Thursday, July 24, 2025
One of my top priorities for this summer was to spend a lot of time sitting on my front porch. Yes, I know--very ambitious.
Lately I've been reading Will Ferguson's Hokkaido Highway Blues, a travelogue recounting Ferguson's hitchhiking travels across Japan. I enjoyed it immensely.
Friday, October 16, 2020
As I've been writing a biography in recent years, I also read a lot of biographies. Many of these are more scholarly or academic-type volumes, but a lot have been trade-press works of varying quality. Especially with regard the latter, I pay particular attention to the writing and what you might call the "storytelling" aspect of the book. I pick biographies mainly based upon how interesting I find the subject, regardless of how closely connected they might be to my interests in the Turkic-Russian borderlands. This year I've read bios of Charles Schultz, Vladimir Mayakovsky, L. Frank Baum, Jim Henson, and Rudolph Nureyev, to name just a few.
For the past couple of weeks I've been reading David Halberstam's book on Michael Jordan, which was first published over 20 years ago. I love Halberstam's writing, and have read probably eight or nine of his books over the years. Breaks of the Game is, of course, a classic, but others like War in a Time of Peace and The Best and the Brightest are also really impressive.
I'm not trying to write the kind of book that Halberstam would have written. As an academic and scholar, I've received too much training on specific areas of the world and developments in modern history to do that. Trying to say something bigger and important about an era, as opposed to talking about a single individual in a vacuum--or simply recounting the details of a person's life--will usually slow down a narrative to a certain extent. But still, it's so inspiring to read the books of such a beautiful writer. I actually shed a few tears when I got to the very end of Playing for Keeps this morning.
One last thing--I couldn't help but notice how much the much-ballyhooed 10-part Michael Jordan document released this summer picks up on so many threads from Halberstam's book. I really liked the documentary, and it's one of the reasons why I ended up finally buying this book a few months ago. But still--I kind of think Halberstam should have gotten some credit here. Obviously, if different creative types are working on the same subject, there's bound to be a lot of overlap. But the insights of the documentary--I see a lot of them in Halberstam from more than 20 years back.
David Halberstam died 13 years ago in a traffic accident at the age of 73. He had published 20 books, of which Playing for Keeps was one of his last. What a career that guy had. I wonder if anyone's ever considered writing a biography of him.
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Meanwhile in the Eurasian borderlands, the world continues to turn. Stories from the region which caught my eye this week include:
Friday, June 16, 2017
EILEEN KANE. Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 241. $35.00.
Eileen Kane’s Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca traces what Kane describes as “the story of how Russia became patron of the hajj” (20). The book is primarily concerned with highlighting Russia’s “sponsorship” of the Muslim hajj to Mecca. To her credit, Kane makes a provocative argument in this volume, but the events she relates in support of this view tend to be more anecdotal than systematic. Chapters 1 and 2 look at the activities of a smallish number of tsarist bureaucrats working in Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, their assistance to Muslim pilgrims, and their proposals for legalizing the hajj, which was prohibited outright by Russian authorities for much of the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 discusses the decision by state officials in Russia to allow two steamship companies to transport pilgrims to the Ottoman Empire. Chapter 4 is devoted mainly to outlining the undertakings of one Said Gani Saidazimbaev, who provided false credentials to tsarist officials in his efforts to win their support for organizing the transportation of Muslim pilgrims. Chapter 5 describes the Soviet government’s cooperation in allowing foreign Muslims (but not Soviet ones) to transit across the USSR en route to Mecca.
Source-wise, Kane employs mainly Russian imperial archival sources from St. Petersburg, Tbilisi, and the Foreign Ministry that showcase instances in which tsarist officials sought to work with, rather than persecute or harass, Muslim pilgrims. These materials are useful, but they would have been much more effective had they been discussed alongside the far larger set of documents in these same archives that demonstrate that Russian officials usually sought to prevent the hajj, rather than sponsor it. Meanwhile, Kane’s use of Ottoman materials seems to hold mainly symbolic value. She cites, by my count, a total of four documents from the enormous holdings of the Ottoman archives relating to Muslim pilgrims and Russia, raising the question of what, if anything, a professionally trained historian could expect to learn from such a tiny sample size. In any event, Kane does very little with the Ottoman materials, describing their contents in only general terms.
Kane could have made up for the deficiencies on the Ottoman side of this study through closer engagement with Ottoman scholars whose work relates directly to Muslim cross-border travel between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman historian Lale Can, for example, draws heavily from the Ottoman archives to look at the activities of Muslim pilgrims from Russia, but her work receives only perfunctory attention in this volume. Kane also appears unaware that the diplomatic assistance to Muslim pilgrims that was offered by tsarist Foreign Ministry officials was in fact provided to virtually any Russian Muslim residing in or traveling through the Ottoman Empire, whether or not they were on a pilgrimage. Whereas Kane sees this diplomatic assistance—which makes up much of the source material and arguments in the book’s first two chapters—as evidence that Russia was “asserting itself as patron and protector of hajj pilgrims” (36), better engagement with the historiography surrounding Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire would have indicated that this assistance had little or nothing to do specifically with their status as hajjis.
For this reason and others, the overall argument of this book—that the Russian government was a hajj “sponsor”—does not correspond well with the relevant source material available in either the Russian or the Ottoman archives, and thus feels rather forced. Tsarist statesmen and bureaucrats viewed the hajj in a variety of ways, but the great majority of these officials—and their policies relating to the hajj—were focused upon either prohibiting or limiting Muslim pilgrimage across borders. While Kane at times appears ready to acknowledge this fact in the form of occasional caveats and asides, too much time and energy is spent trying to divert the reader’s attention away from what seems like a rather obvious point: Russia was by no means a “protector” of the hajj, and the few tsarist officials seeking to engage the pilgrimage more proactively—who themselves often held a personal financial stake in these proposals—were in most cases either ignored or shouted down.
Once Kane gets beyond the introduction and the book’s first two chapters and begins examining the handful of modest proposals that envisioned creating officially sanctioned hajj routes, Russian Hajj becomes more complex and interesting. Particularly in chapters 3 and 4, it is possible to catch glimpses of what this book could have been had Kane not been so determined to view the overall story from the perspective of such a small number of outlying cases. In these useful chapters, Kane skillfully outlines the ill-fated, short-lived, and halfhearted efforts that a small number of state officials made to legalize the hajj, and shows that there was considerable pushback against these proposals. These examples demonstrate the potential for a much more nuanced discussion of Russia’s hajj-related policies than Kane’s oft-repeated declarations of “sponsorship” allow for. Had Kane simply embraced the multiplicity inherent within tsarist attitudes toward the hajj—including those of both the hostile majority and the much less commonly seen outliers—the argument at the center of this study would have been much more convincing.
Kane is on much stronger ground in arguing that that the tsarist state shared a far more complex relationship with Muslims than was perceived by an earlier generation of scholars obsessed with the theme of Muslim-state conflict in Russia. Echoing the views of Robert D. Crews, whose work has clearly influenced this volume profoundly, Kane rightly calls for looking more closely at points of engagement between St. Petersburg and the empire’s Muslim communities. While the weaknesses of these older approaches have already been exposed in the work of Crews and others, Russian Hajj nevertheless provides yet another useful counterpoint to the outdated notion that the tsarist state and Muslim communities were relentless adversaries.
JAMES H. MEYER Montana State University
American Historical Review, June 2017, Vol. 122, No. 3 (June 2017), pp. 807- 808.
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Wednesday, December 1, 2010 |
Earlier this week I went to see "Mustafa," Can Dündar's controversial new documentary about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey.
I have always considered Dündar a rather bland figure, well-known for his vaguely liberal left-of-center and very uncontroversial views. Dündar is a newspaper columnist who has written a number of books on contemporary affairs, but he'd always struck me as someone who was more interested in asking questions than in staking out an opinion. Fifteen years ago he came out with an earlier documentary of Atatürk which I have never seen, but which was tame enough to have served as standard fare for Turkish elementary school classrooms every since. It was therefore surprising to hear that many people had found his latest endeavor insulting to Atatürk, even in a country where hagiography often passes for history when it comes to Turkey's first president.
I found the first half of 'Mustafa' much less interesting than the second. Indeed, Dündar is mainly concerned with the Turkish War of Independence and subsequent years, so the parts of the film detailing Mustafa Kemal's childhood and early career offer little excitement. Indeed, Dündar seems to be in a bit of a hurry to get on to the War of Independence, skipping over major events like the Unionist takeover in 1908 and Kemal's activities in Libya. There is, in fact, much about Kemal's life during these years that I think audiences would find interesting, but Dündar doesn't stray far from the general outlines of Kemal's life that are already of general knowledge in Turkey. As a result, the film feels like it is simply going through the motions at this stage while Dündar looks ahead to the second half of the film.
July 28, 2008
Robert D. Crews’ For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University Press, 2006) is one of the more interesting and thought-provoking works to emerge from the growing list of studies that have been produced over the past two decades with regard to the Muslim communities of late imperial Russia. Following on the heels of the work of Danil’ D. Azamatov (in particular, his masterly Orenburgskoe Magometanskoe dukhovnoe sobranie v kontse XVIII-XIX vv.), Crews’ study is an examination of the role of “official” Islam in the Russian Empire, and of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly in particular. |
