In 1929, a young Swedish librarian arrived in the Silk Road city of Kashgar. He was there to study a language and a people at the time both called “Turki,” which are now generally referred to as Uyghur. The librarian, Gunnar Jarring, would recount some decades later in his Return to Kashgar (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986) the vibrant and lively city, in which the local Turki population went about their daily business in ways that were inextricably intertwined with Islam. He does not use those exact words, but it is very clear from both his account and many of the texts he brought back to Sweden, that Turki and Islamic culture were inextricably intertwined to the point that one could not talk, or even think, about one of them without running headlong into the other. The version of  Islam that Jarring describes was not one of highly-educated mollas trained in one of the great centers of Islamic learning (though they certainly existed, too) but one of people, and more precisely one of people going about their daily lives.  (more…)