New Book Day: The Muslims of Darürrahat

New Book Days are the BEST days! And this book is one that I’m very pleased to see released into readers’ hands:  Ismail Gaspirali’s The Muslims of Darürrahat, translated by Çiğdem Pala Mull and edited by Sharon Carson. This book is published in collaboration with The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota as part of NDQ’s unofficial supplement series.

This volume was a joy to work on. Not only is Sharon Carson one of my favorite people on campus, but she also embraced fully her role as an author with a small press. I also had the support of students in my practicum in writing, editing, and publishing class. In other words, it was a model of what collaborative publishing looks like in practice.

The book is a brilliant, 19th-century, utopian novel written by the Crimean Tatar intellectual, author, and editor, Ismail Gaspirali. Çiğdem Pala Mull provides an accessible and engaging translation and Sharon Carson provides thoughtful historical and literary context for the novel. It is a must read for anyone who has spent time pondering alternatives to our contemporary situation.

You can download the book here for free or buy a low-cost paperback.

In Ismail Gaspirali’s 1890s story The Muslims of Darürrahat, (the Peaceful Country) the not entirely intrepid narrator Mullah Abbas Efendi arrives in the imaginary land of Darürrahat. He has been led there by mysteriously appearing guides, who take him from Alhambra palace in Andalusia through an underground tunnel, where he emerges in Darürrahat to find a Muslim utopian country filled with progressive people and dotted with beautiful Islamic architecture and technologically advanced cities. As in most works of utopian imagination which are also aimed squarely at social critique of the author’s present day, there is nothing simple about this world or this literary work.

Carson explains: “Our main hope is that a range of readers will find a path into Gaspirali’s fantastic world and enjoy it as a work of imaginative literature. We tried to build a book around the translation which would spark the interest of general readers in English who might not be familiar with Gaspirali and his times and writing, and also offer something to specialists interested in utopian literature, comparative cultural studies, Central Asian literary history, and literary journalism.”