Brahim El Guabli, Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (University of California Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Brahim El Guabli (BEG): The idea for this book emerged in 2012 when I was reading Ibrahim al-Koni’s and Abdulraham Munif’s novels intensively. Al-Koni’s novella Nazīf al-ḥajar (The Bleeding of the Stone) and his two-volume novel al-Majus (The Magians) opened large vistas for me to think about the richness of the multilayered desert lives he built into them. A couple years before that I had read Munif’s quintet Mudun al-milḥ (Cities of Salt) as well as his novels Sharq al-mutawassiṭ (East of the Mediterranean) and al-Ān hunā, aw, sharq al-mutawassiṭ marratan ukhrā (Now.. Here or East of the Mediterranean again). Munif’s gripping novelistic output addressed issues related to natural resources, petro-wealth, torture, and the negotiation of political power in desert societies. It so happened that I had read some articles about the French nuclear experiments in the Sahara in 1960 as I was reading these two novelists, and these disparate bodies of knowledge coalesced overtime to become the foundation for Desert Imaginations. I tell you about the making of the book in order to say that I wrote it to reflect on why what happens in deserts happens in deserts. Accordingly, the book finds an answer in Saharanism, which I present as a powerful and all-encompassing ideology that has shaped how deserts are viewed and treated. Whether it is manifested in the form of romanticism, exploration, extraction, or engineering, Saharanism permeates all desert-focused endeavors.
Desert Imaginations defines the phenomenon of Saharanism and furnishes a theoretical framework as well as a critical toolkit that will allow both specialists and lay readers to understand its multilayered impacts on desert biomes. Once Saharanism is named, it becomes easier to detect how it is at work in discourse about, and actions that unfold, in deserts. As I sketch it out above, I first came into this project solely wanting to think about how desert literature depicts the Sahara and the Arabian Desert, but my research led me to discover that there is a real conceptual void that needed to be filled and I undertook the project of addressing this gap. Therefore, Desert Imaginations is a contribution to the construction of a theoretical framework that provides both a new nomenclature and a set of concepts for the study of why takes place in deserts is not shocking because it is almost expected or even desired.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
BEG: In the book, I demonstrate that Saharanism unfolded and continues to unfold in deserts across the globe. From the Sahara to the Atacama desert and from the American Southwest to the Great Victoria Desert in Australia, Saharanism’s imprint is a common thread that is easily detectable in both actions and discourses centered on arid lands. Notions of emptiness, discovery, desertion, death, sublime, fear, and barrenness link these deserts, as do ideas about “heroic” or visionary endeavors to domesticate them and turn them into something they are not. Greening deserts or engineering their climates are just two salient examples that can be mentioned here. Remember that we are talking about roughly thirty-three percent of the area of planet Earth, which makes the examination of this topic all the more important, especially in the context of climate change and the increasing endeavors to decarbonize global economies. Saharanism is, thus, particularly topical due to the ongoing strive to harness solar and wind energy, which has placed deserts, once again, at the center of the world’s attention.
The book uses an interdisciplinary approach to conceptualize Saharanism and highlight some of its distinctive features. Desert Imaginations is divided into a Preface, an Introduction, five chapters, and a Conclusion. The Preface combines an autobiographical reflection with a discussion of the transformative impact Noor Ouarzazate, considered the largest solar plant in the world in 2018, has had on my hometown. I discuss the first time I came into contact with the incandescence of the solar energy tower, which has occupied the horizon of the town where I grew up. Thinking about the polysemic nature of the word “taqa” (energy), I reflect on the transformed arid environment that is now defined by this technostructure. The introduction to the book defines Saharanism and traces its historical trajectory from time of Desert Fathers to the present. Entitled “Spiritual Saharanism,” “Sexual Saharanism,” “Extractive Saharanism,” “Experimental Saharanism,” and “Unity of Creatures,” the five chapters are organized thematically. As their titles indicate, each chapter focuses on delineating a specific aspect of Saharanism and theorizing how it is at work in a large body of sources and media. The last chapter, entitled “Unity of Creatures,” builds on al-Koni’s notion of “wahdat al-kayinat,” which is not to be mixed with the Sufi “unity of being,” to present it as an indigenous philosophy of ecological care (ecocare) in which deserts are nothing short of home.
The different chapters reveal how the entrenchment of Saharanism has routinized and banalized ideas that consecrate deserts as havens for terrorists, spaces for impunity, and areas available for unbridled experimentation and extraction. Drawing on a variety of materials that include, but are not limited to, epistolary exchanges, ethnographic studies, films, literary works, topographical studies, and blueprints for desert-centered projects, the chapters bring back to life the works of generations of travelers, priests, engineers, ethnologists, politicians, military personnel, and others who spent a long time in deserts and endeavored to find ways to dominate them.
All of this is in order to demonstrate Saharanism’s multifacetedness as a system of ideas that operates both in visible and invisible ways in the prevalent approaches to desert spaces. One reads Cardinal Lavigerie’s legacy in conjunction with Charles de Foucauld’s to discover how their legacy about spirituality and violence in the Sahara may still be at work in the way Europe perceives immigrants as a source of danger that has required relocating the EU’s borders further into the Sahara. Similarly, impunity as an inherent aspect of Saharanism can be discerned in my reading of André Gide’s The Immoralist and the HBO series Westworld. Finally, projects to remap deserts, climate-engineer them, or use them for testing of all kinds, are also a fascinating aspect of Saharanism that the book discusses at length.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
BEG: I would like to consider Desert Imaginations as a continuation of the conceptual, methodological, and critical approach that I developed in my first project, Moroccan Other-Archives (2023). However, this and Desert Imaginationsare different in their scopes and themes. Moroccan Other-Archives, as its title indicates, zeros in on Morocco, while Desert Imaginations is more expansive and more global in its scope. Thematically, Moroccan Other-Archives engages with state violence in a very contained national space, while Desert Imaginations examines a longer history of ecological and racializing violence in different desert locations cross the world. Nevertheless, the two books share a commitment to interdisciplinary methodologies and multilingual research, and present a serious endeavor to center those who are usually left out of the historical record or not highlighted enough in scholarship. While my effort to define and delimit Saharanism’s contours in a manageable manner required that I work on sources in French and English mostly, I have also paid close attention to vernacular languages and do cite a lot of local scholarship in Arabic, French, and Tamazight to place those who are on the receiving end of Saharanism’s impacts at the center of the book.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
BEG: Desert Imaginations will have achieved its goal if readers are able to perceive how Saharanism operates in their arid or desertic environments. When readers realize that there are many elements of Saharanism in breathtaking commercials featuring a car in the desert or in movies that depict desert landscapes, then Desert Imaginations will have achieved its goal. For those who are not from arid areas, I hope they will pay attention to whether the ideas I deconstruct in the book occur to them when they think about deserts. Nonetheless, the book will have attained an even greater achievement if climate activists and desert studies students embrace and develop the concepts and terminology it makes available to change the status quo.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
BEG: I am currently working on a couple projects that encompass Amazigh studies, Indigenous studies, and environmental studies. My realization that the current infrastructure of Maghreb studies in Anglophone academia operates as though Imazighen and Tamazight did not exist has pushed me to dedicate some of my research time to disseminating knowledge about this field. More concretely, however, I am doing final edits on a book tentatively entitled Amazighitude: Living Amazigh Indigeneity in the World and completing a fourth book entitled Literature and Indigeneity: How Amazigh Activists Constructed a Literary Field. Drawing on sources and using Indigenous studies methodological approaches that have not been tapped by previous studies in this field, both books center Amazigh indigeneity and seek to present Amazigh worldviews on literature, environment, culture, and social justice.
J: You mentioned “unity of creatures” in your previous response. Can you explain what it means?
BEG: “Wahdat al-kayinat” (unity of creatures) was coined by Tuareg Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Koni to refer to the indispensable complementary of all lives in the desert. Even before the popularity of animal studies, al-Koni’s concept predicated the sustainability of any anthropocentric life in deserts on the preservation of all lives. Accordingly, human and non-human subjects have to negotiate their coexistence to sustain both of their lives, for any imbalance in the desert leads directly to death. Abdurahman Munif, almost a decade before al-Koni, developed another version of this concept in his emphasis on sustainability in oil-rich Gulf states. Deeply realistic, both Munif and al-Koni have charted the path for an ecocare ethics that strikes a rigorous balance between need and greed and between sustainability and depletion of resources in their desert homes.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 5, Healing the World: Al-Koni’s Waḥdat al-Kāʾināt in the Desert, pages 168 to 172)
Ibrahim al-Koni has argued that the tourist’s camera view reduces the desert to scarcity. Al-Koni allows us to draw a distinction between the “superficial view” founded on impressions made from behind the camera and a “thick view” (to paraphrase Clifford Geertz’s famous concept of “thick description”) that is the result of a long-term interaction with desert biomes. The superficial view is that of the “overlander,” which Geoff Nicholson describes, based on Quentin Crewe’s definition of the phenomenon, as “passing over the land without in any way touching the culture.” The thick view is grounded not only in experiencing life in the desert but also in understanding its symbolic significance and observing its codes of conduct. Saharanism most often reflects its propagators’ shortsighted, touristic view. Even when they enter a desert with the best of intentions and a clear awareness of what not to do, practitioners of Saharanism oftentimes are prevented from embracing deserts’ radical difference and attempting to grasp its meaning for its full-time inhabitants.
Al-Koni’s multipronged approach has successfully put the Sahara at the center of a critical literary and nonliterary oeuvre. He has, for instance, paid attention to the way the desert (al-ṣaḥrāʾ is definite in Arabic) is talked about and depicted as a space of nonlife because of its aridity. He has grappled with the literary disregard for deserts, writing, “Since the beginning of humanity, the desert has remained marginalized, neglected, forgotten, and alienated from the world.” He has tackled what he called “tanmīṭ ṣaḥrāʾ” (the stereotyping of the desert), which, combined with ideology, leads to tazwīr or “fabrication[s].” Although he does not call it Saharanism, al-Koni’s discussion of ideology corresponds to my definition of this concept. He writes:
Self-evident truth is always a product of ideology. When the desert becomes a wasteland [in ideology], there is no guarantee that the banal mentality that markets the desert as a void won’t prevail; since it is a ruin and because ruins are desolation, because they are remnants, we can shed tears over reality but we cannot recognize it as a dwelling, since in the myths of the nations of the ancient world, ruins are always inhabited by evil souls, and we have no choice but to leave them. Is this where we get the deadly conviction that the desert is a void, that it is a wasteland, and that there is no guardian, custodian, or heir in its space because it is communized? What does communized mean? It means that every action is permissible! This certainty is the reason why the firman which legitimizes the most vicious sins against it as it is exploited as a site for conducting nuclear tests or dumping chemical waste, and its representation as a sacrificial offering for terrorism and the merchants of prohibited goods, finds a safe haven.
Al-Koni can be said to have depicted both Saharanism and its antidote in this article, and the most striking observation is that the ideology of emptiness has a universal impact on all deserts. This confirms that Saharanism’s mistreatment of deserts is not about specific arid lands but about the category “desert,” which indicates that this is an issue grounded in a long history of deserts symbolizing nonlife.
These distinctions allow al-Koni to offer an Indigenous philosophy of desert ecocare. Aided by a decentered mode of knowledge that accepts both science and mythology as valid ways of explaining the world, al-Koni’s ecocare shifts away from an anthropocentric view to one that sees humans as just one species among others whose existence is contingent upon the ecological balance that will sustain all creatures. Al-Koni has theorized this ecocare in his notion of waḥdat al-kāʾināt, which should not be confused with the Sufi notion of waḥdat al-wujūd (unity of being/existence). The latter refers to the relationship between humans and God, while the former refers to the complementarity between all creatures in the desert. Waḥdat al-kāʾināt, a recurrent theme in al-Koni’s interviews, is the idea that human life in arid lands is only sustainable so long as other creatures’ lives are also nurtured and sustained.
Waḥdat al-kāʾināt is particularly compelling in light of climate change’s disruption of the Earth’s ecological balance. Hence, the apocalyptic end that awaits us should global warming not be curbed gives an even greater significance to al-Koni’s prescient formulation of this unity of creatures. A 2022 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned with high confidence that human-induced warming would lead to a variety of risk-laden climate dangers that threaten both humans and ecosystems. This report paints a dire picture of the mayhem that anthropogenic climate change will spur and which include irremediable losses in both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The IPCC report, drawing on global warming’s impact on deserts throughout the world, sounded the alarm for the impact of increased desertification on water sources and desert plants as well as the degradation of desert communities.
The difference, however, is that al-Koni grappled with ecological sustainability in the Sahara several decades before an understanding of global warming became widespread. His novella Bleeding of the Stone articulated a first version of this notion of interspecies harmony. In his own words, it was
an early warning against what would befall the world if it continued in its blindness and its disregard for this unity of creatures. It was a siren, like the novel entitled Gold Dust, that predated the current environmental catastrophe. The lesson is that the disruption of the unity of creatures is a disruption of the global balance and an extermination of all animal and plant species, which paves the way for genocide against human species, because the law that rules this world is similar to the one that governs the human body: any microbe that affects any member of the body is a tumor capable of destroying the entire body.
At its core, waḥdat al-kāʾināt is a philosophy of human and nonhuman interdependence in the shared desert environment. The notion grants equal significance to all the lives that coexist in this reputedly harsh space. This complementarity of existences is now, in the age of the Anthropocene, almost a given in both environment and animal studies. Anna Tsing has argued that interspecies collaboration is a must for an inhabitable world, for trans-species death will be the results of absence of cooperation. The key distinction here, however, is that al-Koni developed waḥdat al-kāʾināt from the interdependence of all lives for survival in the desert, specifically.
Asouf, the main character in Bleeding of the Stone, leads an isolated—but not lonely—life in the Massak Mallat in southern Libya: tending to his animals; watching over the old Amazigh petroglyphs; and guarding the waddan, a desert animal important in Tuareg mythology. A mystical loner, Asouf has learned the importance of keeping one’s word to the waddan and of not hunting it. Embodying the interdependence between the human and nonhuman subjects of the desert, Asouf abides by the cherished codes of conduct that command respect to avoid tragic disasters. Asouf’s duty to be an agent of sustainability and unity, and not of necro-ecological catastrophe, limits his latitude to hunt by adhering to values like “to hunt a pregnant animal is a great sin,” instilled in him by his father, who will meet his death after recanting his vow to not hunt the waddan again. These teachings allow Asouf to understand the desert as a site for interspecies’ respect and the preservation of both human and nonhuman subjects.
Asouf’s embodiment of this unity does not mean that everyone shares the same values. Qābīl and Masʿūd, two agents of Saharanism, appear unannounced in Asouf’s remote desert home and turn his ecologically balanced life upside down. The parallels between Qābīl and Asouf’s encounter and the Quranic story of Qābīl’s killing of his brother Hābīl (Abel) are all too clear. Driven by jealousy and anger that God accepted his brother’s offering and not his, Qābīl committed what is believed to be the first murder in history. This Quranic killing, however, was a very specific fratricide, whereas Qābīl’s eventual murder of Asouf is a necro-ecologically disruptive act. While Asouf thinks of the waddan as an extension of human life, Qābīl, whose anthropocentric Saharanism entails the relentless consumption of meat, shows no concern for desert animals’ sustainability. Unable to understand Asouf’s vegetarianism and his unconditional love for animals, Qābīl kills Asouf because he is blind to the latter’s environmentalist wisdom and jealous of his ability to embrace his habitat in such a loving way.
Qābīl’s obsessions with meat and hunting bring about the downfall of the desert ecosystem in the oases. His access to deadly weapons, including a helicopter, emboldens his environmenticidal nature, which feeds off his merciless desire to kill. In a short period of time, Qābīl’s murderous guns reap herds of gazelles, which fall “like clusters of dates torn apart in a storm” and spill “rivers of blood” to the point that “the herds virtually [die] out.” All of this is exacerbated by Qābīl’s “little thought for the rules of nature.” His relentless need to consume meat and sell the excess to John Parker, an American officer stationed in the desert, push him to run roughshod over the biome and eventually turn to cannibalism by exterminating animals and killing Asouf. Qābīl’s cannibalistic act is, to borrow Lisa Kröger’s words about a different time period, evidence that “the nature of humanity is to corrupt.” Just like the American tractors and bulldozers that, in search of oil, wipe out Wādi al-ʿUyūn in Munif’s Cities of Salt, the “introduction of rapid firing guns to the desert” precludes the self-renewal of desert life.