The Hundred Thousand Fools of God

Through music, The Hundred Thousand Fools of God opens a window onto the cultural and political history of Central Asia in tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet times. Narrated as a travelogue, the book presents the author's encounters with musicians in Tashkent, Bukhara, Khorezm, the mountains and valleys of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan - and Queens, New York, where many Bukharan Jewish musicians have emigrated. Theodore Levin assembles a living musical and ethnographic map by highlighting the fate of traditions, beliefs, and social relationships in Muslim and Jewish Central Asian cultures during and after seventy years of Soviet rule. He evokes the spectacular physical and human geography of the area and weaves a rich ethnography of the life styles, values, and art of the musical performers. The book introduces urban musical genres such as maqam, mavrigi, suvara, and dastan, while in rural areas the focus is on the epic-reciter and the healer, both called baxshi, and on performers of a variety of folk genres. The accompanying 74-minute CD features 23 on-site recordings of musicians from the cities, mountains, and valleys of Transoxania in performances ranging from urban rock, court music, and classical pieces combining European and Central Asian influences to spirited wedding songs, lyrical ghazals, ritual chants, and field hollers.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.