirst, their longing, their inexhaustible homeache, a landscape from their history or perhaps their imaginations rendered in blunt strokes of unmixed color that still glaze the air of that empty hall. A scene of a river, a windmill, a sky above all, a land as green as life, exhaling the air of the lost, the last, the past, the future. Home.”
AF: Thank you.
SS: You're so welcome.
AF: And thank you, listeners, for joining us today for this episode of In Search Of. If you have ideas of scholars, projects, perspectives that you’d like to hear on this podcast, please let me know. You can email me at insearchof@christiancentury.org. Also, please go to our website, christiancentury.org/insearchof to sign up for our newsletter, to connect with us, to find the show notes for this episode and for all the episodes of In Search Of. Please follow this podcast and rate it on your favorite podcast app. This has been a production of The Christian Century, a progressive, thoughtful, independent magazine for today. We’ll see you next week. Until then, happy searching.