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?

Originally published on Global Voices.

Q: Bektour, it’s nice to meet you. Can you tell me what Kloop is and how it works?

A: Kloop is a web portal that consists of a news section and a blog platform. At the moment, the news is written by young reporters, mostly high school and university students. The blogs are open for everyone, and we already have 66 blogs registered on the website. One of the most important aims is also to create a citizen journalism service, where everyone can post news to the website through different means (by mobile phone for example). Of course the posts will be moderated by our staff.

Q: You say you are moderating posts - do you do this on people’s personal blogs or just on your news aggregation site?

A: No, we do this in the news section only. We never moderate blogs.

Q: Are you getting funded for your operations?

A: Kloop is sponsored by Hivos, and is created by the Kloop Media Foundation in partnership with the Children’s Media Centre, an experienced youth media organization from Bishkek.

Q: What made you start with this ambitious project?

A: There were two initial founders of Kloop: me and Rinat Tuhvatshin. I suppose it was in the end of 2005 when I started being interested in blogging so much. I thought (and I still think) it is great that every person on the Earth can potentially become a journalist and publish online, and with blog platforms it is really easy to do.

At the same time Rinat Tuhvatshin was inspired by the idea of citizen journalism. We just gathered our ideas together and decided to create a web portal that would contain both of these ideas. (more…)

The new issue of Steppe has been dispatched to subscribers and arrived in my mailbox this morning (Ollie in Berlin received his today, too). Like the first issue, the new one greets the reader with a splendid cover. No surprise here, as it’s one of Christopher Herwig’s magnificent snapshots.

The contents of the second issue are as varied as they were last time around. While I have only managed to flick through the 114 pages over coffee, this promises to be great leisurely reading. Among the highlights:

Hamid Ismailov rereads and rediscovers Aitmatov’s Jamilia thanks to a newly published English translation, David Chioni Moore retells black poet Langston Hughes‘ travels in Central Asia in the 1930s, Matthieu and Mareile Paley visit Kyrgyz nomads in the Afghan Wakhan Corridor, Andrew Lawler discovers Victor Sarianidi’s amazing excavations in Turkmenistan, and Gulnara Abikeyeva presents her top-ten Central Asian films of all times.

You can subscribe to Steppe here. Back issues are also available for sale I think, just drop them a line.

Update: The writers of the magazine read blogs, too. In Josh Abrams’ report about Nauruz, it says:

This [Rakhmon’s recent cultural policies] is raising new fears that the Tajik president is leaning towards the [..] governance style of Turkmenistan’s recently deceased president […]. At least Rakhmon hasn’t asked to be called ‘Tajikbashi the Great’. Yet.