Struggle by the Pen describes the discourse of the nation among Turkic-speaking Muslim intellectuals in Xinjiang/East Turkistan. Klimeš breaks his story down into a periodization in which the evolution of ethnonyms and the degree of national consciousness chart the tradition to modernity among the Uyghurs. He begins with the premodern, proto-national “Musulman” of oasis society, as articulated in turn-of-the-century historical narratives. Chapter 2 describes the coming of modernity, bringing with it Jadidist cultural critique and reformist formulations of Turkic or “Uyghur” identity. He then turns to the “politicization” of national discourse in the Muslim rebellion of the 1930s and the warlord regime of Sheng Shicai, before concluding with the adaptation of Uyghur intellectuals to the political environment of the 1940s, when the Soviet-backed East Turkistan Republic vied with a Kuomintang regime in the provincial capital of Ürümchi for hegemony in Xinjiang.

This is not the first treatment of this period in Uyghur history. What distinguishes Klimeš's work from earlier efforts is his emphasis on analyzing the original Turkic vocabulary of his sources, adopting what he refers to as the “Uyghurological perspective” (p. 8). He dissects in detail the language of texts ranging from Mulla Musa Sayrami's Tarikh-i Hamidi, the Kashgar periodical press of the 1930s, to the propaganda of the second East Turkistan Republic and published speeches of pro-Kuomintang pan-Turkists such as Masud Sabri. Some of this material belongs to a well-established canon, but some is quite rare and understudied, and Klimeš has done the field a service by bringing it to light.

The book's approach to theory is avowedly ecumenical, which limits its intervention into wider questions of nationhood and national identity. Klimeš is content in the introduction to doff his cap to the great men of historical sociology, before getting on with the rest of the book. He takes a similarly big-tent approach to issues in the field of Xinjiang studies. To give one example, Sheng Shicai's introduction of Soviet-style ethnic categories in the 1930s has been represented both as breaking down a greater ethnic unity in Xinjiang (a “divide-and-rule” policy), and as an effort to fabricate an internally divided Uyghur nation out of ethnically disparate elements. Can both positions be true at the same time? Klimeš thinks so (p. 158).

Given that his texts span a period of less than half a century, Klimeš's periodization strikes me as too neat. The structure gives the impression that nationalist discourse in Xinjiang developed through discrete phases of consensus, rather than in the clash of competing historical narratives, identity claims, and political strategies. To be sure, in situations in which rivals vie for the mantle of the “true patriot,” we will find commonalities in invocations of communal identity. In the 1940s, for example, while Soviet-trained Uyghur politicians carried on fierce polemics with rivals in the Kuomintang, Klimeš believes that they “covertly agreed on the definition and interest of the East Turkestani/Uyghur nation in East Turkestan Xinjiang” (p. 248). To my mind, any such convergence simply reflects the slippery, obfuscatory nature of nationalist rhetoric. For Klimeš, though, it serves as evidence that Uyghur intellectuals have “shared an enlightened drive toward their nation's well-being” (p. 13). The downplaying of division and emphasis on a united front among the intellectuals is a trope of Uyghur national historiography that runs throughout the book. From the first stirrings of national sentiment, through cultural awakening, to political agitation, Klimeš portrays the Muslim intelligentsia of Xinjiang as a single heroic group, whose “ultimate raison d’être … has been the quest for the political emancipation of their nation” (p. 259).

With evident admiration for the intellectuals he studies, it is not surprising that Klimeš relies too heavily on Uyghur scholarship for his historical narrative. The claims, for example, that Kashgari entrepreneurs were pioneering school reform as early as 1870, and by 1884 had already established a full-fledged Jadidist school (pp. 77–79), have no basis in any primary source that I am aware of. They smack of efforts by Uyghurs to construct a narrative to compete with the Tatar-centric history of Jadidism. Nationalist scholarship also leads Klimeš astray in his textual analysis. Drawing on the 1991 Almaty edition of the Jadidist Nezerghoja Abdusémetov's prerevolutionary writings in Tatar journals, Klimeš tells us that this writer referred to Yaqub Beg's nineteenth-century Kashgar emirate on multiple occasions as a “Uyghur khanate” (p. 94). In fact, Abdusémetov only ever termed it a “Turk khanate,” but the editors in Almaty have “Uyghurified” the original text. This is common practice among Uyghur intellectuals when editing earlier sources, and scholars must approach such publications with extreme caution.

Despite these issues with its framing and methodology, Struggle by the Pen still offers a very readable account of Xinjiang's early twentieth-century history. Each section provides the necessary historical background, before delving deep into its corpus of Turkic-language primary sources. Non-Uyghurologists with an interest in Xinjiang will thank Klimeš for making the lexicon of Uyghur nationalism accessible to them, and those familiar with national movements elsewhere in the Turkic or Islamic world will find in his book interesting points of comparison.