Ships in the Desert by Jeff Fearnside

Author:Jeff Fearnside [Fearnside, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRAVEL/ Essays & Travelogues TRAVEL/ Asia/Central
ISBN: 9781951631154
Publisher: Santa Fe Writers
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

the missionary position

A Personal Exploration of the

Politics of Persuasion in Central Asia

During my first summer in Kazakhstan, I woke up early every morning to the sounds of my village: roosters crowing, dogs barking, cows lowing while sauntering to their mountain pastures, the sharp smack of the pastukh’s stick against their thick hides. I was already on my way to gaining an astonishing twenty pounds (which thankfully I later lost) from being so assiduously attended to by my host mother, Farida; breakfast usually consisted of soup, meat, or noodles left over from dinner the night before, several eggs, something sweet, and in the Kazakhstani style, a pot of tea and plenty tandoor-baked lepyoshka bread. At 7:30 I would begin my half-hour walk uphill to the private home where three of my fellow Peace Corps trainees and I studied Russian every Monday through Friday. The lush green foothills fronting the perennially snow-peaked Tian Shan range formed a daily feast for my vision, but if it had rained recently, which it often did that summer, the narrow, winding dirt roads would turn into streams of mud. In dry weather the path was so rough that I wore out the soles of a good pair of shoes.

On the way, I passed the village school, a mere five minutes from my home. We had been hiking to our lessons for some time before we learned why we had to go so far instead of studying in the nearby school as the trainees in other villages did. Our school’s director thought we were missionaries. As a Muslim, he’d had a bad experience with a group of Korean Christian missionaries a few years before, and though we never found out exactly what had happened, it had affected him so deeply that he refused to work with us no matter how often and strenuously our Peace Corps Russian instructor explained that we were teachers, not missionaries.

Later, during my two years as a volunteer university instructor in the southern city of Shymkent, I came to partially understand the director’s position. Most missionaries, particularly Christians, come to Central Asia in the guise of teachers. A few are open about their real intentions. The rest are, to varying degrees, secretive. The reason for this is simple: in a region that is primarily Muslim, they are often seen as dangerous influences on or, at the very worst, outright corrupters of the predominant culture.

It was in this time that Kyrgyzstani authorities issued a decree stating that groups outside of Central Asia’s two mainstream religions, Islam and Russian Orthodoxy, are “totalitarian sects … using deceptions, silent methods and obtrusive propaganda in order to attract new members.” A contemporaneous analysis of Kazakhstani nationalist newspapers reveals an even more acid attitude toward missionaries, often portraying them as preying upon the young. In this analysis, “Perceptions of Threats from ‘Alien Faiths,’” which appeared in Central Asia and Islam, William Fierman writes, “According to one article, a Christian church was placed next to a Kazakh school specifically because there it would be convenient to ‘cast a hook to children.

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