SONS OF THE CONQUERORS – REVIEW

Registan.net, WA
Nov 29 2007

Considering that Laurence reviewed this book two years ago last
month, I don’t feel too bad about writing another review. Quite a
bit has happened since then. Many of the factors mentioned in this
book as being current events in 2005 still hold true today. The
United States is still in Iraq, an independent Kurdistan is still
in limbo, the EU and Turkey remain in relatively the same position,
though who knows where this newest round of French riots will send
Europe’s relationship with Muslim immigrants and their children,
disappointed by the equal treatment they are promised but kept from by
the inherent racism of a once homogeneously white country? Granted, a
Turkish-led riot in Berlin could well be even worse than the Detroit
race riots of 1943 and 1967. I have a German friend, a native of
Berlin currently living in the United States, that has stated how
much she prefers the Turks of Turkey to the immigrants living in her
own neighborhood. We talked on the subject at length, and it put me
in mind of the complaints against ethnic Uzbeks living and working
in Kazakhstan. Those who know Uzbeks in their homes readily agree
that Uzbeks living and working abroad tend to act by a different set
of rules. Another friend joined in this conversation, saying that it
wasn’t only Turks, but that strongly family-oriented societies tend to
use a large amount of shame and fear of the elders to control their
younger family members, and that when those pressures are removed,
the youth act callously and irresponsibly. His examples were the
immigrant Italians from Sicily, who, like Uzbeks and Turks, would
give you the shirt off their back if you happened upon the house of
their parents, but might not stop to save your life if they witnessed
your car accident. That’s a drastic illustration, but I can recall
several horrible car accidents where the driver of the car I was in
could not be persuaded to stop and help. Still, I don’t want to take
specific life examples out of context – it’s a slippery slope to racist
stereotypes. Mr. Pope’s intentions seem pure enough, and he really
only wants to educate those interested as the realities of a "Turkish
World" and how those people act, think, live, worship, and do business.

As for my own experiences with Uzbeks, Tatars, Turks, and the lot,
it would be a momentous task to boil down my opinions into a novel,
and I have a deep respect for Hugh Pope’s ability to describe opinions
garnered over decades of living and traveling among the Turkic
people. As for Turkic violence, discrimination, acts of genocide,
and uncaring treatment of strangers, this is a darker side of the
Turks than Mr. Pope concentrated on, though he’s no apologist. The
Armenian Genocide is mentioned, and the atrocities of the Ottoman,
Timurid, and other Turkic empires are stated without trying to offer
extenuating circumstances.

Suffice it to say that over this past week I’ve been reading Hugh
Pope’s Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World.

Published, as I mentioned, in 2005, it is one of his newer works
concerning the Turkic world, and definitely his most widespread
attempt at approaching the entirety of the Turkic people. Mr. Pope,
a Reuter’s writer who contributes to the Wall Street Journal, has
lived in Turkey for many years. He speaks Turkish fluently, and can
also speak Arabic and Persian. He has fans in many circles, from NPR
listeners to Economist readers to Robert Kaplan and company, which in
turn gives him even more attention. He has all the appeal of the clever
British student making good on his dreams of becoming international,
worldly, and respected. There are a few times when I didn’t follow
his logic, as Mr. Pope seems a bit too apologetic on the behalf of
President Karimov of Uzbekistan. In his defense, he makes no allusion
to the Andijan massacre, so i assume that happened after his deadline.

On the whole I enjoyed the book. His writing is as entertaining as it
is intelligent, and not condescending to the anyone he portrays. I
sensed a very real love of Turkey, without a sense of him forgiving
all the sins of their fathers. It’s simply the realistic response
that would come from living among a people I objected to certain
adjectives, as I have a knee-jerk reaction to the use of the word
‘wily’ being used to describe anyone, no matter how ‘wily’ they may
be. I guess it stems from reading old British imperialist texts,
and less old American imperial texts. They seem to assume the white
people are clever and intelligent, and ‘Orientals’ are dastardly,
wily, and fully of tricks. That being said, I’m willing to chalk that
up to nuance and connotative differences between American and British
academic writing styles. I don’t actually think that Hugh Pope is
racist in the slightest degree, and I mention this largely to make the
point that many of the books written on the Turks and Turkic Republics
of the former Soviet Union have been British, and their vocabulary
is quite different from what I am used to. Descriptive words like
"keen", "clever", "cheery", and "wily," are just not in my everyday
lexicon, nor do I particularly understand the exact meaning of "smart"
as it applies to appearance. For me it’s still rather like reading
C.S. Lewis or Roald Dahl as a kid. It’s the wonder of our dual-English
age, when someone can ask for a ‘torch’ and be expecting a flashlight
and be handed a stick of wood dipped in burning pitch.

As for writing about the Turkic World… Just as it would be impressive
to see someone try and nail down the ideas, policies, histories,
and beliefs of the Germanic peoples, it’s staggering to see such a
feat even attempted, let alone carried off. And, to my mind, that’s
just what happens – Hugh Pope really has done an excellent job with
this book. In about 400 pages the reader is whipped around from Asia
to Europe and back again, with brief stops in the Americas to cover
both the new Turkic minority in the New York/New Jersey area, as well
as the tenuous and controversial connection between certain Native
Americans and the Turks. Hugh Pope does a brilliant job, however,
of not coming off as some quack impersonating an anthropologist. He
merely states that the Turks are "notoriously hard to classify."

Turks, Azeris, and Turkmen are certainly related. Uzbeks, Tatars,
Kirghiz, Kazakhs, Uyghurs, Karakalpaks, too. Mongolians, Tuvans,
Manchurians – the reach becomes longer, the ties tenuous, but
still there is a common ancestry. Stretching that across the Bering
Strait, while a bit of a stretch, is at least within my own realm
of imagination. I also liked seeing the pan-Turkic take on History,
arguing that the Turkic nomads and conquerors stretch from the storming
of Constantinople to the Genghis Khan’s and Tamerlane’s sackings,
back to the Seljuks and Huns. The Scythians didn’t make the cut,
though, as Mr. Pope must agree with the anthropological assumption
that they were proto-Indo-European nomads, and thus relatives of
the Tajiks, Persians, Kushans, etc. In my own opinion, seeing as how
many conflicting theories there are about the origins of each of these
groups of people, it’s less important which theory Mr. Pope picks than
how consistent he is with his reasoning. And that is where I think he
really shines. It might be difficult to find a common thread throughout
the Turkish world, from the Turks in Germany to the shamans living
on the shores of Lake Baikal, but I think that Sons of the Conquerors
makes a bold and enjoyable attempt at capturing some of the mythos and
most of the science and history. And I love the "Turkic Family Tree"
in the Appendix! I wish that the various Peace Corps programs in the
Turkic Republics had one so they could help the new Volunteers keep
track of the various Turkic tribes.

I had some favorite moments in this book. His interview with
Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbaev was just great, and I wasn’t shocked
at all when Nazarbaev identified himself first and foremost as a
"Turk." The idea that the Turks of Turkey are the half-blooded sons
of the original Turkic conquerors may or may not be true, but it’s
a real stretch of the imagination to think that the Kazakhs have had
any more luck preserving some kind of pure warrior’s bloodline.

Ethnicities don’t die off – they merge and marry off. The Turkic
Determinist’s version of anthropology is as sketchy and self-serving
as Stalinist accounting and statistic managing.

The entirety of the epilogue was just brilliant – as daunting a
proposition as wrapping up this kind of work must have been, Mr. Pope
met the task head-on with clear and concise conclusions, without
being too sentimental. Also, every example given from his personal
life and experience was constructed very professionally, never taken
out of context or expected to stand for broad generalizations.

There’s a very real trend in travel writing for the worst-day-ever
in some tourist’s life to be used to build a very nasty view of some
ethnicity or country. While some Uzbeks may delight in ripping you off,
others are as honest as they come. It’s akin to judging all Americans
by the hawkers of fake watches in New York City, and Mr. Pope did
admirably at avoiding falling into that particular trap.

I also enjoyed using the Uygurs to bookmark the work. They are almost
the furthest east of the Turks, and probably the most oppressed
of their brothers, with the least amount of hope for the immediate
future. They are beginning to turn to Islamic fundamentalism as a
political reaction, much more than a religious reaction. I imagine
we can expect to see the Uzbeks continue in the same vein with Hizb
ut-Tahrir, which has come a long way in the last fifty years since
its founding. While these Islamist people will seek to be peaceful
in the beginning, the brutality of their respective governments’
responses will, I’m afraid, certainly drive them to violence. Mr. Pope
even mentions those Uygurs picked up while the US DoD was filling
the halls of Guantanomo with Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists. I
strongly recommend listening to this interview with Adel, an Uygur
held in Guantanomo, given on the NPR radio show This American Life.

I really had a great time reading this book, and I’m hoping that next
week’s The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan
by Ben Macntyre will be as intriguing as its subtitle leads me to
hope. I welcome all comments, questions, and cuss words! Let me know
what you thought of Hugh Pope’s work, and if there are other works
which might relate to our Central Asian emphasis here at Registan.net.

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