This review originally ran on Green Man Review.
Surely by now you have noticed that many of us who inhabit these offices possess a more than moderate interest in all things related to Turkish history and culture. I also confess to a slight obsession with Central Asian history and culture. Lucky me, I happened to be helping out in the mailroom the day this book arrived. So I grabbed it at once, before anyone noticed.
Hugh Pope is a British news reporter, currently heading the Wall Street Journal’s Istanbul office. He studied both Persian and Arabic while at Oxford and picked up Turkish and some of its variants during his many travels around the region. I think it was his fascination with the Turkish language and the aforementioned variants that got him started on the idea for Sons of the Conquerors. His thesis in this book is that the significant commonalities of language, religion and material culture shared among peoples residing in locations from Germany and the Balkans in the west to China’s Xinjiang Province in the east that could — and should — lead to the establishment of stronger political and economic ties than exist at present.
In order to place Sons of the Conquerors in context, I found it necessary to start this review process by reading Pope’s earlier book, Turkey Unveiled: Atatürk and After (originally published in the UK by John Murray in 1997), co-authored with his first wife, Nicole. Turkey Unveiled is straight history, written in third person and strict chronological order. It features several pages of endnotes and a truly wonderful bibliography, including books published in several languages other than English, with initial publication dates going back to the 1920s. I won’t say it’s the most exciting book I’ve ever read, but it’s a fine reference on the leadership of the Turkish state from its founding in 1923.
Sons of the Conquerors takes a radically different approach. Pope writes in the first person, basing a lot of his narrative on his direct personal experiences in different parts of the so-called Turkic world and on conversations he held with all kinds of people, from dictators to shopkeepers to dissidents to bus drivers, along the way. This approach gives Sons of the Conquerors an immediate and engaging style that I have observed in other well-crafted travel books. Yet, as I suggested earlier in this review, Sons of the Conquerors isn’t ‘just’ a travel book. Pope also provides background — not always as well-documented as I would like — on the history of the various Turkic peoples, from recent to long past, and on the political economies of the nation states that have emerged in Central Asia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
In choosing to organize his narrative around his ‘Turkic world’ thesis, Pope eschews a chronological or locational approach in favor of a more thematic structure, with sections of the book focused on the military, leadership, history, Islam as faith and practice, and relationships with the West, whether that means Turkey, the UK, the U.S., or the global capitalist hegemony. (That’s my language, of course! Can you imagine someone who writes for the WSJ using that kind of terminology?) This made a lot more sense to me when I read about it in the Prologue than it did as I read through the sections, where Pope had a tendency both to time-trip and to revisit the same locales with different thematic purposes.
Here’s an example of this approach to give you a flavor for the book. Kazakhstan is geographically the largest of the Central Asian nation states to declare independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It stretches from the north shore of the Caspian Sea on the west to a common border with China’s Xinjiang Province on the east, including the north shore of the Aral Sea (what’s left of it) and Lake Baikal. Pope ‘visits’ Kazakhstan several times in Sons of the Conquerors. It initially appears in the leadership section, where he meets with President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a former Soviet party chief, and describes the country’s economic success. In the history section, we encounter some of the Kazakh nomads who travel back and forth between Kazakhstan and China, herding livestock and living in yurts. In the same chapter, Pope learns from a guide at the national museum in Almaty about the division of the Kazakhs into three ‘hordes’, or tribes. He reflects on the way the Kazakhs have been trying to reconnect with their history and culture following the departure of Soviet rule — er, didn’t we already establish that the President is himself a latter-day Soviet ruler?
There’s a brief mention of Kazakhstan in the section on Islam, where Pope tells us that the Kazakhs were one of the Turkic peoples who held on to shamanic traditions until well into the nineteenth century. Some of the people Pope talked to in Kazakhstan are very obviously animists. Not much room there for Islam! We return to Kazakhstan in the section on the West, where Pope focuses on the development of the oil fields north of the Caspian — obviously a significant factor contributing to the nation’s wealth, and to the motivation of the West (however you define it) to be really good friends with Kazakhstan. I had a very hard time forming a coherent picture of Kazakhstan because of all this narrative jumping around!
I am willing to accept, without any discomfort whatsoever, Pope’s inclusion of the Turkish immigrants residing in Germany as a component of his Turkic diaspora. They are a significant and still oppressed minority population in that nation state, as they are in China’s Xinjiang Province. I was even willing to overlook Pope’s unsupported assertions about Ottoman influence on Austro-Hungarian culture (reflected in both the Viennese coffee houses established in the late seventeenth century and in the use of the signature crescent shape for that famous European pastry, the croissant). I found myself having a lot more trouble handling Pope’s evident fascination with the so-called Melungeons. These are a group of people who live in the Appalachian Mountains, southeast of Washington, D.C. They claim ancestry from a group of Turkish galley slaves brought to the New World and abandoned there by none other than Sir Francis Drake. Pope enters into this discussion after suggesting that some of America’s First Folk may also be descended from Turkic peoples. Never mind that neither the Melungeons nor the indigenous people of the Americas use languages that are any more than remotely Turkic, do not practice Islam, and cannot document any historical connection to ancestors in Central Asia.
The publisher has followed a couple of practices typical in books of this sort. There’s a decent line-drawn map covering two pages in the front of Sons of the Conquerors, to which I found myself referring frequently as I tried to figure out where Pope was at various points. The place names on the map generally correspond with those in the narrative, although I had a heck of a time figuring out where the Ferghana Valley was, since Pope says “it runs for 200 miles from east to west between two mountain ranges” without bothering to provide more specific reference points. Good thing I keep a large fold-out map of the Middle East on my reading table!
Also noteworthy is the obligatory 8-page insert of small, not very clear, black and white photographs (mostly taken by the author). These are accompanied by relatively long captions written in tiny, virtually unreadable italic type. Typical of such pictorial representations, these relate only tangentially to the story and are not explicitly referenced in the text, so that the reader comes upon them without warning and is largely unable to use them to enhance the narrative’s meaning.
My biggest complaint about Sons of the Conquerors, however, brings me full circle back to Pope’s Turkic world thesis. If language is the primary link connecting these peoples, as Pope claims, then wouldn’t it make sense to provide at least some explanation of the salient common characteristics of those languages? After a single paragraph in his Prologue, the only explicit reference to this is in an appendix of less than five pages in length. It’s just not very convincing as the basis for his argument.
Sons of the Conquerors certainly provokes thought about the many meanings of ethnicity. The real question it raised for me is this-how can people have an ethnic identity of which they are completely unaware? It’s one thing for Turks living in Sofia or Berlin to stay in touch with relatives or to go ‘home’ to Turkey, but quite another for Uzbeks in Central Asia to feel any emotional ties to Istanbul.
(Overlook Duckworth, 2005)
Comments