The work is inspired by the ambiguous figure of Al-Muqannaʿ (“The Veiled One”), a dyer who became a spiritual and political agitator in eighth-century southern Central Asia, while it speculates about the cultural and political echoes of his revolutionary ideas. Al-Muqannaʿ preached an ideological syncretism of Zoroastrianism, Mazdakism and Buddhism, and awakened the minds of his “White-Clothed” disciples by shedding light on the status quo of his time, challenging practices of land exploitation, authoritarian centralized power, and religious repression. His legacy, which might be seen today as “proto socialist,” was appropriated by the regional Soviet propaganda machine as a nativist heroic example of how to rise up and fight for the communal sharing of property and wealth.
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