Theodore Levin is Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. He has written extensively on the traditional musics of the Balkans, Siberia, Slavic Russia, and Central Asia. Moreover, he has released a number of his field recordings of these musics to wide acclaim - including the incomparable Tuva: Among the Spirits: Sound, Music, and Nature in Sakha and Tuva (I'll review this work soon) and the accompanying album for this book (which I'll discuss in yet another review). Most recently, Levin has acted as the executive director of the Silk Roads Project, a non-profit organization started by Yo-Yo Ma to showcase the arts and cultures of the people from traditional Silk Road areas (like Central Asia). The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York), then, was written by someone with a lot of knowledge about traditional music of Central Asia - or, more specifically, the music of Transoxania, the region "beyond the Oxus River" that includes parts of Turkmenistan and Tajikistan and most of Uzbekistan.
Levin spent time in Tashkent as a graduate student in the 1970s, and he has returned to this region on several occasions, both during the Soviet era and after. This book is, in part, a summary of his experiences and thoughts concerning this region of the world, the people who inhabit it, and the musicians who seek to maintain their culture's music in spite of fierce opposition (first from communism, where Moslems were forced underground and music was "Europeanized," and now from capitalism, for although religion is relatively tolerated, Western culture's influence on music and life has begun to eclipse the traditional cultures of Central Asia).
The point of this book can be summed up in Levin's title. A "fool of god," he notes, is a Sufi term identifying "one who has given himself to the life of the spirit and is under the special protection of God, but also a dervish or an ascetic - a person not entirely 'of this world.'" As Levin notes, he and his Uzbek companion, Otanazar Matyakubov (OM for short), began using this phrase "fool of god" to "describe a particular musician who, in both his musical activities and his personal life, seemed to embody the high ethical standards, humility, and altruistic spirit that characterized the figure of the...fool of God." Levin goes on to say, "We knew at best several dozen [fools of God] in Transoxania whose life spans overlapped, or had overlapped, with ours. But there might have been a hundred, a thousand, or even a hundred thousand who had come before. Others would surely follow" (37-38).
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