Sevket Hylton Akyildiz

• BA (hons), BSc (Econ), MA, PhD
• Researcher at SOAS University of London

The majority of British Muslims live in cities such as London, Leicester, Birmingham and Bradford—and academic research thus far has reflected a city and post-manufacturing town emphasis. This paper investigates the as yet undocumented history and mosque politics of Muslims living in the small town of Eastbourne, East Sussex, using participant obse...

Focusing on Soviet culture and its social ramifications both during the Soviet period and in the post-Soviet era, this book addresses important themes associated with Sovietisation and socialisation in the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The book contains contributions from scholars in a va...

A short study of the mosque in Hastings, East Sussex, UK, its locale, and general seaside architecture and place meaning in the early 21st century.

History Studies--International Journal of History: The Cold War Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev (d. 1971) and Leonid Brezhnev (d. 1982), between 1953 and 1982, continued with Vladimir Lenin's (d. 1924) and Joseph Stalin's (d. 1953) physical culture policy designed to create healthier citizen-workers and soldiers. The underlining concept was to co...

The notion that the mind influences the body has ancient roots; however, modern scientific research finds that the ancients might have been correct. David Robson's The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life brings together the latest research about our positive and negative expectations and how they can impact us physically, m...

The book contains about ten short chapters. Several chapters end with ‘tips’ sections highlighting methods and ideas to prevent self-sabotage. The Introduction and Chapters One and Two set the book's tone, explain why self-sabotaging should be overcome and define the term ‘sabotage’. The Introduction is attention-catching because of its straightfor...

United States Vice President James David Vance published Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 to explain the plight of the White working-class in the United States, particularly in the Appalachian and Midwestern regions. The book is a memoir about Vance’s family, notably his grandmother, mother, and sister—and traces Vance's journey from school to the Marines t...

Book review: Anita Moorjani, Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing (2022)

Key to understanding this book is that it provides readers with a good overview of the key historical events, circumstances, personalities, and policies that explain what the seventy-year history of the Soviet Union was about and why. It does so without confusing the reader; this is achieved because of Fitzpatrick’s ability to be succinct and write...

LicenseCC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Vakanuvis International Journal of Historical Research Book review of Tim Marshall, The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal The Future of Our World, London: Elliott and Thompson, 2021.

Conservationist Lisa Schneidau's collection of folk tales connects the natural landscape and plants with the human and enchanted worlds. It is a world of fairies, witches, nature spirits and 'magical beings'. Ideally, the book's short stories might inspire the reader to feel a curiosity or a closer connection to nature and folklore. It consists of...

A Year in the Life: Adventures in British Subcultures (2022), written by Lucy Leonelli, is an engaging journey through twenty-six British subcultures undertaken over twelve months. In doing so, Leonelli meets numerous individuals and characters from various subcultural communities, ranging from battle re-enactors to Goths, Morris Dancers to trainsp...

Ilse Sand's book, On Being An Introvert or Highly Sensitive Person: A Guide to Boundaries, Joy, and Meaning (2018), is an ideal starting point for exploring self-discovery and self-awareness. First and foremost, this book is an introductory reader, and at 135 pages, it is best viewed as a concise gateway to understanding this broad personality type...

Stress is something we deal with daily and can be manageable; however, when we experience bouts of too much stress that negatively affect our lives, it can affect our social relations, friendships and physical and mental health. Lee Brosan’s An Introduction to Coping With Stress (2018) is a handy pocket-sized guide to help us (re-)think and reflect...

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, 'It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life'. In the context of thinking about employment, well-being, and living, this quote is helpful because it allows us to think about how better our lives might become if we change our mindsets and habits; once we have got to the essence of something, we can rebuild or resign our lives...

Reviewer: Sevket AKYILDIZ The premise of Be A Man: How Macho Culture Damages Us and How to Escape It (2017) by Chris Hemmings is that modern men are currently experiencing, and perhaps always have experienced, a unique set of challenges about what it means to be a 'man' and how to interact with others as a man. Indeed, the book argues that men face...

In contemporary Central Asian research, the text Building States And Markets: Enterprise Developments In Central Asia (2010), written by Gul Berna Ozcan, is a useful addition. As a Reader in International Business and Strategy, Ozcan combines knowledge from the business sector with a detailed examination of the developing region of Central Asia. In...

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.30013.27361 License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (2006) is ambitious, topical and thought-provoking. Although the book comes under the heading of history, its content is closely connected with contemporary environmental issues of sustainability, permaculture and humankind's u...

(All Rights Reserved License CC BY-NC-ND Copyright: Sevket Akyildiz, The Aral Sea Encyclopedia.) This book addresses and organises thoughts on environmental, scientific, cultural and political subjects concerning a damaging legacy of Soviet socio-economic transformation within Central Asia. The ecological disaster relates to the shrinking of the Ar...

(Journal of Cultural Studies, 2024, Issue 21, All Rights Reserved License CC BY-NC-ND Copyright) In its amateur and professional formats, the sport of boxing historically has been associated with a physical and aggressive type of masculinity. The notion that a boxer might have a mental health problem was not something generally discussed in the pro...

License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Simon Barnes is a nature writer and conservationist. His latest book builds upon this by examining the concept of ‘rewilding’ (meaning restoration of land to its natural, uncultivated state). This has been a topical notion in Western society for a decade; its extension to include the ‘self’ makes this book unique. The connec...

Michael Rywkin’s Moscow’s Muslim Challenge: Soviet Central Asia (1982, 1990) is a set text for studies of Soviet-era Central Asia and the history of the Turkic and Persian/Iranian peoples of Asia and Eurasia. The five so-called ‘Stans’ under investigation are Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. The book focuses on the...

What is the secret of the third eye? The third eye (the inner or mind’s eye) is well-known in Eastern spiritual and religious practices. It is an ‘invisible eye’ situated in the forehead. The third eye is supposedly linked with religious visions, clairvoyance, chakras and auras, foreknowledge of events, out-of-body experiences, and altered percepti...

Claire Hayes explains how to understand anxiety no matter your age, that it is part of being human, how to place it within a framework to begin managing it, and how to move into the future with self-compassion and hope. Hayes discusses anxiety straightforwardly. Finding Hope in the Age of Anxiety (2017) offers people

David Wallace-Wells is a journalist, author, and deputy editor of New York magazine. His book The Uninhabitable Earth contains a worrying message for readers. It will make many reassess their opinions on climate change, the burning of carbon fuels and the future of the Earth. Wallace-Wells presents a story of a not-so-distant future global society...

Does the idea of a basic income provided by the state and given to all long-term residents and citizens sound like a sensible and fair solution to make life good and more secure? Would a basic income help solve the inequalities of the current income distribution globally? Should we all benefit from a guaranteed basic income from society’s wealth an...

An early review by Sevket Akyildiz for Library.Thing.com. The United States philosopher and professor George Yancy interviews well-known and emerging critical, social, and activist thinkers in this book. He asks them about their thoughts on race, justice, and equality in the present day and looking into the future. The discussions in the book will...

(Book: Paperback and Kindle versions ISBN-13 978-1477642498) How did the Soviet Union educate and indoctrinate youths outside the school environment? What was the link between the school system and the youth movements? What do we mean by Soviet civic and social values? In this extended article, I answer these questions and more. The book contains 1...

Back page matter

The Palestinian voices of pain and hope are at the heart of Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation, edited by Cate Malek and Mateo Hoke (2015). The book is important because it brings to non-Palestinian audiences a feel and understanding of what life is like for Palestinians from all backgrounds under Israeli military control. Palest...

The multiethnic and multilingual Bosnia and Hercegovina, with its Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Yugoslav heritage, is a country that many history readers require further understanding. In particular, an explanation of the 1992 and 1995 war between the Bosniaks, Serbians and Croatians of that country. At the time, numerous Western...

It is surprising how one generation can be unmindful of another generation’s lived reality and challenges. How well do the Baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and Generation X (or Gen X, born between 1965 and 1980) understand the lived reality of the millennials (Generation Y or Gen Y, born between 1981 and 1996)? Surely, boomers and Gen X’s...

Under Stalin’s leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the Crimean Turkic Tatar population of Crimea (Qirim), on trumped-up charges of collaboration with the occupying German Army, were forcibly exiled overnight on 18 May 1944 to the Central Asian republics. During their transportation by train, approximately half of the 200,0...

Lenin commenced Soviet physical culture and sports during the mid-1920s, and Stalin organised it significantly during the 1930s and 1940s. It was part of Stalin's Cultural Revolution and the implementation of Soviet modernity. This qualitative and quantitative research paper investigates physical culture and sports 33 years after its founding when...

Magic has been marginalised in Western society since the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment and the rise of rationalist science. Indeed, it is possible to study humanities and the social sciences at the university level and never read in-depth about the history of magic worldwide. Conversely, religion and science dominate the humanities curr...

Lenin commenced Soviet physical culture and sports during the mid-1920s, and Stalin organised it significantly during the 1930s and 1940s. It was part of Stalin’s Cultural Revolution and the implementation of Soviet modernity. This qualitative and quantitative research paper investigates physical culture and sports 33 years after its founding when...

Eurasia Studies Society of Great Britain & Europe Journal, Book Review, Vol. 6. No. 1. 2023: 8-15. What do the British mean by the term ‘The Establishment’? How does it function? Is it a collection of individuals who know each other or a network of interconnected groups based on power and privilege? How does it justify its behaviour? Do its group m...

Chronicle: Journal of Historical Research (Yıl/Vol. 8, Sayı/No. 2, Güz/Fall 2023 ISSN: 2149-9535). Paul Strathern’s Rise and Fall: A History of the World in Ten Empires is a concise world history analysing the characteristics and impact of ten empires from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and America. Explaining the spirit of adventure, administratio...

It is not uncommon for a child of a minority community in Britain to explore their parents’ cultural heritage and understand how and where elements of their identity were formed. Often this includes journeying to a place in Britain or overseas to experience a built (home) environment, family network, and family friends that have been spoken about i...

The United States of America Department of State press statement of 2022 by Secretay of State Antony J. Blinken reads: ‘Five years ago, Burma’s military launched a brutal campaign against Rohingya – razing villages, raping, torturing, and perpetrating large-scale violence that killed thousands of Rohingya men, women, and children. More than 740,000...

To explain how graveyards, tombs and cemeteries affect us, our families, and the broader contemporary society and how they shape the built environment requires an insightful writer. Thankfully, Peter Ross's book A Tomb With A View: The Stories and Glories of Graveyards is able to meet this task more than adequately. Ross has produced a rich histori...

(doi.org/10.46250/kulturder.1238261) Christina Lamb's Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women? explains that men's sexual violence is designed to humiliate women and entire communities in a war context. Furthermore, Lamb's study highlights women's testimony in fighting stigmatisation and ostracisation in conservative societies. The stu...

Christina Lamb’s Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women? explains that men’s sexual violence is designed to humiliate women and entire communities in a war context. Furthermore, Lamb’s study highlights women's testimony in fighting stigmatisation and ostracisation in conservative societies. The study also discusses the physical, psych...

Book review - Since the 1960s and 1970s, the notion in Western democratic societies was that computers, algorithms, and the internet would bring about new opportunities to enhance and improve human lives and help create a better world for all. Today, this optimism has diminished as the Chinese Communist Party seeks to use the new technology used in...

Book review - China's new economic power places it in a position to compete with the United States, Japan, the European Union, and others. In response, observers are asking if China will be a superpower. Indeed, will it become an assertive power? How will this impact its citizens and the international community? How will China’s foreign policy evol...

Vakanuvis / Chronicler: International Journal of Historical Studies, Sept 2022. Some political books become out of date quickly in a climate of ever-changing world events and technological and scientific transformations. The impact of Covid-19 across the globe and Russia's invasion of Ukraine fills our television screens, collective consciousness,...

Vakanuvis / Chronicler: International Journal of Historical Studies, Sept 2022. Traditional sports and recreation in Central Asia are deep-rooted and ancient. The Central Asian Turkic people participated in physical culture for different reasons; horse races, wrestling, archery, and hunting had combat training elements—while fairs, circuses, and h...

Vakanuvis / Chronicler: International Journal of Historical Studies, Sept 2022. Mixing nature observations about the New Forest (Hampshire, England), childhood memoir, and the politics of climate change and land ownership is the focus of Neil Ansells’s The Circling Sky: On Nature and Belonging in an Ancient Forest. The author visited the forest app...

Book review. When history and anthropology form two strands of a research investigation, they explain events and human feelings in new ways. Carl Rommel’s Egypt’sFootball Revolution: Emotion, Masculinity, and Uneasy Politics is an anthropological and historical account of Egypt’s Revolution between 2011 and 2012, which was stifled by a military cou...

Orta Asya'da geleneksel spor ve rekreasyon aktivitelerinin tarihi oldukça köklü ve eskidir. Orta Asya'da Türkler fiziksel etkinliklere bir çok nedenle katılırlardı. At yarışları, güreş, okçuluk ve avcılık savaş eğitiminin; şölenler, sirk ve ev çevresinde yapılan eğlenceler ise gündelik yaşamlarının bir parçası olarak görülürdü. Dini bayramlar ve mi...

A short nature essay about Whitbread Hollow, Eastbourne; the work is about a place, memory, significance, history, loss, life, living, love and nature.

Book review

Book review

In this first issue of our journal in 2022, we included five research articles, a review essay and a book review. The first article written by Hasan Ali Karasar deals with a painting on the wall of the "Haralambos Mansion", which serves as the administrative building of Cappadocia University today. The mural painting, which is the subject of the ar...

Turkish Journal of Diaspora Studies Vol.2, no.1, 2022 This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto is a timely and topical book that makes the case that migrants from the Global South, for several reasons, will continue to arrive in the Global North in numbers and provide much needed, affordable, and quality labor. CC BY-NC 4.0

Book review: Vakanuvis Journal Vol 7, no 1, 2022: licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0. The open-access book European Handbook of Central Asian Studies: History, Politics, and Societies by Jeroen Van den Bosch, Adrien Fauve, Bruno De Cordier (eds.) is a welcome addition to the growing literature about Central Asian peoples and societies and...

Vakanuvis: International Journal of Historical Researches: Special Issue Book review: Violet Moller, The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found: A History in Seven Cities, London: Picador, 2019. VAKANÜVİS- Uluslararası Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi/ International Journal of Historical Researches, Yıl/Vol. 6, Prof. Dr. Süleyman Büy...

Vakanuvis: International Journal of Historical Researches, Vol.6. No.2, 2021. Reinterpreting the story of Sultan Boabdil and his surrender of Granada in 1491 CE -- and the end of the 750-year-old Muslim rule in Iberia -- is the subject of Elizabeth Drayson's "The Moor's Last Stand: How Seven Centuries of Muslim Rule in Spain Came to an End."

Copyright BY-NC-ND. My short essay investigates Lundy Island (England) and its brief occupation by the Barbary corsairs circa 1625 to 1632 CE. They are also known as the Turkish corsairs, Turkish pirates, Ottoman corsairs, and North African corsairs. These agents of the Ottoman Empire sailed from North African seaports to raid shipping and coastal...

COPYRIGHT CC BY-NC-ND SEVKET AKYILDIZ SUMMER 2021 Sevket Akyildiz. Muslim culture had started with a single book - the Qur’an, which was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (b.570—d.632 CE) between the years 610 and 632 CE. Yet, within three hundred years, Islamic civilisation had some of the largest and best-stocked libraries in the known world.

This paper assesses the modern and traditional sports of the Soviet Union shortly before its collapse in 1991. The case study is the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan under the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU, established 1917). Central Asia is a crucial historical case because it was a Muslim-majority region that Moscow wished to tran...

VAKANÜVİS- Uluslararası Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi/ International Journal of Historical Researches, Yıl/Vol. 6, Sayı/No. 1, Bahar/Spring 2021 ISSN: 2149-9535 / 2636-7777.

COPYRIGHT: CC BY-NC-ND. This extended essay investigates the Ottoman corsairs (also known as Barbary corsairs or North African corsairs) and their impact on South-East England. Of particular interest are the English renegade privateers and pirates who worked alongside the Ottoman sailors. John Ward (b.1553-d.1623 CE), the most notorious English ren...

Three English folk customs with links to the Saracens, Moors, & Seljuk Turks

Sovyet beden kültürü, sağlıklı ve yurtsever vatandaş-askerler yetiştirmek ve Sovyetler Birliği'nin kentli nüfusunun modernleşmesine yardımcı olmak için kullanılan yumuşak bir güç aracıydı. Bunun en önemli yollarından biri modern sporlardı. Josef Stalin (1925'ten 1953'e kadar Komünist Parti lideri) topluma beden ve spor kültürünü kabul ettirip kurum...

Journal title: 'Vakanuvis - International Journal of Historical Researches'. Soviet physical culture was a soft power tool used to create healthy and patriotic citizen-soldiers and help modernise the urban Soviet Union: one key strand of this was modern sports. Josef Stalin (Communist Party leader from 1925 to 1953) imposed the physical culture an...

A short study of Bexhill-on-Sea Mosque and Muslims, East Sussex, England.

Bexhill is a seaside town in South-East England, long associated with retirement, a 'genteel' British holiday experience, and the splendid Art-Deco De La Warr Pavilion. This short paper looks at Bexhill town centre and the seafront promenade architecture at Marina Arcade and Marina Court Avenue. In particular the intercultural relations between the...

A short study about intercultural relations in Brighton, East Sussex, UK. The paper was revised in 2021.

Explanation of the development of Soviet physical culture and sports in Muslim majority Uzbekistan 1924 to 1991.

A very short essay about the natural environment and history of Wannock Glen, Eastbourne, East Sussex, UK, 2017.

A study about authoritarian communist education in a Muslim-majority region of Central Asia.

The opening and development of a small mosque in a medium-size English seaside town between 1995 and 2013. This is a 2021 revised edition.

There has been much literature, especially during the Cold War, that was heavily influenced by a particular discourse which argued that 'Soviet Muslims' were not integrated into Soviet society or mindset. A number of academics from the United States and the UK, despite limited access to the Soviet republics of Central Asia, have suggested that not...

Book review.

Sevket Akyildiz's An Introductory History of Soviet Uzbek Academics 1924-1960, published in Polivocia SOAS graduate research journal 2012.

A study about a natural water spring, its excavation, and the visitors who collect water from it to drink. A site of relaxation, beauty, peace, and community in Eastbourne, East Sussex.

The polemic debate involving the universality and relativity of human rights reveals the wide intellectual gulf between academics and political thinkers on this matter. This paper evaluates why these differing points of view seem irreconcilable. The arguments examined below have never been more topical in Western societies: migrating cultural group...

Education in the Soviet system from the 1920s was a primary agency of radical socio-cultural transformation. The strategy of the Communist Party of the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (established 1922) was to mobilise the masses by co-opting them into the ideological project and vision. The Party management of intellectual, moral...