Books 19


Muslim Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Diversity and Pluralism, Past and Present edited by Stephan Pradines and Farouk Topan, Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 978147448649, £85


Tis book examines the role of Muslim communities in the emergence of connections and mobilities across the Indian Ocean World from a ‘ longue durée’ perspective. Spanning the 7th century through


the medieval period until the present day, this book aims to move beyond the usual focus on geographical sub-regions to highlight different aspects of interconnectivity in relation to Islam. Analysing textual and material evidence, contributors examine identities and diasporas, manuscripts and literature, as well as vernacular and religious architecture. It aims to explore networks and circulations of peoples, ideas and ideologies, as well as art, culture, religion and heritage. It focuses on global interactions as well as local agencies in context.


The Ottoman emperors saw


themselves as the new Romans


industry who all had a vested interest in France’s prolonged presence in lands far from Paris and shows us how key players in conflicts throughout history often have a motivation even deeper and darker than nationalism and political ideology – greed. As well as bringing scenes from the battlefields to life, Vuillard looks beyond this visceral reality on the ground to the cold calculations of the boardroom elite with the power to turn a military win or loss into their financial gain.


Islamic World


The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars & Caliphs by Marc David Baer, John Murray Press, ISBN 9781473695740, £12.99


Te Ottoman Empire has long been depicted as the Islamic-Asian antithesis of the Christian-European West. But the reality was starkly different: the Ottomans’ multi- ethnic, multilingual, and multi- religious domain reached deep into Europe’s heart. In their breadth and versatility, the Ottoman rulers saw themselves as the new Romans. Recounting the Ottomans’ remarkable rise from a frontier principality to a world empire, Marc David Baer traces their debts to their Turkish, Mongolian, Islamic and Byzantine heritage; how they used both religious toleration and conversion to integrate conquered peoples; and how, in the nineteenth century, they embraced exclusivity, leading to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the dynasty’s demise after the First World War. Upending Western concepts of the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Reformation, this account challenges our understandings of sexuality, orientalism and genocide.


Plants of the Qur’an: History & Culture by Shahina A Ghazanfar and Sue Wickison (illustrator), Kew Publishing, ISBN 9781842467176, £25


Tis book is the first to explore and highlight the history of the plants mentioned in the Quran, many of which are part of our everyday life, from pomegranates and grapes to


ginger and garlic. Te author explores the context in which these plants are mentioned in the Quran, mainly as food plants, as well as for medicinal use, use in beauty, fragrance or for shade. Shahina’s in-depth research for this book has led to new findings in our knowledge of the historical and cultural significance of these plants, their traditional and present uses, as well as detailed exploration of the context in which they are mentioned in the Quran. Te main section of the book highlights 30 of the most prominent plants with details on where the plant is mentioned in the text, detailed etymology, cultural history, and botanical description. Each of these plants are beautifully illustrated with unique botanical paintings by artist Sue Wickison, drawn from living specimens in the wild.


The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China by Robert D Kaplan, Random House, ISBN 9780593242797, £25


Te Greater Middle East, which Robert D Kaplan defines as the vast region between the Mediterranean and China, encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia, existed for millennia as the crossroads of empire: Macedonian, Roman, Persian, Mongol, Ottoman, British, Soviet, American. But with the dissolution of empires in the 20th century, postcolonial states have endeavoured to maintain stability in the face of power struggles between factions, leadership vacuums, and the arbitrary borders drawn by exiting imperial rulers with little regard for geography or political groups on the ground. Kaplan explores this broad, fraught space through reporting and travel writing to reveal deeper truths about the impacts of history on the present and how the requirements of stability over anarchy are often in conflict with the ideals of democratic governance. Kaplan makes the case for realism as an approach to the Greater Middle East. Just as Western attempts at democracy promotion across the Middle East have failed, a new form of economic imperialism is emerging today as China’s ambitions fall squarely within the region as the key link between Europe and East Asia.


Central Asia


From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane: The Reawakening of Mongol Asia By Peter Jackson, Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300251128, £35


By the mid-14th century, the world empire founded by Genghis Khan was in crisis. Te Mongol Ilkhanate had ended in Iran and Iraq, China’s Mongol rulers were threatened by


the native Ming, and the Golden Horde and the Central Asian Mongols were prey to internal discord. Into this void moved the warlord Tamerlane, the last major conqueror to emerge from Inner Asia. In this new account, Peter Jackson traces Tamerlane’s rise to power against the backdrop of the decline of Mongol rule. Jackson argues that Tamerlane, a keen exponent of Mongol custom and tradition, operated in Genghis Khan’s shadow and took care to draw parallels between himself and his great precursor. But, as a Muslim, Tamerlane drew on Islamic traditions, and his waging of wars in the name of jihad, whether sincere or not, had a more powerful impact than those of any Muslim Mongol ruler before him.


The Mongol Strom


by Nicholas Morton, Basic Books, ISBN 9781399803571, £12.99


For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region’s complex history. As the book reveals, during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions. In a single generation, the Mongols conquered vast swaths of the Near East and upended the region’s geopolitics. Amid the chaos of the Mongol onslaught, long- standing powers such as the Byzantines, the Seljuk Turks, and the crusaders struggled to survive, while new players such as the Ottomans arose to fight back. Te Mongol conquests forever transformed the region, while forging closer ties among societies spread across Eurasia.


The White Mosque by Sofia Samatar, Catapult, ISBN 9781646222032, £14


A historical tapestry of border- crossing travellers, of students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, Te White Mosque is a record of a journey through Uzbekistan and of the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity. In the late 19th century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites travelled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey, but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet (Te White Mosque) after the


Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village lasted for 50 years. In pursuit of this curious history, Samatar discovers a variety of characters whose lives intersect around the ancient Silk Road, from a 15th-century astronomer-king, to an intrepid Swiss woman traveller of the 1930s, to the first Uzbek photographer, and explores such topics as Central Asian cinema, Mennonite martyrs.


Fiction


Golden Age by Wang Xiaobao, translated by Yan Yan, Penguin Classics, ISBN 9780241630525, £9.99


Twenty-one year old Wang Er, stationed in a remote mountain commune, spends his days herding oxen, napping and dreaming of losing his virginity. His dreams come true in the shape of the beautiful doctor Cheng Qinyang. So begins the riotously funny story of their illicit love affair, the Party officials who enjoy their forced confessions a little too much, and Wang’s life under the Communist regime: his misadventures as a biology lecturer in a Beijing university, and his entanglements with family, friends and lovers.


Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li, Fourth Estate, ISBN 9780008531867, £11.90


A new collection of short stories written over 14 years, spanning loss, alienation, aging and the strangeness of contemporary life by this best-selling author of Te Vagrants includes 10 short stories and one novella, Such Common Life.


Stay True


by Hua Hsu, Picador, ISBN 9781035036370, £8.30


In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity, is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ‘zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. Te only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes


Empires of the Steppes: The Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation By Kenneth W Harl, Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781526630407, £30


Te barbarian nomads of the Eurasian steppes played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. Tese tribes produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, among others. And their deeds still resonate today. Tese nomads


built long-lasting empires, facilitated the first global trade of the Silk Road and disseminated religions, technology, knowledge and goods of every description that enriched and changed the lives of so many across Europe, China and the Middle East. From a single region emerged a great many peoples - the Huns, the Mongols, the Magyars, the Turks, the Xiongnu, the Scythians, the Goths - all of whom went on to profoundly and irrevocably shape the modern world. Prof Kenneth W Harl draws on a lifetime of scholarship to recreate the lives of these peoples from their beginnings to the early modern age. Teir truggle to survive on the steppes bred a resilient, pragmatic people ever-ready to learn from their neighbours. In warfare, they dominated the battlefield for over 1,500 years. Under charismatic rulers, they could topple empires and win their own.


and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends, his memories, Hua turned to writing.


The Heart Sutra by Yan Lianke, translated by Carolos Rojas, Chatto & Windus, ISBN 9781784744663, £14.89


Yahui is a young Buddhist at university. But this is no ordinary university. It is populated by every faith in China: Buddhists, Daoists, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims who jostle alongside one another in the corridors of learning, and whose deities are never far from the classroom. Her days are measured out making elaborate religious papercuts, taking part in highly charged tug-of-war competitions between the faiths and trying to resist the daily temptation to return to secular life and abandon the ascetic ideals that are her calling. Everything seems to dangle by a thread. But when she meets a Daoist student called Mingzheng, an inexorable romance of mythic proportions takes hold of her. In this otherworldly novel, Chinese master Yan Lianke remakes the campus novel in typically visionary fashion, dropping readers into an allegorical world ostensibly far from our own, but which reflects our own questions and struggles back at us.


Owlish


by Dorothy Tse, translated by Natascha Bruce, Fitzcarraldo Editions, ISBN 9781804270349, £11.99


In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a music box ballerina named Aliss who tantalizingly springs to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all- consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.


The North Light by Hideo Yokoyama, translated by Louise Heal Kuwai, Riverrun, ISBN 9781529411133, £9


Minoru Aose is an architect whose greatest achievement is to have designed the Yoshino house, a prizewinning and much discussed private residence built in the shadow of Mount Asama. Aose has never been able to replicate this triumph and his career seems to have hit a barrier, while his marriage has failed. He is shocked to learn that the Yoshino House is empty apart from a single chair, stood facing the north light of nearby Mount Asama. How can he live with the rejection of the work he had put his heart and soul into, the dream house he would have loved to own himself? Aose determines that he must discover the truth behind this cruel and inexplicable dismissal of the Yoshino house and in doing so will find out a truth that goes back to the core of who he is.


The Rainbow by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Haydn Trowell, Penguin, ISBN 978021542286, £11.96


With the Second World War only a


few years in the past, and Japan still Continued on page 20


ASIAN ART | WINTER 2023


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