When you get to the end of a non-fiction history book and your first reaction is holding back tears, you know it’s a good book. Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present did just that, taking me on an enlightening and emotional journey through Muslim history that made me smile, sigh, and make du’a from one chapter to the next!

This book is one for the committed enthusiasts (and students)! I can’t really write a review of a book like this, but I wanted to share my overall impressions. A few years ago, I started a project to read books from a different part of the world each month, as some of you may remember. This was not long before I started my podcast, which ran alongside it. One of the regions I was interested in was Central Asia because it had never featured in any of my schooling and rarely came up incidentally as part of my general knowledge. However, when I started looking for non-fiction books on the region in English, I discovered that they were almost exclusively written by non-Central Asian, non-Muslim Westerners. While I don’t believe a book by such a writer is necessarily a problem in itself, I was still disappointed at the lack of variety. So when I came across this book by Adeeb Khalid, a Pakistani-American Muslim academic and respected expert in the field, it grabbed my attention. It was also relevant to my search for works on Uyghur history for my Uyghur Book List, which has similarly yielded few non-Western-authored books, although this has been changing in the last year or two.

At 576 pages (or 17 hours of audiobook), Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present provides a pretty detailed overview of the history of the region starting around 1750 and passing through the Russian Empire and Qing Dynasty, USSR and Chinese Civil War, First and Second World Wars, Cold War, independence of the “Stans”, the “War on Terror” all the way to the present that sees a variety of political paths taken in the Central Asian states and the ever increasing domination of the CCP in East Turkestan. Throughout his exploration of these periods and the many changes that occurred, Khalid puts the Central Asian people and, importantly in my opinion, Islam at the centre. This is what I had hoped for when I searched for a writer from a Muslim background, although one can never be sure what to expect. He doesn’t tell the Central Asian stories from the Russian or Chinese perspective, but from the perspective of Central Asians in their own right. Further, he doesn’t position the Central Asians as victims of their circumstances, neither does he sweep over the crimes of the colonial Soviet and Chinese states and other involved international powers. He portrays the history of both Russian- and Chinese-influenced Central Asia in parallel, avoiding the tendency to separate East Turkestan from the rest of Central Asia. He also introduces us to many individuals – Central Asian and not – who made fateful decisions and firmly situates them and their decisions in their wider contexts, helping the reader to understand why events progressed as they did and continue to do.

In addition to the political history of the region, something that was of particular personal interest to me was his focus on the place of Islam. Khalid shows in detail how Islamic faith and Islamic movements have played a fundamental role in the choices and history of the region, something that I think is often only briefly considered in many history and politics books about the Muslim world. Furthermore, he doesn’t romanticise or – for the most part – criminalise these movements, focusing on their beliefs and the impacts they had on decisions. An aspect I found particularly enlightening and inspiring was the discussion of various Islamic scholars and the importance of scholarship in different parts of Central Asia across time. I’m not at all familiar with Central Asian Islamic scholarship in the last two centuries and have struggled somewhat to find books on the topic, especially Uyghur scholarship. This is despite the region’s significant role in Islamic scholarship historically as centres of learning and the birthplace of major scholars such as Al-Bukhari and At-Tirmidhi, and scientists including Ibn Sina and Al-Khawarizmi. I found it uplifting and invigorating to learn about the passionate debates around Islam in society, the many many scholars who strove to teach and retain Islam in their societies, the proliferation of study and publication across Central Asia and the links between Islamic scholars and students in the region and in other Muslim societies, all in more recent history.

This book is not for someone with a passing casual interest. Having said that, it is written in a very accessible and empathetic style and organised into logical chapters that make it easy to follow considering the scope and length of the book. Ideally, I would have read this as an ebook so that I could highlight and make notes, but I knew if I did, I would delay reading it to much later. It is also quite a bit more expensive as an ebook or paperback than as an audiobook with Audible. Aaqil Ahmed, the narrator, did a generally good job of narrating; his pronunciation was not always accurate, but that is easily forgiven when it comes to a book involving a number of languages!  Given the audio format, I approached it differently, with the expectation that I would forget a lot of the detail but with the hope of starting to get some understanding of the region and the historical context of its state today. I know I have achieved that and much more. As is often the case when learning about history, I also found myself reflecting on similarities between events in Central Asian history and other parts of the world and the patterns that become apparent. Having read this book, I feel I am now in a place to focus on more specific areas of the region, with a decent foundation to build upon.

To close, I think this short quote from an interview with the author Adeeb Khalid on his writings about Islam and Central Asia in recent times shows the mindset that he approaches this book with: “I am really a historian, most comfortable in the issues and sources of the first third of the 20th century. I was pulled into the larger sweep of that century by a sense of civic duty—to say something about the misconceptions that are routinely peddled in the public sphere. That is one’s responsibility as a scholar and a citizen and I have been happy to do it”.

Related resources

A discussion about the book with the author on Youtube – this discussion is valuable even without having read the book; it is also useful for deciding whether to read the book as it effectively demonstrates the book’s importance and positioning relative to other works on the region