If I said the name Uzbekistan, could you find it on a map? Most people, I think, would have a hard time. It doesn’t make it into the news much. I bet the same would be true for Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan, let alone Old Turkistan, now a region forming the western part of the People’s Republic of China. What holds all these central Asian countries together? Well, for one thing, the people of these countries and regions are all Turkic: the Uzbeks, the Kazakhs, the Tajiks, the Kyrgyz, the Azeris, the Turkmen, and the Uighurs (of western China.) Their cousins, who live in Turkey, make up the Western-most inhabitants of the old Turkic empire, stretching from Mongolia to the Mediterranean Sea. The other way these places are connected has to do with Christian pilgrimage and missionary journeys.
Christians first ventured among the Turkic peoples starting in the 6th century. Some whole tribes of Turks converted to Christianity over 1000 years ago, but for the most part, Christianity died out among the Turks with the coming of Islam.
Why do I bring all this up? Well, about a week ago, I saw a book in a bookstore, the title of which had caught my eye: The White Mosque. I picked up the book and read the following blurb: A historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, of students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and of the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity. In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. There they built a white-washed church. The locals called it Ak Metchet, the white mosque.
I was intrigued at first glance: nomadic Mennonites in Central Asia!? This was a story I had never heard. The author, Sofia Samatar, herself a Mennonite, the daughter of a Swiss-German Anabaptist mother and a Somali Muslim father, she retraces the trek of these itinerant apocalyptic Christians on their long, hard journey to their own Promised Land. I dove right into the book, and everything she describes, I knew: the harsh desert landscape, the exotic smells, the omnipresence of livestock to daily living, the clash of cultures and ethnicities, and keenly curious hospitality. I knew the Turks she met and fell in love with on her journey; not the same Turks, mind you. You see, hers were Uzbeks and mine were Uighurs.
Thirty-six years ago I travelled to far-western China to teach English among the Turkic people of the Tian Shan (Heavenly) Mountains in Xinjiang Province. I too fell immediately in love with these curiously exotic peoples. Sofia Samatar, in her memoir, is clearly on a trek, not only to discover her shared ancestors in Mennonite faith, but a trek to discover herself. As the book jacket says, “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?” I don’t think I specifically set out on a halfway-around-the-world journey to ‘construct myself,’ but I do surmise that who I am today was shaped in significant ways by that pilgrimage. I walked along the old Silk Road, I spelunked in ancient Buddhist caves, I lavished in remote desert oases, and I met God among strangers whose ways were on the one hand alien and on the other so familiar in their humanness. Oh, and I danced…in those aforementioned oases, on the highest peaks of the Heavenly Mountains, with myriad times myriad stars stupefyingly beautiful, with their cacophonous silence overhead, and in busy market places, the dust rising like twin benevolent desert djinn, dissipating as quickly as any momentary breath of surprise and awe.
Such a journey led me to wonder too in the daily routine of life back here at home. God leads us each and everyone to discover in “weird incidents and startling connections” moments of wonder and awe where we can say, “God is in this place.” What pilgrimage of the ordinary (and extraordinary) is God leading you? Who will you be when your camel train stops at the next oasis? Whom will you give a refreshing drink of water on their journey? With whom will you dance next, when you least expect it? There is an old camp song that goes, “My Lord knows the way through the wilderness. All we have to do is follow.” May God lead us home.
