If you're like me and have an unhealthy obsession with Xinjiang, you've probably read Ahmad Kamal's narrative of Silk Road derring-do, Land without laughter (1940). I've debated with myself and others countless times whether the book is a work of complete fiction or a very real narrative of travel and adventure in 1930s Xinjiang from the perspective of a deranged individual. Land without laughter has the most improbable of protagonists and narrators, Ahmad Kamal, the son of Tatarstan, the crypto-Muslim, born on a Colorado reservation, who learned military tactics at the knee of a banished Prussian officer, an American Muslim liberating the homeland of his brothers. It's full of the good old tropes of pop-orientalist fiction, right down to a dusky-skinned, green-eyed "temporary wife" whose eyes beg for his caress.
It turns out to be authentic, at least more or less.
Ahmad Kamal turns up again in A mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (2010), a new book by journalist Ian Johnson recounting the CIA's role in fostering Islamist groups as a counter to Soviet influence. Kamal, as it turns out, was born Cimarron Hathaway in 1914 to a well-off family in a Denver suburb. Some storm in his head, as his children will tell you, drove him to become "Qara Yusuf," son of Kara Yakub, a man in search of his long-lost Turkic father. The rest of his life combined literary endeavors in both Arabic and English with a strange and still mysterious intelligence career.
I won't cut into Johnson's book sales, nor could I summarize this story in a blog post. If you locate the book for yourself, go straight to chapter 10 ("The novelist's tale") and beyond. It's worth a read.
As for Land without laughter itself, if you haven't read it, you should, and, if you have, you should re-read it with a little less caution. Ahmad Kamal has been easy to dismiss because his stories seem so unlikely, but, since his CIA file says he was in Xinjiang in 1935, this could be a good source for the history of the Sheng Shicai period. I, for one, am going to try to get through the rest of his ouevre.
It turns out to be authentic, at least more or less.
Ahmad Kamal turns up again in A mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (2010), a new book by journalist Ian Johnson recounting the CIA's role in fostering Islamist groups as a counter to Soviet influence. Kamal, as it turns out, was born Cimarron Hathaway in 1914 to a well-off family in a Denver suburb. Some storm in his head, as his children will tell you, drove him to become "Qara Yusuf," son of Kara Yakub, a man in search of his long-lost Turkic father. The rest of his life combined literary endeavors in both Arabic and English with a strange and still mysterious intelligence career.
I won't cut into Johnson's book sales, nor could I summarize this story in a blog post. If you locate the book for yourself, go straight to chapter 10 ("The novelist's tale") and beyond. It's worth a read.
As for Land without laughter itself, if you haven't read it, you should, and, if you have, you should re-read it with a little less caution. Ahmad Kamal has been easy to dismiss because his stories seem so unlikely, but, since his CIA file says he was in Xinjiang in 1935, this could be a good source for the history of the Sheng Shicai period. I, for one, am going to try to get through the rest of his ouevre.
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