#the white mosque

[heavenlyyshecomes]

On the crest of a hill, the third voice enters: a voice that demonstrates, with elegant precision, the primacy of speech over writing. Johann Drake is trying to swallow a Bible. Take it, and eat it up. Eating a book is a nonliterate response to text. Ingested and digested, the words become part of the speaker, who is then endowed with the spirit of prophecy. The image echoes the sacrament of communion, in which participants ingest the body of Christ, the Word made flesh. The vision of eating a book evokes a transcendent relationship with language, in which one is not a speaker but an instrument. The words of the Book flow from one’s mouth. Pure praise, pure expression, like lark song. As the old hymn puts it, “How can I keep from singing?”

—Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque: A Memoir

[thelovelygods]

Could we with ink the ocean fill And were the skies of parchment made Were every stalk on earth a quill And every man a scribe by trade To write the love Of God above Would drain the ocean dry Nor could the scroll Contain the whole Though stretched from sky to sky.

Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque

[rhetoricandlogic]

The White Mosque - A Memoir - Sofia Samatar

RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 2022 An exploration of religious and cultural identity through the lens of an ill-fated pilgrimage into Central Asia in the late 19th century. In the 1880s, a group of German-speaking Mennonites known as the Bride Community followed the charismatic visionary Claas Epp on a harrowing journey into pre-Soviet Uzbekistan, where Epp predicted Christ would return. Despite losing many followers to death or disillusionment, the core group reached the Muslim khanate of Khiva and founded the Christian community known as Ak Metchet—the White Mosque—a village that survived 50 years before its dissolution by the Bolsheviks. Embarking on a Mennonite heritage tour through Uzbekistan, Samatar—fantasy novelist, professor of African and Arabic literature, and daughter of Swiss Mennonite and Somali Muslim parents—chronicles her journey through the century-old footsteps of the Bride Community in an attempt to see this beautiful, alien region through their eyes. In addition to the community’s path, the author traces their intersections with the Muslim people of the region, whose generosity carried the Christian pilgrims to their destination.

Samatar interweaves this historical narrative with her own personal history and a litany of religious, literary, and philosophical texts, stitching together a multifaceted account of faith, identity, and acceptance. “It’s the contrast, the incongruity, that delights,” she writes. “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. Rendered in the author’s vivid prose, Uzbekistan—a place unknown to most Western readers—feels like a fantastic land of deep history, stunning architecture, and uniquely diverse culture. The author devotes the same careful attention to Mennonite theology and society, depicting the complicated international religious and ethnic community with a caring but critical eye. Reaching beyond all state and religious boundaries, Samatar is “always saying we,” incorporating more and more of humanity into a growing inner circle.

Complex and gorgeously written, this memoir invites readers on a journey to the ever expanding borders of human compassion.

[zegalba]

Michele Lamy at the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi (2006)

[sir20]

A door at the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, by sir20

[heartnosekid]

hobopeeba on ig

[ecoharbor]

📍Üsküdar, Istanbul, Turkey 🇹🇷

[cavalierzee]

Nuking Gaza

Gaza is 25 miles long and 6 miles wide.

It is home to 1 million catastrophically traumatised children.

They have no water or food.

Israel’s dropped explosives on them equal to 1.5 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

In 3 weeks.

Do you get the enormity of the crime we are witnessing yet?

(Matt Kennard)

[lumina-d]

🏛️ symmetry 🕌

Mosque Djamaa el Djazaïr -Algeria

[downfalldestiny]

Algeria Sunsets 🌇 !.

[heavenlyyshecomes]

Lois pauses to note how rare Elizabeth’s memoir is, this woman’s writing. “Didn’t any of the women on the trek keep diaries?” she asks. Nobody knows, so Lois answers the question herself: “Maybe they did, but people didn’t think they were important, so they didn’t save them.” I think of all the women who lay in the street at Ak Metchet, who climbed on the cars, who carried their children onto the cars. Such women generally leave few records. Their letters, if preserved, are considered to have little meaning outside the family. These women leave behind quilts, embroidery, recipes, planting schedules. Perhaps a knack for languages. The shape of an elbow or a nose. Their legacy consists of objects and children. To seek these women, who treated their bodies so recklessly, is to be stuck with the body. Stuck with the body, or gifted with the body. Maybe this is why, among the many extant pages of men’s writing, Elizabeth Unruh’s memoir glows with a near-unbearable intensity, a radiance so strong it’s almost black. Precious Elizabeth! The only one to tell us of the bats in the ancient prison of Samarkand, the giant birds in the mountains of Bukhara, the caves where colored stones lay strewn like gems. The only one who tried to record the name of every fruit. As the sole woman to take her place in the history of the Great Trek, she makes me long for the lost stories of women, the diaries that might have recorded more of what I most want to know, and what Elizabeth captures best: the texture of experience.

—Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque: A Memoir

[thelovelygods]

In the classical Arabic tradition, poetry is known as sihr halal, lawful magic—an oxymoron, as magic is by nature unlawful, forbidden.

Sofia Samatar, The White Mosque

[viagginterstellari]

Hassan II Mosque, interior - Casablanca, 2012

[drsonnet]

Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, [Mosque, Cairo, Egypt], 1843, Daguerreotype, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie, Réserve EG2- 701., LL/62078

[sir20]

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, Abu Dhabi by sir20

[mothmiso]

Bou Inania Madrasa (2) (3) (4) by Phil Gyford