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The startling biography of a native Turkestani whose pursuit of self-determination for his country saw him serve the Nazis in World War II, the Red Army, and the CIA at the height of the Cold War.
Using recently declassified Soviet documents, Jamil Hasanli examines Soviet involvement in the anti-China rebellion in East Turkistan. Hasanli takes readers back to the early 1930s when the Turkic national movement was suppressed by the Soviet government and the USSR. Hasanli deftly illustrates how Stalin’s policies toward the movement changed after the turning point of World War II and the treachery of Sheng Shicai, leading up to the 1944 establishment of the Eastern Turkistan Republic and the start of the Cold War.
"Other scholars have dealt with the Jadid movement, but none approaches this study in the quality of its scholarship and contextual social history."—Dale Eickelman, author of The Middle East and Central Asia "Original and stimulating . . . with both the empathy of a contemporaneous insider and the critical objectivity of an informed outsider."—John Perry, University of Chicago
Examines the transition Central Asia underwent in the twentieth century following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet colonial legacy and the attempts of new states to build secular states within the radical Islamic world.
In the wake of the news that the 9/11 hijackers had lived in Europe, journalist Ian Johnson wondered how such a radical group could sink roots into Western soil. Most accounts reached back twenty years, to U.S. support of Islamist fighters in Afghanistan. But Johnson dug deeper, to the start of the Cold War, uncovering the untold story of a group of ex-Soviet Muslims who had defected to Germany during World War II. There, they had been fashioned into a well-oiled anti-Soviet propaganda machine. As that war ended and the Cold War began, West German and U.S. intelligence agents vied for control of this influential group, and at the center of the covert tug of war was a quiet mosque in Munichâ€...
The Venture of Islam has been honored as a magisterial work of the mind since its publication in early 1975. In this three-volume study, illustrated with charts and maps, Hodgson traces and interprets the historical development of Islamic civilization from before the birth of Muhammad to the middle of the twentieth century. This work grew out of the famous course on Islamic civilization that Hodgson created and taught for many years at the University of Chicago. In this concluding volume of The Venture of Islam, Hodgson describes the second flowering of Islam: the Safavi, Timuri, and Ottoman empires. The final part of the volume analyzes the widespread Islamic heritage in today's world. "This is a nonpareil work, not only because of its command of its subject but also because it demonstrates how, ideally, history should be written."—The New Yorker
On October 27, 1991, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Hammer and sickle gave way to a flag, a national anthem, and new holidays. Seven decades earlier, Turkmenistan had been a stateless conglomeration of tribes. What brought about this remarkable transformation? Tribal Nation addresses this question by examining the Soviet effort in the 1920s and 1930s to create a modern, socialist nation in the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenistan. Adrienne Edgar argues that the recent focus on the Soviet state as a "maker of nations" overlooks another vital factor in Turkmen nationhood: the complex interaction between Soviet policies and indigenous no...