I ended up skimming parts of this book because I got a bit impatient, but I think that's just the mood I was in. This book is best read when you are in the mood to take your time and be reflective, instead of trying to read as much of it as possible on a plane.

The book relates several journeys. The first chronologically is that of a group of Mennonites who left their home in the Ukraine and went east until they reached Uzbekistan. They wanted to go further but were not permitted. These people were following a messianic "prophet" who told them that Jesus would return, just a few years after they arrived, to the place along the Silk Road where they would await his coming.

This did not happen. While the Mennonites learned to live alongside their Muslim neighbors, the Communists were not as kind and the colony was dispersed in the 1930's, with most people being sent to Siberia.

The latest journey is that of Samatar herself, who joins a group of Mennonites (mostly with a family tie to those past colonists) who wish to retrace the route and learn more about their ancestors. As Samatar is the daughter of a Swiss-Mennonite and a Somali-Muslim, her experiences as a member of the community are unusual and she considers many topics on her trip, including being "other" no matter where you are, the transformative nature of travel, what our expectations can blind us to, how so often people are succored along their way by those who are not like them.

Samatar also looks a bit further into the history of the Muslim local administrators who shaped the Mennonites' home in Uzbekistan, relates the travels of a lone European woman who dared to bike the road, and of course her own history and upbringing and how that has shaped her.

There are a lot of primary sources used in this book: journals of the original colonists, photographs of the colony and its surroundings. Samatar describes the towns that her tour visits and the people that the tour meets.

My ancestors were also colonists of the Ukraine who left (for the USA instead of the East) and the way of leaving one's home, never to return, and to make a new life for oneself and family is one that most Americans have in their past. I don't think that my ancestors were expecting the end of the world but they were expecting that the new Communist regime would not be welcoming to those that it perceived as outsiders. I've seen books of letters from those who did not immigrate and something of the fates that befell them after the Communists came in to their villages. I likely would not exist if my family hadn't emigrated. So I think it's very interesting how the decisions of one's forbearers affects the future of the family, often in ways never dreamt of.

This sort of meditation is encouraged by the book. If you aren't in the mood for that, it might not be the time for you to read it. Unfortunately, I think it didn't hit me the right way with how I was reading at the time. But I think it's well worth reading and I'd be surprised if you don't find something to relate to in it.

I was drawn to this book because I knew nothing about the history of Mennonites in Uzbekistan and thought that sounded fascinating. While this book was about that, it was also about so much more. At first I was a little thrown off by the descriptive writing, and maybe thought it was a bit too much. But it made sense when I learned that the author is a poet, and as the book went on I grew to really appreciate it and enjoy being inside Samatar's head.

I will read anything Sofia Samatar writes! I love her style, the way she crafts her prose. This is the first non-fiction I've read by her (I've read short stories) but I was captivated from the start. Thank you for the advance copy!

What a unique story. I Have never ran across a woman with Mennonite-Muslim ancestry.
It’s a one if a kind memoir, interlaced with a lot of religious history that I skimmed. I was interested in the author’s story and her heritage. I also found her descriptions of her travel to Uzbekistan very interesting.

Starting with the trek of a group of Mennonites from Russia to Central Asia in the 1880s, Samatar creates a wonderful mosaic of a book. She begins by describing how they fled military service and arrived in Uzbekistan to await the end times. Samatar, a Mennonite herself, goes on a tour of Uzbekistan and uses this as a springboard to discuss a cornucopia of topics. She ranges from Central Asian history, film, and photography, to the multicultural nature of the Mennonite church, to her own past and quest for identity as the daughter of a Swiss Mennonite and Somali Muslim. No need to be a Mennonite to enjoy this; Samatar presents a thought-provoking book on issues of universal significance.

Fascinating look at a lost community mixed with memoir. It's a bit of a mish mash blending history with theology. I learned quite a bit about Uzbekistan and the Mennonites, a place and a religion that were both alien to me. Fair warning that this may seem overwritten at times but it's a good read. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC.

Thank you to Netgalley and Catapult for providing me with an eARC of this book, however, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

This is a hard review for me. It's not that I didn't enjoy reading this book, I did, but I found myself unable to concentrate on it for long lengths of time. There was something so soothing about the writing style that it would always lull me to sleep after a few pages so it took me awhile to finish. It's in a stream of conscious, with beautiful descriptions and historical facts sprinkled in. I can respect this writing style, but it doesn't work for me when I'm trying to read full books.

Writing style aside, the subject matter of this book was extremely interesting. I didn't know anything about the Mennonites who had ventured into Uzbekistan. Honestly, I don't really know anything about Uzbekistan either. I learned a lot, not only about the Mennonites, but also about Uzbekistan, following Samatar on journey. It's a great mixture of historical non-fiction and travel memoir.

Overall, I would recommend this for fans of travel memoirs, readers interested in both Mennonites and Uzbekistan, and lovers of beautiful prose. Because this such a niche topic, I'm unsure of how much it will appeal to the masses, but I would recommend readers giving it a chance. Samatar will suck you in and take you on a pretty magical journey.

This book took me to fascinating places. It is structured around Samatar's participation in a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan tracing the history of a failed band of Mennonite pilgrims, and it is a deeply layered interrogation of travel, hybrid identities, including Samatar's own, and the missionary mindset. It's also a beautifully written book, full of compassion for the contemporary and historical people met along the way, with a gift for describing light and presence whether it's glimpsed through the windows of the tour bus, captured in a historical Mennonite manuscript or captured in an early photograph. It is one of the best books I've read this year.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read an earc.

The White Mosque is an outstanding and wide-ranging memoir about the curiousness of religion and religious difference, the desire for community, and the unexpected relationships that come out of travel and history and time to think while riding a tour bus across a desert. Samatar writes in an open, self-questioning, thoughtful way. She takes care in writing about both her disappointments and her joy as she travels; in creating canny portraits of her fellow-travelers; and in relating the history of the places she visits. I can't wait to read more of her work. Highly recommended.

I requested this memoir based on its intriguing description. But, I did not finish this one. The memoir itself flows in a stream of conscience style filled with purple prose and adjective-filled observations abruptly interrupted with journalist historical facts. I can easily see how some readers would embrace the author’s style, but it did not work for me.

The White Mosque was a super interesting non-fiction read about Mennonites in Uzbekistan. The author also delves into issues of race, religion, connection with home country, etc. It was very relevant for today's climate, but also very interesting about a group I had no idea about!

Mennonites? In Uzbekistan? The premise of this book caught me instantly, and I was rewarded for my curiosity. Samatar's white mosque in The White Mosque is a Mennonite church located in the heart of a Muslim community in Central Asia. Perhaps this reveals a biased tendency on my part; the juxtaposition of the Mennonites in Central Asia suggests an irresistible, exotic historical account.

That -- in part -- is what Samatar delivers, but the memoir is more than that. The White Mosque is also about the embodiment of a Christian/Muslim, Foreign/Autochthon juxtaposition within Samatar via their experience of living as a Somali-German American Mennonite, a second-generation immigrant in a largely White American community. In one sense, Samatar is a "white mosque" in her academic and personal worlds, as unique and unusual as a pilgrimage of German-speaking Mennonites trekking into Uzbekistan.

The White Mosque begins and ends with Samatar's touristic, scholarly pilgrimage to Uzbekistan in search of these European Mennonites who traversed that path over a century ago. It is a guided tour. Mennonites, non-Mennonites, tourists, and heritage-seekers accompany Samatar; their observations contribute to this memoir and help shape Samatar's embodied experience of being a Mennonite of color. The White Mosque also treks back in time, not only through this unique tangent of 19th century Mennonite history, but into Samatar's past as a child of a Somali father and a German-American mother and as a graduate student. The memoir flickers to the present too: Samatar as an accomplished researcher in pursuit of scholarship.

Indeed, what The White Mosque delivers to the reader is less a historical account, and more a commentary on the present moment, a moment in which cultural-ethnic-religious-racial juxtapositions are worth examination because of the violent divisions in our world along those same lines. This memoir suggests that a closer, more nuanced examination of such transcultural connections, persons, histories, and experiences is worthwhile because they are not as anomalous as they might initially seem.

Midway through reading it, The White Mosque forced me to reconsider why I was attracted to the premise of this book: Were the Mennonites so unusual in their pilgrimage? Is the idea of a European Christian sect in Central Asia such an exotic thing? Haven't such transcultural phenomena occurred all throughout history? .... Mmm. Well-played, well-played. As a historian, a humanist, and an anthropologist, I know that no human phenomenon should be surprising; we have been criss-crossing, mixing, transgressive and transcultured throughout our history. But The White Mosque makes that point poignant, brings it to the forefront cleverly and gently through personal memory, subjective experience, and beautiful prose.

For that reason alone The White Mosque is worth reading.

In “The White Mosque,” author Sofia Samatar details the tour that she took through Uzbekistan that follows the path of a Mennonite band that journeyed from Russian into Central Asia and ended up settling there for several decades. From this journey, she spins off and explores a curiously rich array of different subjects.

I personally found myself deeply absorbed in her examination and musings of everything Mennonite-related beyond the aforementioned Central Asian settler group. The subjects explored here were incredibly varied on their own, and included early Mennonite martyrs, mission work, and the debate over whether being Mennonite means adhering to a particular faith, or whether there’s a (specially European) racial component - the latter being an increasingly difficult stance in a religious movement where adherents in Africa, Asia and Central America are now by far and away the majority. However, if everything that grabbed my attention in particular doesn’t sound so intriguing, I can promise other readers that there’s going to be something in here that will pique their interest, whether it’s Samatar’s numerous discussions that touch on the nature of identity, or the several sections of the book that are specifically devoted to Central Asian films.

Brimming with both bountiful information on little-known subjects and plenty of thought-provoking reflections from its author, “The White Mosque” is a gorgeously complex travelogue.