Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is Pilgrims on the Silk Road: A Christian-Muslim Encounter in Khiva by Walter R. Ratliff, published by Wipf and Stock, 2010, 293 pages, $34.

Melanie Zuercher is the writer and editor for institutional communications at Bethel College in North Newton, Kan.

I had little exposure to Mennonite history until I went to Goshen (Ind.) College. Looking back on my studies there, and a decade later at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, I see a solid foundation in the 16th-century Anabaptists, a decent grounding in “Old Mennonite”/Mennonite Church history in North America, and not much from the Russian/ Prussian/General Conference Mennonite Church section.

My vague impression of the 19th-century apocalyptic movement that took Russian Mennonites to Central Asia — a journey most often associated with Claas Epp Jr. — was of a misguided bunch blindly following a charismatic leader into the unknown.

This began to change in 2007, when Bethel College professor emeritus of history James Juhnke and then-assistant professor of business Sharon Eicher led Epp descendants and others on a “retrace of the Great Trek” from the locations of the Molotschna colony in Ukraine and Am Trakt colony in Russia to a spot near Khiva, Uzbekistan, that was for almost 50 years the Mennonite village of Ak Metchet.

Walter Ratliff, a content manager for Associated Press Television with an interest in Christian-Muslim relations and with Mennonite Brethren and Great Trek connections in his extended family, joined the tour. He was already exploring largely unknown aspects of the Great Trek, with the view of writing a book.

That book is Pilgrims on the Silk Road. It was preceded by a 2008 documentary film co-produced by Jesse Nathan, Through the Desert Goes Our Journey.

What the experience of those who took the Great Trek retrace reveals, and what both Through the Desert and Pilgrims confirm, is that the story of Claas Epp, the eastward Mennonite migration and the people who made it is far more complex than Mennonite popular history outlines.

While Epp remains an enigma, Pilgrims on the Silk Road puts the motivation of the families leaving their prosperous and established Russian colonies to venture into the desert into a solid historical context.

It becomes clear, first of all, through Ratliff’s description of leaders such as J.K. Penner, Emil Riesen and Herman Jantzen, that these were educated, well-read people, far from a homogeneous bunch who took everything Epp said without question.

But perhaps even more important is the depiction of the respect and cooperation between Muslim and Mennonite communities. The Muslim village of Serabulak allowed several Mennonite families — forced out of a settlement in the khanate of Bukhara — to spend the winter there and even to use the mosque for their Sunday services.