The Sahara/Desert, the vast arid land that connects North Africa to sub-Saharan Africa, is an undertheorized place. Cast as an inherently dangerous, marginal and peripheral space, the Sahara has been mostly defined by what it is not or what it should be like, instead of what it actually is. Even today, travel literature, explorers’ accounts, and drilling companies’ reports deploy facile imaginaries of the desert that were forged in the precolonial and colonial periods to depict the desert as a place to be explored, dissected, exploited, used, and tamed, without any regard for the millennial knowledge its inhabitants have produced and transmitted about it. From René Caillié (1799 –1838) to Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) and André Gide (1869-1951), a motley of writers, explorers, adventurers, divine prophecy followers, geologists, and colonialists gravitated towards the Sahara. Fascinated and mesmerized by the desert’s power, these individuals’ lives were consumed by the endeavor to penetrate this mythologized space. Nowadays, a prime example of this practice is the notorious Paris-Dakar Rally, which since 1978 built on cliché imaginations of the desert to offer its wealthy participants the opportunity to relive the European penetration of Africa through the desert—this time in fast cars and motorcycles. However, understanding these endeavors requires the examination of the larger discursive practice and knowledge production that undergirds them. This paper proposes ‘Saharanism’ as a concept that subsumes the various ways in which the Sahara is written about, deployed, imagined, and represented in Euro-American cultural production. Instead of focusing solely on the present manifestations of Saharanism, the paper delves into a plethora of literary, anthropological, and reconnaissance writings that have underlain Saharanists’ practices since the 18th century. Saharanism offers a framework through which desert studies can understand and deconstruct the origins and continuation of the imaginaries, which the mere mention of the word ‘desert’ evokes. I draw on the life story of Jacques Lebaudy, the self-declared Emperor of the Sahara, and Jack Mortimer Sheppard’s travelogue Sahara Adventure as well as Carlo Carretto’s epistolary book Letters from the Desert to examine how Saharanism undergirds, informs, and shapes the attitudes and endeavors of these explorers and writers. By investigating their intellectual genealogies to former explorers and writers who inspired their own work, the paper shows how Saharanism has its own set of references, genealogies, traditions, and imaginaries that are transmitted from generation to generation, across times and spaces, and intellectual schools.

Taking off from the premise that French maps of the Sahara have long served as instruments of colonial violence, this paper seeks to explain why documentary film and photography have been among the instruments most capable of registering the enduring radioactive effects of the seventeen nuclear weapons detonated by the French military in the Algerian Sahara between 1960 and 1966. My focus is a small village called Mertoutek, whose residents were in the direct path of a radioactive cloud released during the subterranean detonation of a bomb named ‘Béryl’ at nearby In Ekker in 1962. One of the few existing documents of this disaster—and its enduring effects—is a film by Elisabeth Leuvrey called At(h)ome (2016), which is inspired by landscape photographs taken of the site by Bruno Hadjih. Leuvrey’s and Hadjih’s works combine image and sound to chart an invisible toxic territory of unknown, possibly infinite, scale. Authorized by secret clauses in the Evian accords and carried out at secret military bases hidden in the desert, tests like ‘Béryl’ were designed to be invisible except in carefully choreographed media propaganda events. Knowledge of this history has almost completely vanished from public record and collective memory, despite widespread international protest at the time—including 11 sessions of debate at the UN in 1959. At(h)ome, I argue, is an aesthetic cartography of a dangerous archival blank zone where old taboos on naming French colonial violence intersect with the present nuclear secrets of both the French and Algerian nation-states.

Although Sufi scholar and anticolonial resistance leader al-Shaikh Ma al-'Aynain (1831- 1910) lived before the era of nation-states, his legacy is often framed as an early form of Moroccan nationalism. In the same vein, his resistance movement is co-opted to support a narrative of eternal political and cultural cohesiveness between ‘Alawite Morocco and the northwestern Sahara. This has taken both legal and literary forms, as Morocco relied on Ma al-?Aynain’s political legacy to bolster its claim to “immemorial possession” of the disputed Western Sahara at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1975. Curiously, both the ICJ case and later academic studies of al-Shaikh Ma al-'Aynain fail to engage with the Shaikh’s own conceptions of Saharan territory, authority, and belonging. This is where his own legal ruling can help reconceptualize the Sahara on the eve of colonialism. Thus, this paper examines how Ma al-'Aynain actually framed Saharan space and the duty to defend it in his 1885 fatwa 'Hidayat man hara fi amr al-Nasara.' The fatwa reveals Ma al-'Aynain to be adroit at moving between negotiating Saharan politics defined by siba (the lack of central authority) and a global pan-Islamic ideal. This fatwa also puts the abstract ideal of jihad in dialogue with various Muslim struggles against colonial powers. As becomes apparent by reading 'Hidayat man hara fi amr al-Nasara' in dialogue with Saharan sources from the same period, Ma al-'Aynain’s political genius lay in his ability to translate Islamic solidarity and resistance into terms which spoke to the particular circumstances of the northwestern Sahara. He does so largely by making the imagined geography of “Bilad al-Muslimin” apply to the Hassanophone region.

Bilad-Shinq?? (Mauritania) is often portrayed as a preeminent center of classical Islamic knowledge transmission supposedly untouched by modernity. From Sahara to Mecca and from Abu Dhabi to California, bearing the nisba of “al-Shinq??i” often signals strong claims to authentic scholarly and religious authority. While previous scholarship concerned itself mostly with Bilad-Shinq??’s local history and distinctive methods of learning, in this paper, I seek instead to demonstrate how it has become, in less than two centuries, a label and symbolic/representational space of excellence in Islamic knowledge with a truly global reach. I uncover the dynamics of transformation of an Arabo-Islamic cultural world known for encyclopedism, memorization of the core Islamic texts, mastery of the Arabic language, especially poetry and mobility. Drawing on a variety of historical, literary and anthropological sources, the paper historicizes the rise and mythologization of Shinq?? as a peerless center of traditional sacred scholarship. Focusing further on the changing ways in which Shinq??i’s scholars articulated their discursive tradition in different spaces and times since the 19th century, I examine how their label is being today invoked and re-invented by a number of local and global Muslim actors under changing circumstances. Through the exploration of what I call Global Shinq?t, I ambition to illustrate the ways in which Muslim Saharan societies assert their relevance and scholarly authority on a global scale, ultimately documenting how the so-called peripheries of the Muslim world shape central traits of what we have come to identify as global Islam. The somewhat imagined Bil?d Shinq?? emerges in this paper as a global center of learning and religious authority whose reputation is being enacted, performed, reproduced and sometimes contested in various places around the globe, including in Mauritania itself.