Souffles: What made you write Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara (2025)?
Judith Scheele: The Sahara as a region of study has long fallen between all possible stools: if North Africa tends to be seen, in the Anglophone world at least, as a marginal appendix to the Middle East, the Sahara itself is marginal to North Africa; meanwhile, Africanists speak of sub-Saharan Africa without giving much thought to the exclusion thus operated. This has had a tremendous impact on the way the African continent tends to be imagined: as divided into two by a ‘natural’ barrier, with the northern part never quite African enough, the southern part somehow ‘cut off’ from the Mediterranean, and the continent’s sizeable Arab or Arabic-speaking population strangers in their own lands. Much of this is due to European imperial perspectives, but not all: pre-colonial North and West African traditions usually have few good things to say about the Sahara either. The perceived marginality of the region hence dates back centuries if not millennia, to the point where it has become one of the region’s structural or at least structuring features.
My aim in Shifting Sands was to attempt to turn these assumptions on their head: to see what the Sahara might look like when we take it as a starting point, a model in its own right, and not as an eternal deviation from norms set elsewhere. Marginality is, after all, always a relation. This means questioning not only geographical boundaries, but also basic assumptions about the priority of place over movement, settlement over mobility, territorial over personal sovereignty, boundaries over connections, which I think might also help shed light on political, social and economic history elsewhere on the continent. After all, the Sahara covers almost a third of it, and its inhabitants have for centuries actively participated in its history – hence ‘Africa’ itself will look rather different if we pay due notice to Saharan contributions.
Souffles: What particular issues or literatures does it address?
Scheele: When I started my research on the Sahara in the late 2000s, there was a feeling of excitement in Saharan studies. Many North African countries had launched Saharan studies programmes, including in their Saharan universities; many local manuscript libraries had opened their doors to researchers, and it was relatively easy to work with scholarly families on editions and translations; there was a whole new generation of scholars, from the Sahara and beyond, who were keen to break with the still dominant colonial paradigms in Saharan history, and who had more than enough material to do so. It is not so much that local sources were ‘discovered’ – they had of course been there all the time – but that there was a shared awareness that it was not enough to mine these sources for ‘facts’ but that the vision of history and society that they conveyed also had to be taken seriously. Despite the potentially revolutionary implications of this – I think there are few regions on the African continent where non-colonial written sources are quite so abundant – much of the resulting publications have gone quite simply unnoticed in the academic mainstream. Since then political conditions in much of the Sahara have taken a turn for the worse, making it more difficult to carry out the kind of collaborative research – or just to achieve the peace of mind – that would be required to advance further. I therefore thought it might be useful to take a step back and write a summary for a more general audience, combining my own findings with that of my colleagues, in what I hoped would be a more accessible format also for readers who had no prior particular interest in the region.
Souffles: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?
Scheele: The main difference with my prior publications on the region is that Shifting Sands is aimed at a non-academic audience, and adopts a region-wide perspective. After years of publishing in academic venues, it was rather unnerving to drop footnotes and most references, to make bold statements and to ‘include narrative’ (as my editor always wanted me to do – but how exactly do you do this when writing about Saharan geology?). I have worked in the region since the late 2000s, spending several years in southern Algeria, northern Mali and northern Chad respectively, and I have published two earlier academic books, one on the border between Algeria and Mali, and one – with Julien Brachet – on northern Chad. I now tried to integrate these two case studies into an overall interpretative framework derived from Saharan material itself, and not from any external model of what a desert ought to look like. As with any attempt at generalization and comparison, this was tricky – one of my main arguments in the book is that the Sahara is internally incredibly diverse and that it was (and is) Orientalism’s original sin to reduce this diversity to a stereotype – but it was a useful exercise, because it forced me to think hard about the dialectical relationship between environmental constraints and cultural tastes, extreme fragmentation and regional connectivity, external interpretative impositions and internal awareness of cultural and political difference. In other words, about how to reconcile the fact that even the most local event is inscribed into a much broader (and power-laden) history and geography with the equally valid statement that, even in an environment as extreme and constraining as the desert, human lives are the result of (collective) choice and could always have been otherwise.
Souffles: Who do you hope will read Shifting Sands, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
Scheele: As I said above, my hope is that Shifting Sands will be of interest to people beyond the rather narrow readership of academic publications, and who might have little or no prior interest in the Sahara, or even African history. It is difficult to know if this has worked, but I have had a number of kind messages by unexpected readers. There is also an audiobook, which helps making the book more accessible. The only downside is that I fear only few people from the region itself will read the book. Partly, this is so because of language – few people who live in the Sahara read English for pleasure, and although a French translation is in the pipelines, I have found no Arabic-language publisher so far to take on this project. Yet this is not all: the book aims to dispel longstanding myths about the Sahara-as-an-empty-place, or the Sahara-as-a-barrier, and it is essentially based on knowledge that people in the region have generously and patiently taught me over the years. They of course have no need to read a book to know that the Sahara is far from empty, passive, isolated, archaic… they know this (and much more) already. With regards to Saharan audiences, I will thus always be in the position of a student, although I do hope that some of the more historical and comparative research might be of interest to Saharan readers also.
Souffles: What other projects are you working on right now?
Scheele: One of the chapters in the book is concerned with the political history of the Sahara and with contemporary developments, attempting to find an analytical language that avoids the pitfalls of breakdowns and shortcomings. Not: why has the Malian army failed to contain rebellion in the north of the country and how does the Chadian state act in ways it should not, but rather: how is political order created on the ground and by whom, what kind of political moral economy is in play, what does ‘the state’ mean from a local point of view, and how do political actors draw on their own version of history to negotiate legitimacy. These are questions that I feel the contemporary social sciences are rather ill equipped to answer, because standard models of political organisation are either derived from impossible European archetypes (the famous ‘Westphalian state’) or fundamentally derogative.
I would now like to pursue this line of thought further. There is a strong tradition of assembly politics that runs through northwest African political history, becoming visible in moments of crisis, such as in post-Qaddafi Libya for instance. Many of these assemblies produced written archives going back to before the colonial conquest, some still function today. My aim is to see how far this ‘assembly-from’ can provide an entry point into regional political history, while at the same time helping us to break out of the straitjacket of what still passes as ‘standard’, that is to say profoundly Eurocentric, political theory.
From Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara (2025):
The heat of the day finally abates and conversation picks up again as our pickup truck speeds along the one straight, long road. We pull into Talmin as the sun is setting over the dunes that stretch as far as the eye can see. The qsar is hardly visible in the evening light, its crumbling mud-brick buildings blending into the surrounding dunes that are gradually reclaiming this fragile outpost of human life. Nobody lives here anymore; the qsar’s former inhabitants have all moved to the modern village that we saw on the main road before turning into the sandy track that led us here. Over there, they have access to running water and a primary school and, most importantly, the road itself. They return periodically to visit their old houses, digging them out from under the sand that piles up inside and blocks doorways and gives the impression that somehow, the old qsar was built for people smaller and nimbler than we are. The next day, our host, Abdelmalek, will take us to his own family home, built from mud brick many years ago. It still contains his grandfather’s collection of manuscripts, mostly letters, contracts and other administrative documents, written neatly in locally produced ink on small scrolls that were then rolled up tightly and stored in woven baskets hung from the rafters that hold up the low ceiling.
For now, however, we are heading to the centre of the qsar. It is already bustling with people, perhaps 200 of them, all men, all clad in white turbans and robes, in an atmosphere of quiet anticipation and excitement. Here and there, groups of men start humming and stop again. When it finally starts, the ahellil seems to come from nowhere. First there was small talk, chatter, greetings, movement; then suddenly everybody is intent on the same chant, ebbing and flowing, with a few drums beating to keep the rhythm, an occasional flute and rhythmic clapping of hands. It is pitch dark by now, no moon, no electricity, just stars and the flicker of burning cigarettes. Polyphonies develop, disappear. I recognise words, phrases I have heard elsewhere: religious invocations in Arabic, repeated words. Others remain totally obscure to me.
The night wears on. The chanting never seems to stop. When people step away from the circle of singers for a break, others seamlessly replace them. Most have put brown woollen burnouses over their white gandouras, with a pointed hood to protect them from the cold that gradually creeps in. There are still no women in sight, although elsewhere they are regular participants and indeed have their own version of the ahellil, called tagerrabt. At about 3 a.m., a bowl of food – harīra, thick chickpea-and-lentil soup – materialises. There is a faint odour of marijuana. Somebody has lent me a burnous, too, and nobody seems to notice or perhaps rather show any interest in my presence. I finally fall asleep, crouched next to a mud-brick wall on a pile of sand that is ice-cold to the touch. When I wake up in the early morning, I can see the first sunbeams outlining the dunes to the east of the qsar. The chanting is still going on, a little more quietly but unabated. As the sun rises, one after another, the men get up, pray, shake out their burnouses, thank each other and praise God, and disappear. By midday, Talmin is once more deserted.
In 2008, the ‘ahellil of the Gourara’ was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage as a ‘Berber musical and poetic genre’. It had come to prominence in Algeria as a ‘Berber tradition’ in the late 1970s as northern Berber-speaking authors travelled south and were struck by its poetic beauty and richness. The first published version of texts was penned by the prominent Berber activist Mouloud Mammeri in 1984. At that time, Berber activists were struggling against proponents of nation-wide Arabisation who tended to be associated – wrongly or rightly – with Islam. Their aim was to reclaim a place for their language and literature in independent Algeria and to prove that it had even deeper roots than the country’s Islamisation and concomitant Arabisation. ‘Islamisation’ in this reading was seen as an external process that had imposed an alien religion and language on prior cultural and social relations, which, with careful restoration work, could still be salvaged. Mammeri therefore presented the ahellil as somehow prior to, and outside, Islam, an understanding that is clearly reflected in the UNESCO description. Yet, as pointed out by the anthropologist Rachid Bellil, for the performers themselves, the ahellil is above all else a religious duty and a spiritual experience.
Both interpretations have their place in Algerian national politics and history, but what makes the ahellil transcend them is its sheer beauty. Only when it is heard – any online search will yield a selection – can a listener begin to understand how it is that it, and other practices like it, cannot be so easily contained. In fact, the categories put forward in the debates sketched above (‘Berber’, ‘Arab’, ‘indigenous’, ‘foreign’, ‘religion’, ‘art’) bear a promise of simplicity that they cannot fulfil. The realities they point to are so entangled that to pull them apart would be to destroy whatever they purport to describe and whatever we are trying to understand.
Much like the ahellil, Islam in the Sahara was never an artificial layer superimposed on local realities. It participated and still participates in every aspect of local societies and culture. At the same time, Islam, like all other revealed religions, derives its spiritual appeal and claim to absolute truth from its universality. Trying to understand Islam in a region such as the Sahara – in which Islam is central to virtually all aspects of social and cultural life but which itself has long been marginal to the centres of Islamic learning and statehood – requires a careful balancing act between these two poles, the locally and historically particular and the universal, the many and the one. It also demands peeling away the many stereotypes that have been used to describe Saharan – or even ‘African’ – Islam for so long that these stereotypes have in some places become part of the thing itself.
…
On 22 August 2016, Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a member of the northern Malian Islamist organisation Ansār al-Dīn, was brought to trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Brussels, accused of war crimes by the Malian government. He was indicted for leading the destruction of nine shrines and parts of the Sidi Yahya mosque in Timbuktu, one of which was a UNESCO-certified World Heritage site. He was sentenced to nine years in prison and fined €2.7 million in compensation for his victims, although the identity of these victims was not specified in the judgement. By 2015, in any case, the shrines had been re-built with UNESCO funding, and a ceremony was held to hand the keys back to their ‘traditional owners’.
The physical destruction of zāwiyas has become something of a trademark of radical Islamists throughout the region (and beyond: as noted above, Afghanistan, also a frontier region, shares both a similar zāwiya tradition and attraction to would-be mujahidin). In Western media, these incidents tend to be described as radical, dynamite-toting foreigners attacking local heritage, which is seen as standing for ‘moderate Islam’. The destruction of manuscripts in Timbuktu tends to be read in the same vein and for many clearly put ‘Islamist terrorists’ beyond the pale of any civilised interaction even more than their other unpleasant habits – the terrorising and killing of civilians. These attacks were cited as irrefutable proof of Islamists’ ignorance and hostility towards learning, knowledge or even ‘Islam’ itself.
This interpretation might be partially true, but as always, things were rather more complicated. Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi was in no way a ‘foreigner’ ignorant of local tradition but was very much home-grown. He hailed from the suburbs of Timbuktu, where many nomadic pastoralists had been forced to settle during the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. These suburbs were often little more than makeshift slums, and their inhabitants still remain excluded, socially and economically, from the heart of the city. He blew up the shrines of saints whose prestige, like that of all other Saharan saints, derived from their foreign origin and their inscription in a religious topography that was anything but local. Rather, it reads like a list of the most prestigious centres of learning in the Islam world – many of them places which by now have become virtually inaccessible to ordinary Malians. Sidi Yahya himself was reputedly from Andalusia.
We can surmise that the real targets of Ahmad al-Faqi’s wrath were not the shrines themselves but the saints’ contemporary descendants. Centuries after the saints’ demise, these people are still at the heart of the current Timbuktu elite. After all, shrines, like zāwiyas, are, as we have seen throughout this chapter, not just monuments to the dead but also active nodes in vast networks of power and wealth. They stand not only for a particular form of religiosity – which, as we have seen, can vary from one zāwiya to the next and over time – but also for a particular socio-economic and political order in which people like Ahmad al-Faqi can only occupy an inferior position. Islamic reformism of the kind that usually inspires attacks on shrines states that everybody, regardless of origin, race, class or status, can achieve direct access to Islamic knowledge without the intercession of local elites. This, then, was a conflict not between nasty universal ideas and cosy local realities but between different kinds of universalisms and the harsh local socio-economic realities they have long legitimised.
Although Ahmad al-Faqi’s means of action were radical, he was in no way alone in his hostility. For many contemporary Saharans and North Africans, zāwiyas stand not just for ‘superstition’ but for a ‘feudal’ past and its hierarchical prejudice that it is high time to abolish. This perception is made worse by current attempts by all North African and many West African governments to instrumentalise the zāwiya tradition for their own (usually conservative and deeply authoritarian) ends, for instance, by using them to gather votes and for electoral campaigns. In exchange, they often promise funds and the restitution of land that was nationalised earlier. If we consider that zāwiyas have, over time, accrued considerable power as landowners and in many cases as slave-owners, there is in fact much for ordinary people to worry about in the current alignment of interests between authoritarian governments and revived Sufi orders and their zāwiyas.