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Brahim El Guabli, "Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences" (U California Press, 2025)
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Marshall Poe
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Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the Biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBM Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Ibrahim Fawzi
Hello everyone, and welcome to the New Box Network. I'm your host, Ibrahim Fawzi, and today I'm super pleased to be joined by another Ibrahim, Ibrahim El Ghwebli, the author of Desert A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences, recently published by the University of California Press. Welcome to the show, Brahim.
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Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Thank you, Ibrahim. Nice to meet you and nice to talk to you.
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Ibrahim Fawzi
Thanks for accepting our invitation. And let's start at the beginning. This book opens from a deeply personal place. Your family history, your hometown, your relationship to the desert. When did you realize that what you were living inside was not just geography, but ideology?
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Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Thank you, Ibrahim, for this great question. I have to be honest with you that I only realized that after I was writing the book. The idea for this book started, I would say, in 2009, 2010. And at that time I was reading Ibrahim Al Kouni, the Libyan novelist. And I was reading Abd al Rahman Munif, the very famous Saudi writer. And I was just interested in deserts. And particularly for Munif, it was political imprisonment, and for Alkuni, it was the Amazigh they mentioned of the Sahara and the mythology and all of that. And when I first wanted to write this book, I really wanted to take the direction of just looking at literature and, you know, how deserts are depicted and all of that. But the more I read, the more I realized that there is a conceptual void. There is no framework that is transportable between deserts and that there is a void to fill. And that's how I came up with this idea of Saharanism, to use as a framework to look at deserts in a comparative way and also to explain the things that happen in deserts. And it's through this process of thinking about deserts that I actually came to think about my own home and what has been happening in my hometown of Ouarzazet, and particularly through these projects of Taqah. And as I say here, my father is Sahrawi, he's from the Sahara, and my mother is black. And I was just. Just recently talking to my brother, and we were talking about, like, because my brother is 10 years older than me, and he got to see my grandparents, and now he knew more people than I did, of course. And he told me that in our family, some of the women were actually had these large earrings and they were wearing bracelets on their feet. And he said, I'm 100% convinced that they are all linked to sub Saharan Africa. And no, I'm very curious again to see where I can find more information about these family histories. But to come to answer your question, like moving from home to ideology, it's through the process of research and understanding what's happening in these arid spaces that I came to that conclusion.
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Ibrahim Fawzi
Yeah, this makes sense. And you write very clearly that this is not a history of deserts, but a history of ideas about deserts. Why was it important for you to make that distinction from the start?
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Ibrahim El Ghwebli
This distinction is really important because methodologically, you cannot really make a claim about all deserts. Or like. Right. Well, you can make a claim about what happens in deserts, but you cannot write the history of all deserts, because that's a project of not just one lifetime, but of lifetimes. And it's important to say that there are specialists who know each and every desert intimately, who can trace what happens in this desert, specifically when and how. And there are different temporalities that you can look at. There are different fields of study that can help you think about the histories of places in general. And that's not a project that I want or can undertake just because it's so tremendous and it's not something that one individual can do. However, you can do a history of ideas about deserts by looking at the patterns that are repeated, the discourses that drive conversations about deserts, by looking at actions and enterprises that unfold in deserts, and by trying to conceptualize what that means for nuclear testing to take place in deserts, for example, what does it mean for a state to place, like the chemical weapon industry or the nuclear waste in a desert? What does it mean for a state or for a company to use a desert for solar energy? What does it mean to think about deserts as these lawless places where you can do whatever you want in total impunity? These are some ideas that you can see converging and reducing these very rich and important geographies landscapes, topographies and biomes into very narrow cliches that are repeated across desert. So there is a difference between writing the history of deserts and writing a history of ideas that reduce deserts to something that I claim are not wonderful.
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Ibrahim Fawzi
And you introduce Saharanism as a framework, almost a sibling, but not a twin to Orientalism. So for the benefit of our listeners, how would you define Saharanism? Because I think most of our listeners are just encountering the term for the very first time.
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Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Yeah. So Saharanism for me, and I have to say that there is another colleague from Algeria who used the term before me, and his understanding of it is definitely very similar to Orientalism. So for him, Saharanism is the Orientalism of the desert. Whereas for me, and sometimes I find some issues with that use because it gets into these eulogy of the messed up colonial policies that happened in deserts. And it's almost like a praise of the stuff which I disagree with. My methodology is more decolonial. And my definition of the term Saharanism or my reorientation of the term of Saharanism is to be an ideology that undergirds everything that happens in deserts. And the perceptions that we have about deserts as first of all, empty, lifeless, lawless, dangerous and exploitable and extractable places that opens up the space of the desert to a multitude of uses based on the power relations between the people who encounter them and the people who inhabit them. And of course, between the space itself. So if you think about Orientalism, and it's a field of expertise, it's a field of expertise about the Orient. And if you think about Edward Said, Edward Said does not say, says like that the Orient doesn't exist. It's just an imaginative expertise that's created and that's deployed for political reasons. And the Orientalist is in Paris or London or in New York, and they are theorizing this space from these locations. Right, of course. Whereas for me, what I'm saying is like, first of all, deserts are everywhere in the world. There are deserts in Latin America, they are in North America, they are in Europe, they are in Africa, they are in Asia. So I'm really interested in a geography that's transnational, transcontinental, and not tethered to one place or one space. And they're not imaginative spaces. They are actually real spaces that exist that you can visit, that you can engage with. However, there is an overlap between Orientalism and Saharanism in terms of colonization, in terms of power dynamics between some spaces and power holders. However, the main difference for me is that Saharanism is not the province or the specialization of Europeans. Even people within desert communities can engage in Saharanism as long as they use the textbook definition of Saharanism, like when you think about a lot of Gulf rulers like Mohammed bin Salman or Dubai, and they produce and reproduce Saharanism in ways that of course, like there is self orientalization and Orientalism, of course. But for me, I don't think that Saharanism is like Europeans and Americans having ideas about the Sahara. Everyone who has these ideas about the Sahara, for me, it doesn't matter what language they speak, where they come from, what location they occupy, engages in Saharanism and needs to desaharanize themselves to see desert under a different light. So that would be my main differentiation between these two. But of course, I think another thing to add to this is that when you think about the Sahara, I think that there is a mistake that we always use Orientalism and Orientalization to think about a place like Tamazha or. Or what Amazigh people call the Amazigh homeland, which has been called North Africa or the Maghreb. I can assure you that you will never meet somebody in this area who says, I'm an Oriental. People say, I'm Azir, I'm a North African, I'm this. So it's also important to not just impose these definitions on places. They are important, they're powerful conceptually. They can help us think about things. But I feel that Orientalism does not really capture, for example, the situation in the Sahara or in North Africa. Europeans can use it. That's their problem. But I don't want to reproduce that same paradigm to look at this region, which I think is definitely very, very different.
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Ibrahim Fawzi
Yeah, wonderful. I can see also at the very beginning, you mentioned Abdurrahman Munif and Ibrahim El Cooney, and very big fan of them. So how do these writers imagine deserts? Not as voids, but as ethical worlds?
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Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Yeah, thank you for that question. It's great. I think I'll start chronologically. Abdurrahman Munif, whom, like people know, was trained in oil economics in Yugoslavia. He was from, you know, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. He lived in Jordan for a while and then in Syria. He was this really larger than life intellectual and literary figure whom I think was really instrumental in bringing a lot of critical ideas about decolonization, about architecture, about desert ecologies, about the misuses of deserts for imprisonment and political incarceration. And also he healed or he offered a different vision of a goal future that's not solely dependent on oil. So if you take Abd al Rahman Munif. His ethics was grounded in the desert, in the Arabian Peninsula, in the traditions, the tribal traditions that he talks about in one of his works. These like crossings, his father was a merchant, these crossings of borders and connections, his understanding of the inadequacy of important architectural models into the Gulf. He says, for example, the model in Hong Kong or like in San Francisco, does not suit the weather or the needs of people in the Gulf, because in the Gulf there is space, you have more land, the demographic density is less than, for example, Hong Kong and San Francisco or New York. And through these ideas, he thinks about what I would call a desert future that is more reconciled with the desert, with the climate, with the needs of the people. And he even gets into ideas of consumerism, the shift in habits, the relationship to land. He talks about the fact that land became purchasable and that led to practices that, for example, prioritize the money over nature and money over relationships. And then Alcuni, of course, like he wrote over a hundred novels, he has done a ton of work to sustain the desert as a literary and intellectual project. And so for Elkuni, I use his notion of the unity of creatures, which I find as both an ethical and concept, but also as a concept that helps us think about the creatures in the desert and how they can co. Survive. Like for him, or the unity of creatures is an important and crucial relationship that ties the survival of the humankind to the survival of all other creatures. So an approach that's only focused on humans would only say, well, we prioritize the survival of human beings, right? But Le Couni goes against that by saying that my survival as a human being in the desert is contingent on the survival of the gazelle, of the wadden, or the snake, of other creatures that together form this life. And taken together, Alkuni and Munif helped me in the last chapter of the book, what I call desert eco care or ecological care, to articulate what this desert ecological care is like, what its principles are, and how I see it through their work as like the foundational figures of this desert literature and desert thinking, but also in other works, like the work of Omar Al Ansari Tabib Timbuktu, the physician of Timbuktu, which is about the nuclear tests that France carried out in Algeria in 1960, and Hassin's book Le desere de l' enferre des ISS Nuclear the Desert in the Hell Fire of the French Nuclear Tests. And these works allow me to engage with the ways in which this desert space is. The richness of this desert space is reflected in their works, but also pushes us to think beyond the cliches and beyond any superficial ideas that we might have received about desert biomes from our readings or the popular ways in which people talk, generally talk about desert spaces.
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Marshall Poe
Yeah.
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Ibrahim Fawzi
So talking about the ecological care, do you see storytelling itself as a form of ecological care?
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Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Yeah. I mean, storytelling is very foundational, because when you think about, like, Ibrahim Al Kuni's deployment of mythology, of deployment of, like, Tuareg ethics in his novels and his strive to always represent the desert as this dynamic, living, rich space that is not just inscribed within, like, a physical space, but that has, like, a mythological dimension. There is the desert that we see, but there is also the desert that we dream of. There is the arid land and the desert that's kind of like, sought after by the Tuareg. So if you look, for example, at different works, you will see that for Elkoni, there is the world we see and the world we don't see. This relationship is very important because what it does is that it stages the possibility to think differently about the desert as a harsh space. I mean, I'm not saying that it's not harsh, difficult water scarcity, food scarcity, but also there is this other desert that's dreamed of that's like, full of water, full of flowers, full of life that the Tuareg is always hoping to encounter, but the Tuareg does not transcend the conditions of his real world. So storytelling transmits what people are thinking, but also creates the realm of the possible. And I think that's why his work is really important. For Abdurrahman Munif, he's more explicit in a lot of ways. First of all, he talks about the state formation through the discovery of the oil industry. And then once states are established, they become these oppressive regimes where authority is transferred through lineage, but also where the oil business strikes a union with a political entity that then creates this monstrous reality of consumerism, of inadequate architecture, of blatant use of power to dispossess people. You can think about the city of Neom in Saudi Arabia and just the number of people who have been imprisoned, displaced, and also, like, the monstrosity of an architecture that is not adequate. Like, if you look at YouTube and see how many engineers and architects have videos online saying, this is the most insane thing you can do in a desert space. It's going to kill birds, it's going to impact biodiversity. It's just, you know, and Monique had said these things like 40 years ago, 30 years ago. And storytelling here is really very helpful because what it does, one of the aspects of storytelling is that it's projective, so it can tell us things that are not happening yet, but it's also historical in that it records things that are happening. And so I think storytelling is definitely central to this deserty cook hair. And it's very important in my analysis in this chapter.
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Ibrahim Fawzi
Yeah, amazing. And I think Saharanism or desert fiction overlaps with petrofiction, something like that.
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Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Yeah, definitely. And petromo. Like, there are a lot of, like, concepts that I use in the book that relate to that field, particularly like this petrofiction, petro modernity, hyper modernity, oil money, and so on and so forth. But it all boils down to this idea that deserts, particularly like the Gulf, if you like, is reduced to a place where you're extracting oil and extracting oil mercilessly because the space is already considered empty and dead and has no value other than the value of what comes from underneath the soil, which is shale gas or oil and stuff. And this reduction of the desert is part of this larger conception of Saharanism, because book upon book, article upon article, film upon film, what you will see is that the desert is a place you went to get rich. Dunes of gold, rivers of oil under the earth. And the attention that's paid to the life that exists in a place like the Arabian Peninsula or the Sahara is very minimal because the orientation is always, what can we expect Extract from here? And that's like an overpowering thing, because it's an education. And it's an education you receive by osmosis. You don't even pay attention to it. Like when you look at, like, a commercial that's played by a very famous TV channel, or when you're looking at a magazine, or when you're. You're internalizing Saharanism. We don't even, you know, we don't even know. It's just because it's everywhere. But. And that's also why of the reasons I'm really excited about the term and the book is because it pins down some of its aspects and it provides the language to know what it is and to pay attention to its existence. Because oftentimes when we don't know things, we don't know what's happening because we don't have a name for something. It doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It just needs that we need to articulate it. And once it's articulated, it Becomes normal. Like, everybody knows, for example, everybody knows Orientalism. And you know it when you see it. Like. But Edward said, incredibly, with a lot of force and brilliance, was able to create this, to put this term at the center of our concerns. And we are grateful to him for that work. And I think, yeah, today a lot of us are ashamed. Like, if you engage in anything that's even slightly orientalist, you know, you're conscious of it. So hopefully, Saharanism will become like that. It will inspire people to pay more attention to. To its aspects and its manifestations and to avoid.
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Ibrahim Fawzi
Yeah, amazing. And talking about language, you propose Arabic and English equivalents for Saharanism, like desertism. What is at stake in naming this ideology across languages?
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Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Yeah, that's important. Thank you for that question. I think so. Thinking about words is very important. I'm a literature scholar, and I think coming up with terms like istikhla and desertism is very important. The root for Saharanism, for me, comes from the Sahara and Sahara Saharanism. But I thought that if we use istihar would be very close to, like, you know, like, the derivative of, like, Orientalism. So I thought that istikhla would best capture the notions of void, both legal, ethical, social, cultural, and so on and so forth that is embedded in the notion of Saharanism, which then has the ramifications that I discuss. And then I was like, okay, great, I have this Arabic equivalent, but how is an American or British reader going to read this and feel like that they can connect to the term? So I came up with the word desertism, and I think desertism comes from the notion of, like, deserting something. Deserting. You desert your army position, you desert your function, you desert something that you have to do. And they think desertism is escaping the considerations that normally give some sort of organization or discipline to your life. And I like this coinage just because it helps me think about the desertion of ethics, the desertion of environmental considerations, the desertion of the interests of the indigenous people of the Sahara, when it comes to not just of the Sahara, but of desert hazards, when it comes to exploiting their resources, when it comes to experimenting in their environments, when it comes to engaging in fantasies, I talk about, like, sexual fantasies and deserting ethics and all of that. So I try to kind of, like, create these words and provide them as possibilities for this notion to carry into Arabic and Western languages and so on and so forth.
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Ibrahim Fawzi
Yeah, and you connect deserts to border regimes. How does Saharanism shape the way migrant deaths are normalized or rendered invisible?
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Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Yeah, absolutely. You know, so that's like. These are also like. The idea is always Saharanism. What does Saharanism allow to happen in deserts? And I think Saharanism allows tragedies to happen in deserts. Because the notion of deserting law, deserting ethics, knowing that, that whatever you do in a desert is, for example, outside the bounds or the purview of the law, and you can do whatever you want. So, for example, we hear about people disappearing in deserts. We hear about people being killed in deserts. We hear about the United States, for example, the US Mexico border being a grave or a cemetery for immigrants because the government has turned the desert into a killer. So when a desert becomes weaponized and it participates in the assassination of immigrants. So you want to come in here? Okay, great. You can cross, you cross, but the cost is your life, because we are going to push you further and further into the most difficult areas of the desert. And then nature will just take care of you. That's one way. The other way is to actually shoot at you and kill you. And then, you know, that's why you want it. In the Sahara, it's the same thing. Like when you think about the movement of migrants from sub Saharan Africa, or like what they call the southern part of Tamazra into North Africa or Northern Tamaza, there is a lot of. There are a lot of drones, Europol, there are like the European Border Protection Agency. They have their people watching the Sahara. And what this does, again, is that it pushes people to places where it's more difficult to be detected, but where it's easier to die. Either way, the result is that the desert becomes a cemetery, becomes a killer, becomes an assassin. Not because the desert is an assassin, but because humans made it into assassin, an assassin. And Saharanism is culprit, is guilty of this. And it's very important to always keep in mind this idea of Saharanism, the motivation that then these people will die and nobody will care because the desert killed it. So the desert becomes the killer and becomes blamed for it. And of course, the experimentation with like, drone technologies, which are versatile, they can be used to detect locusts, but they can also be used, improved and used to detect humans and watch humans and push them into. But the result of all of this, for example, in the Sahara, has been that even the traditional connectivity between different areas of the Sahara has been impacted. Like people who would usually go up north to markets and buy things, and like traders and merchants. And the normal life that used to be in the Sahara has been reconfigured and subjected to the hegemony of Saharanism, which is now disintegrating or has already disintegrated, the relationships between the different parts of the desert.
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Ibrahim Fawzi
Yeah, and also use the term sacrifice zones. Who gets sacrificed in the name of sustainability and who gets it? Call it progress.
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Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Yeah, that's a great question again. And I think sacrifice zones are. I think this term was first used in the Soviet Union to talk about these areas where the Soviet Union concentrated high polluting industries. And these are areas that were dedicated to mining and to really polluting industries in the United States. It's also used to talk about these corridors in the south, which are literally sacrificed for the higher value that the activities happening in them generate somewhere else. So if the pollution happens in, like, Louisiana, in, you know, like, the benefit is reaped in New York or in Los Angeles and so on and so forth. And deserts are sacrifice zones in the sense that Saharanism has turned them into areas where their life as spaces is not really valued. So the example I will give you is if you think about an oil spill, think, for example, there are oil leaks from a refinery, from a space of extraction. If you just say, well, if you say, well, there is an oil leak on the Atlantic Ocean and you say that there is an oil leak in one of the deserts, like, say in Saudi Arabia, first of all, there is probably less chance for people to know about the oil leak in the desert. And even if they know, they wouldn't care. However, if there is an oil leak on the coast, it will be on the news. Everybody would know about it. And it would elicit sentiments of anger. The disaster would be felt by people. There will be, like environmental organizations protesting it. It will be an event that everybody would know about. So we would say, oh, this is normal. It's normal because one place is visible, the other one is not. But I think in my explanation of Saharanism, my takeaway is that what operates here is a different understanding of life, because we understand deserts as being dead, as places where nothing happens, whereas the oceans are full of creatures. We think about coral reefs, we think about fish, we think about whales, we think about dolphins, we think about these beautiful creatures. Whither, whether we are aware of that or not, whether this knowledge is conscious or not, it conditions the way we behave and the way we react towards disasters that happen in these two different spaces. So again, Saharanism has reduced deserts into these dead places where life is minimal or dispensable or discardable. Whereas our education and environmental consciousness and the way we learn about seas and fisheries and sea life creates the predisposition to be scandalized by any disaster that happens at sea. So this. And then it comes down to the behavior, the reaction that it elicits when we hear about it. So what's the solution? By deconstructing Saharanism and being aware of it, we have to re envision life. We have to rethink life. What do we mean by life? Who deserves to live and who deserves to die? Why does desert life weigh less than sea life, for example? So once we start asking these questions and once we try to answer them, then the conclusion is, of course there is no difference between these lives. Life at sea and life in the desert are the same. But we have to get it into our minds that they are the same. And this extends to people. It extends also to people like do lives of the people of the desert weigh the same? Or are their lives valued as much as other lives are valued? And then you can extract from that a lot of things that can be very helpful in the constructing house of harmonism is actually very destructive. And it extends, not just. It extends from nature to people.
- [41:35]
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- [42:03]
Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Experian.
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Ibrahim Fawzi
Yeah, and yeah, this is amazing because I'm. I'm now interested in reading about hydrofiction and sea lives and all this stuff. And now we are talking about the desert and making this connection. This is amazing. Thank you for this. And I have one final question. That is you spray Saharanism across colonial, postcolonial and supposedly green futures. What surprised you most in discovering how continuous this ideology really is?
- [42:37]
Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Yeah, that's a great question again. And I think I just will take a couple minutes to talk a little bit about like the, the chapters. So the chapters. In one chapter I talk about like the. What is it called? Spiritual Saharanism. And in this, in this spiritual Saharanism, I talk about how religion has been deployed to, to fanatize the desert and represent particularly the Sahara during the 19th and early 20th century, which kind of like. And this spiritual Saharanism still continues Today, in the way Islam is talked about. So I find in spiritual Saharanism the traces of one of the earliest forms of Islamophobia, particularly in the relationship between Africa and Europe. The other one is extractive Saharanism. And this is where actually your question lies, which is imagining deserts as these places where you can extract everything, you can extract minerals, you can extract into wind, you can extract labor, you can extract people. Slavery is like one of the models of that. At some point slavery was allowed and they extracted people from the Sahara and just treated people like, you know, like a merchandise. And then when slavery stopped, then they was out loud, then they now like the desert is like a space to extract minerals, wind, uranium, and you can name it. And of course, solar energy today is one of the hot industries to save us from the calamity of climate change and to help us support green futures. However, we have to ask questions about the histories of solar energy, which are deeply embedded in, in colonialism. And actually Egypt was like one of the earliest places where this technology was. A frank showman from Philadelphia in The, I think 1914, 1915, Kirchner, the British governor in Egypt, invited him to start to use solar energy to water some farmlands in Egypt. And he proposed a lot of ideas about how to do it and then how we needed to kind of like cover, I don't remember the number now, but quite a huge area of the Sahara to be able to power the entirety of what he called the civilized world. So now you can think about also these notions of like, civilized and uncivilized. Who was he referring to as being civilized? They assume Euro Americans. And if you think so, civilized and uncivilized, then experimental Saharanism in this chapter talk mostly about nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, rockets, and these projects unfolded like in the Marilinga area in Australia, in the American southwest, in the Soviet Union, in the cold deserts, but also in the Sahara. You can see that the grammar of Saharanism is everywhere in the way people talk about these deserts. And then of course, I think sexual Saharanism is really important, like how people associate deserts with transgressions and with self discovery and engaging in activities that may not be accepted in what's called ordinary spaces or ordinary places. And these together give us an idea about how Saharanism operates and its different manifestations. But definitely, I think what you were talking about, the green futures, is a very dicey one, because on the one hand, we want a sustainable planet that is weaned off fossil energy and its calamitous pollutants. But at the same time, we also have to be mindful of the fact that when we talk about green energy, we're also talking about people, we're also talking about livelihoods, we're also talking about environments. And the extraction of green energy is not solely just happening, but it displaces people, it changes topographies, it impacts people's ways of living that sometimes are masked behind or discursive practices that do not allow us to see what's happening. And what I write about, my hometown, for example, is just one example. So overall, I would say that Saharanism allows us to deconstruct these practices without, of course, falling into the trap of overly feeling desperate or being pessimistic. Because that's not the goal of my project. It's more like to help people understand what's happening in desert environments and how it came to be.
- [48:51]
Ibrahim Fawzi
Amazing. Thank you, Brahim, for being with me today. I really enjoyed this conversation. I loved how deep your answers were. Thank you so much.
- [49:02]
Ibrahim El Ghwebli
Of course, Yazizi. Thank you.
- [49:05]
Ibrahim Fawzi
Dear listeners, that was my conversation with Brahim Gobly, author of Desert A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences. I highly recommend this book. I encourage you to read it slowly, attentively and critically. Thanks for listening and if you enjoyed this episode, please share it. Until next time. Goodbye.