The novel “Desert Devils” (original title “Al-Majus”) is one of the most famous works of Libyan writer Ibrahim al-Quni, winner of numerous Arab and international literary prizes.
The novel presents an epic picture of the life of the people of the Sahara, the Great Desert, where ancient tales, wise sayings of distant ancestors, and the aspirations of the present-day people are intertwined, some of whom seek God, while others are obsessed with base passions and the eternal pursuit of gold and power. This is a book about attempts to regain the lost paradise through the creation of an earthly city of happiness.
Rarely has a work of fiction allowed us to delve so deeply into a foreign culture, to familiarize ourselves with myths and legends in such detail, to get in touch with the history of another people, as Ibrahim Al-Quni’s novel did. When we open it, we are not just transported to the heart of the Sahara, we are immersed in the details of life of the Tuaregs – proud riders of the desert, their slaves and blacks, their neighbors – Arabs and Berbers, and we begin to realize the correctness of someone’s remark about the incredible diversity of cultural and ethnic differences of the inhabitants of the Black Continent. Because I finally realized why my friend of student years so persistently corrected me when I called his Tuaregs (he studied at the Faculty of Oriental Studies) Arabs.
On the other hand, it is not for nothing that all the reviewers of this novel tell so little about the plot of the book – the plot here does not just recede into the background, it is so often swept away in the sand by the inexorably blowing winds that at times you have to spend a lot of effort to unearth its origins, to remember those characters whom the author left on the previous pages. And this is not a flaw of the novel, it is just a peculiarity of life in the desert, with which the reader has to come to terms. You can’t do otherwise in the desert, and you realize it quite quickly.
And then you stop being surprised by the fact that Tuareg men cover their faces and their women are not as submissive and obedient as it is customary in the rest of the Muslim world, by the fact that not only camels, but also scarabs, mountain sheep, stones and water speak to a real desert dweller…. That gold should be avoided and silver should be rejoiced in as a greeting from a distant mother moon, that to say aloud the name of an ibijji means to bring him a thousand steps closer to the herd…. I have learned so much about life in the desert that now I know I don’t belong there. I could be there only as a captive, and all the power of my spirit could not change the laws of the desert.