If you only read one book about Central Asia…
How many of you have had the pleasure of trying to convey a very basic understanding of Central Asia to a friend or acquaintance with no prior knowledge about the region? (”Yes, they are Muslims, no, they aren’t Arabs, etc.”) For those of you living in Central Asia, the answer is probably not a whole lot. But for outsiders like me, the reality is that many people have at best heard of Borat, or “some crazy guy” in Turkmenistan.
Given that most non-specialists aren’t going to invest a huge amount of time into a dense scholarly text, what is the best read to most efficiently and entertainingly gain an appreciation of Central Asia? I recently picked up Monica Whitlock’s Land Beyond the River to assess its purported merits for just that purpose.
The short answer is that it fits the bill. Monica Whitlock is a journalist, and as such, it is better written (and more engaging) than academic texts. Whitlock follows several historical figures from present-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century.
By tracing the Islamic scholar Hindustani, the intellectual Sadr-e Zia, and their descendants over the past century, Whitlock touches upon all of the century’s crucial historical events, focusing in greatest depth on the decade and a half since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Along the way, she brings events from secondary sources to life and contributes a lot of new information to the table from original reporting as well.
Though her treatment is relatively brief, I particularly enjoyed her depiction of the final days of the Bukharan Emirate through the eyes of Sadr-e Zia. Imprisoned by Amir Alim Khan for his intellectual pursuits (after the Amir threw his lot in with the Ulama), Zia spent three years from 1917-1920 in prison. He returned to a broken shell of Bukhara under siege by the Red Army, the architectural devastation presaging the dramatic lifestyle changes to come.
Whitlock also has some interesting information in the book about Central Asians in World War II, a topic about which there is practically nothing published. She follows the lives of ordinary Central Asians, initially sent to play support roles in the war — like digging trenches and cooking — but later, after the Soviets had taken considerable losses, sent to fight as well.
Other highlights — to name a few — include a history of the basmachis, a rather illuminating treatment of Tajikistan’s civil war, a skeptical introduction to Karimov’s war on extremism,
The lack of almost any information on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, or Turkmenistan, and the fact that it has already been slightly dated since it’s publication in 2002, probably damage this book’s credentials as a stand-alone volume of mandatory reading for the initiated, but I am at a loss to suggest a substitute.
Does anyone out in the ’stanosphere have another suggestion for a single entertaining work capable of elevating someone from “Borat is funny” to differentiating between the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, and the Bukharan Emirate?
on September 20th, 2007 at 3:11 am
Here is a link to the website of Iraj Bashiri-one of the more prominent writers about Central Asia:
http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/
I found his work quite interesting.
on September 24th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
The books of the Moris Simashko is best, that I read about Asia.
He is the Kazakhstani writer, he has died some years back in Israel