The Libyan born Ibrahim Al Koni won, earlier this year, the Shaikh Zayed Book Prize for Literature for his novel “Nida’ Ma Kan Ba’idan” (Calling the Distant). He has received numerous awards in France and Switzerland; he was chosen as the Arab Novelist of 2005 in Asila, Morocco, and also received the prize of desert fiction from his own country.

No contemporary writer has written in such a poetic and overpowering manner about the desert. Ibrahim Al Koni’s feelings for vast stretches of empty and desolate landscape stems from his childhood spent in the desert as a member of a Tuareg tribe. Ferial Ghazoul has beautifully described Al Koni’s novels as:

“Aesthetic renderings of the passions of the desert… his texts are prose poems woven around a primordial drama”.

Gold Dust is Al Koni’s second novel to be translated in English by AUC Press in its series of Modern Arabic Literature. It was first released in 1990 in Arabic as “Al-Tibr”. Its main theme, the hero Ukhayyal’s deep attachment for his Mahri, a thoroughbred camel, is highly reminiscent of the pre-Islamic “qasidas” or odes. The most famous of these “qasidas” known as “Mu’allaqa” are renowned for their genial description of Arabian horses and camels.

In the following passage, it is difficult to imagine that the hero, Ukhayyal, is talking about his camel:

“As if in a dream, he saw their friendship as it had been at the very beginning, before they were born… He saw them together, before they were even a thought, or a feeling, in their fathers’ hearts. He saw them before they were a desire that took hold of bodies, before they were even dust drifting in the endless void. He could glimpse them back when they had been merely a sound in the wind, the echo of a song, the lamentation of strings played between the fingers of a beautiful woman… And now he saw it clearly: before they ever existed as anything, they had been as one being.”

It is interesting to note that Al Koni’s world of Bedouins is not only unknown to most English readers but also to many Arab readers. Elliott Colla rightly points out that besides the writings of Abdelrahman Munif and Miral Al-Tahawy, the nomadic segment of Arab society has been largely absent from the Arab novelistic imagination. “The historical rise of the novel as an art form is directly linked with the marginalization of nomadic pastoralism as a key component of Arab civilization. The very industrial era that enabled the one made the other obsolete” explains Colla.

Ibrahim Al Koni’s first home and the cradle of his childhood is Libya’s vast desert. In a conversation with Hartmut Fahndrich, Al Koni explains that this cradle is the north-west edge of the desert known as the ‘hammadah al hamra’ or ‘red plateau’: “I mean the immense emptiness that stretches endlessly away to the horizon, where it meets that eternally clear sky which equals in its nakedness. Together they make up one continuous body, the secret of whose intimate embrace I am in fact still searching for.”

Gold Dust is imbued with a mystical poetry. The hero’s quest for the truth and his search for God in the magnificent silence and emptiness of the desert appeals more to non Arabs than references about the nomadic way of life like the concept of nobility which are not easily understood.

Ibrahim Al-Koni left Libya, after a brief career as a journalist, to study philosophy and literature at the renowned Maxim Gorky Institute in Moscow. In 1974, while still a student, he published his first literary work, a collection of short stories. After working as a journalist in Moscow and then as an editor for a cultural magazine in Warsaw, he moved to Switzerland in 1993 where he still resides. He has written more than sixty volumes, including novels, stories and aphorisms,

Al Koni admits that the law of the desert demands that we remain constantly on the move and life is a constant journey. Al Koni took his Great Desert with him: It inspires him and is the source of his imagination. However, the desert living in his heart is not the same desert existing outside his heart. His desert is a metaphorical desert and there exists no connection between writing about the desert and living in the desert. “The signs that my Great Desert planted within me have made a poet of me, and a seeker after the truth of this world”.

In this uplifting passage, the author shows us the unique beauty of the desert sought throughout the ages by seekers of the divine Truth:

“Here, there was a stillness of the ears, and a stillness of the heart. There was God’s presence in the desert, and His presence inside a man’s chest. And while the waters of the vineyard spring may wash clean the body, only the desert can clean the soul. In the desert, the soul empties and clears and becomes free and brave in the process. And so it enables you to defy the endless open space, challenge the horizon, and explore the emptiness that leads beyond the horizon, beyond the desert void. It invites you to face the other world, the hereafter.”

Gold Dust gives us the opportunity to enjoy a beautiful novel and discover an outstanding writer. Its lyrical prose exudes the unique breath of desert life and a mystical taste of the afterlife.