In the early 1970s, the Libyan scholar, poet, and journalist Muhammad Qashat arrived at an isolated oasis in the Western Sahara. Upon meeting the Sahrawi inhabitants of the oasis, he waxed poetic about the people’s unique relationship with the desert. “There where the Sahara extends with its acacia and thorns and juniper trees, between the sands and the ocean, between the painful present and the glorious past, there spread the Arab tents,” Qashat wrote in his narrative of the journey: “A branch of the umma from which they have been isolated, moving on the backs of camels, [...] the sun has increased the brown-ness of these Arabs to another degree, but it was not able to hide the glimmer of hope in their eyes shining towards a better future” (Qashat, 1989b, p. 47).[1] Qashat, who lived most of his life among various communities around the Sahara, was enchanted by the desert as a space both beautiful and terrible. “I have loved this desert since my youth,” he wrote in a later scholarly publication: “I have exalted it and seen to its needs north and south, east and west, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Tibesti Mountains. [I am dedicated to] this desert which embraces us with its violence, and which pushes us into the face of intruders with its calmness” (Qashat, 1989a, p. 7-8). The contrast between peace and violence was more than merely rhetorical flourish; it reflected Qashat’s role as a scholar-activist and promoter of revolutionary armed struggle.
Qashat had come to the Western Sahara as an emissary of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s Libyan Arab Republic, hoping to make contact with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (Polisario) then engaged in an armed rebellion against Spain’s colonial occupation of the Sahara. Qashat was something of a professional provocateur, having previously liaised with the Dhofari rebels in Oman and disaffected Tuareg nationalists in Niger and Mali on behalf of the Qaddafi regime. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Libya was attempting to claim the mantle of anti-colonial Arab nationalism left vacant by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s death in 1970. Often mocked or dismissed out of hand, Qaddafi’s foreign policy was in fact a well-calculated attempt to activate the anti-imperial, nationalist, and Islamist sentiments of people living in a rapidly decolonizing Northwest Africa. Qashat’s work provided scholarly justification for Libyan leadership through an ethnographic account of the ties of race, environment, lineage, and language which bound the inhabitants of the Sahara. This capacious notion of Afro-Arab identity allowed Qashat to sidestep centuries of thorny debates over ethnic, racial, and linguistic differences through an emphasis on shared Islamic tradition and desert lifestyle. Qashat’s primary concern was the struggle against continuing Western imperialism, for which the rugged Saharan landscape offered the ideal platform for armed resistance. Stressing the Sahara’s Arab and Islamic traditions, he tended to elide the ethnic and racial particularities of African groups like the Tuareg. This paper reads Qashat’s journalistic and historical works to analyze his particular brand of Saharan Arab nationalism. Taking seriously the revolutionary commitments of Qaddafi’s Libya, Qashat emerges as a significant thinker and scholar-activist of the transnational Afro-Arab Left in the closing decades of the 20th century.
Qashat’s Role in Qaddafi’s Revolutionary Foreign Policy
Mohammad Said Qashat was born in al-Jawsh, Libya in 1942 and educated first in Tripoli then Cairo. Between 1959 and 1962 he taught at a primary school in Ghat, in the far southwestern corner of Libya, where he became familiar with the anti-colonial currents then sweeping the central Sahara. A prolific poet and amateur ethnographer, his writings brought him to the attention of the Libyan state. Following the coup of Qaddafi’s Free Officers Movement in 1969, Qashat was named director of the new Center for Studies and Research of Saharan Affairs in 1972, a position which he would hold for many years.
In 1969, Libya’s King Idriss I was overthrown by an Arab nationalist group of army officers. Qaddafi’s Libyan Arab Republic was guided by an anti-colonial ideology which sought to advance armed revolution across the region. Throughout the 1970s, Qaddafi redirected Libya’s oil wealth into military projects as he sought to destabilize political regimes in neighboring countries like Chad, Tunisia, and Mali which he argued were neocolonial puppets of the West.[2] In a remote terrain where both local and colonial state power had always been weak, the national loyalties of many Saharans were still potentially up for grabs in the 1970s and 80s. Libya’s revolutionary efforts should thus be understood as a significant factor in the longue durée decolonization of the Sahara which, Mark Dury has argued, “entailed border making processes and intensified efforts to fix the political affiliations of its peoples” (Drury, 2022, p.3). Qashat was a key agent of these Libyan policies, as he worked to identify disaffected political constituencies and activate tribal and religious networks across the Sahara. While Qashat was director of the Center for Saharan Affairs, Libya was engaged in a decade-long armed conflict in Chad (1978-1987) via Islamist proxies like the Fronte de libération nationale du Tchad (FROLINAT), as well as a sponsor of Tuareg opposition groups in Niger and Mali like the Front populaire pour la libération du Sahara Arabe Central (FPLSAC). Libya provided the movement with funding and military training, and even arranged for some FPLSAC fighters to participate in the Lebanese Civil War (Lecocq, 2010, p. 286-88.
In this light, the Center for Studies and Research on Saharan Affairs appears as a soft power element of Libya’s revolutionary policies in the Sahel. It capitalized on the goodwill of Saharan communities for the Qaddafi regime, whose redistribution of oil wealth made Libya into an island of prosperity during harsh droughts which shook the region in the 1970s (Kohl, 2010). As director of the Center, Qashat produced dozens of ethnographies, poetry collections, and biographical dictionaries seeking to advance his ideology of Saharan Arab nationalism which bound the region’s inhabitants together in anticolonial struggle. Qashat’s Saharan nationalism was distinct from Nasserist Pan Arabism in its attention to marginal communities like the Sahrawis and Dhofaris, its emphasis on the desert as a constituent element of Arab identity, and its flexible inclusion of indigenous African groups like the Amazigh, Tubu, and Tuareg. Although this paper analyzes Saharan Arab nationalism as an idiosyncratic personal project of Qashat, it was part of a broader ideology of Afro-Arab anticolonial struggle which the Qaddafi regime developed in various scholarly publications and media strategies. Qashat was joined in the Libyan government by the Sudanese-born poet of “Songs of Africa,” Muhammad al-Fayturi, who served as Libya’s ambassador to Morocco and Lebanon in the 1970s (Frangieh, 2017). In the same period, the state also sponsored Syrian director Moustapha Akkad’s big-budget 1981 film “Lion of the Desert,” starring Anthony Quinn as Libyan anti-colonial fighter Omar al-Mukhtar (Twair, 2006, p. 48-9). Although the Center for Saharan Affairs was headquartered in Tripoli, its works were republished in places as far afield as Tunis, Cairo, Beirut, and even Cagliari, Italy, providing some evidence for the influence and reach of Qashat’s ideas.[3]
This paper uses several major Qashat publications to analyze his vision of Saharan Arab nationalism. From Dhofar to Sagia Hamra records two trips Qashat took in 1972 and 1973, respectively, to visit representatives of the armed revolutions then happening in Oman and Western Sahara. In pairing the two accounts together, Qashat explicitly connects revolutions against Spanish colonialism and British neo-colonialism as part of the same Pan-Arab struggle rooted in isolated geographies. The Tuareg: Arabs of the Sahara is an ethnographic account of the namesake Saharan ethnic group published in 1987. Based on Qashat’s travels and participant observation in various communities across the Central Sahara, it argues for the Tuareg’s inclusion in the Arab umma. The Jihad of Libyans Against France in the Sahara is a historical account of various armed anti-colonial movements in the Sahara, published in 1989. Concerned primarily with tribal genealogy and hagiographic biographies of Saharan mujahidin, the work depicts a century-long civilizational conflict between French colonialism and the Libyans who bravely stood to oppose them. Together, these three works serve as a rich corpus to understand how Qashat linked ethnic identity, revolutionary struggle, and desert landscapes together in his vision of Saharan Arab nationalism.
Ethnographies of the Sahara
Contemporary scholarship has convincingly demonstrated that the production of scholarly knowledge was a key element of French rule in North, West, and Central Africa. Colonial administrators worked closely with linguists, ethnographers, and sociologists to understand the populations they governed, making them legible for taxation, conscription, and discipline (Burke, 2014). Divide and rule strategies called for the identification and reification of distinct racial and ethnic groups, as demonstrated by the infamous “Kabyle Myth” of French Algeria (Hannoum, 2001). As French rule extended into the Sahara in the latter half of the 19th century, colonial administrators struggled to navigate the harsh and inaccessible terrain. Indeed, Brahim El Guabli has argued that these qualities of the desert enabled the development of Saharanism, a style of Orientalist discourse founded on “the universalizing idea of deserts as empty and lifeless spaces, providing the conceptual justification for brutal, conscienceless, and life-threatening actions in desert environments” (El Guabli, 2022, p. 58). Having convinced themselves of the backwardness and intractability of Algerian Arabs, many French officials were in search of non-Arab local allies in the Sahara. As Benjamin Brower has argued, this led to the invention of a genealogy for the Tuareg as a pre-modern warrior class amenable to French ambitions of colonial domination. This process of Orientalist knowledge production had a strong racial dimension, as colonial discourses glorified the Tuaregs’ strong physique and light skin; in the words of French ethnologist Henri Duveyrier “without [the Tuareg] the deserts they inhabit and that separate the white race from the black race would be impassable” (qtd. in Brower, 2009, p. 230.) In their quest to emphasize the Tuaregs’ racial distinctness from the other inhabitants of the Sahel, French writers invented increasingly fanciful tales about these “alien invaders” of the Sahara, including origins among the ancient Vandals and the lost city of Atlantis (Lecocq, 2010, p. 99). Although the Tuareg never fulfilled expectations for reliable partnership, with sporadic armed resistance continuing across the Sahara and Sahel through the 1910s, French rule slowly extended across Central Africa; Chad was formally incorporated as a colony under civil administration in 1920 and Niger in 1922.
In North Africa, anticolonial movements like the FLN in Algeria and the Neo-Destour party in Tunisia articulated their demands for independence in the language of Arab nationalism. Yet in the Sahara and Sahel, colonial legacies complicated the relationships between race, ethnicity, and national identity. In the closing years of the 1950s, French officials created a new territorial in the Central Sahara called the Organisation commune des régions sahariennes (OCRS), hoping to insulate the region from the growing independence movements in Algeria and West Africa. They found a local ally in Timbuktu cleric Muhammad Mahmoud Ould al-Shaykh, whose Islamic scholarship and political activism had advocated for the sovereignty of Arab and Tuareg groups in the region since the 1930s (Scheele, 2012, p. 140). Ould al-Shaykh became an enthusiastic supporter of the OCRS project, and with French sponsorship he embarked on an intense campaign of petitions, publications, and public lectures arguing that Saharan nomad communities formed a nation distinct from Sub Saharan African groups in Mali. Ultimately the OCRS collapsed and most of its territory was integrated into newly independent Mali, with the state’s first president Modibo Keita condemning Ould al-Shaykh as a colonial toady who “created the myth of the nomad and the myth of the sedentary, the myth of the white and the myth of the black” (qtd. in Lecocq, 2010, p. 60). Yet the demands for Tuareg and Arab sovereignty persisted, leading to a series of armed conflicts beginning in 1963 with the Kidal Revolt and continuing into the present day.
Some scholars have emphasized how postcolonial politics were driven by racial animosities, rooted in local culture but exacerbated by French intervention in favor of ‘white’ Tuaregs and Arabs. Chouki El Hamel, for example, has argued that anti-Black racism became a defining aspect of Sahara society in the early modern period, with enslavement of Black Africans providing “the ideological foundation for a society divided by skin color” (El Hamel, 2013, p. 10). Bruce Hall extends these arguments in his history of race in West Africa. He argues that Ould al-Shaykh drew on nationalist vocabulary derived from the Arab nahda of the Middle East, introducing words like watan [nation/homeland], sha’b [people], and zanj [Black African] to create new racialized arguments about Saharan territory “that clearly followed the emerging logic of the nation state” (Hall, 2011, p. 303-306). From this perspective, Arab nationalist claims in the Sahara carry an undercurrent of colonialism and white supremacy.
Yet critics argue that it is inappropriate to project theories of race and slavery developed in a North American context onto Saharan history. Without apologizing for anti-Black racism, they caution against exporting a Black/white racial binary onto a region with complex histories of overlapping racial, ethnic, and religious identification. “Slavery does not in any way exhaust
Morocco’s historical ties with Africa, notably West Africa,” writes Zakia Salime. “These ties were knotted in webs of exchanges between scholars, Sufi masters, students, spouses, trade partners, and more. They were strengthened later by dreams about liberation, Third-Worldism, and Pan-Africanism” (Salime, 2024). Mahmood Mamdani emphasizes that West African identities were historically plural and mutable, with ethnicity and race only becoming exclusive identity categories in the colonial period. Historicizing race, he writes, requires “bringing to light how the precolonial was articulated with the colonial under terms shaped by colonial power” (Mamdani, 2018). Thus this essay’s reading of Qashat’s Saharan Arab nationalism will focus on the flexible and contingent ways in which he applies ethnic and racial identities to inhabitants of the region.
Qashat was an accomplished scholar who was fully aware of the thorny debates over race and ethnicity in the Sahara. He was conversant in French ethnographic scholarship, regularly citing early 20th century authorities like Paul Marty and Henri Lhote while also maintaining a healthy suspicion of their ultimate motives. “European spies assumed scientific airs, with the public intention of exploration and knowledge but with the real intention of colonizing the land, humiliating and conquering its people [sh’oub],” he writes of early exploratory expeditions in the Sahara, “Europeans analyze for themselves what they forbid to others” (Qashat, 1989a, 87-88). He matched European Orientalists in boots-on-the-ground experience, regularly boasting of his many years living with nomadic groups and enduring the hardships of desert life. [4] At the same time, he was also grounded in a centuries-long Arab historical tradition; his library included the works of classical historians like Ibn Khaldoun, al-Tabari, and al-Hassan Muhammad al-Wazzan (Leo Africanus) as well as contemporaries like the Nigerien politician and professor André Salifou and the Mauritanian diplomat Muhammad Mahmoud Ould Dadi. These Saharan scholars, like Qashat himself, were simultaneously engaged in scholarly publication and the building of postcolonial nation states. Like Ould al-Shaykh, Qashat was also familiar with the Arab nationalist thought of writers like the Beirut-born Khayr al-Din al-Zirikli. Qashat’s authority was ultimately grounded in his participation in the very movements he wrote about. His footnotes were as likely to reference interviews and personal correspondence with Saharan rebels as they were to cite French Orientalists; he was even more likely to cite his own extensive body of work on Saharan history and culture. Indeed, Qashat made few claims to scholarly impartiality and unabashedly directed political appeals to an Arabic readership steeped in anti-colonial nationalism. “As I write this book in 1988, we are still face to face with France in the Sahara,” he concludes Jihad of the Libyans by asking his readers, “Will the revolution achieve victory, and remove France with no return? Or will the inhabitants of the Sahara decide to submit themselves under French wings?” (Qashat, 1989a, p.201). For Qashat, Saharan Arab nationalism was not merely a discursive tool but an all-encompassing national ideology and a daily practice which defined his life’s work.
Saharan Arab Nationalism in Qashat’s Work
The Sahara is a central theme across Qashat’s many writings. He loved the desert’s vast expanses, personifying it as a female companion with an alluring double nature. “She has greeted me with her storms of fury and her burning eastern winds; she has greeted me with her cold western winds in the dead of winter,” he writes with poetic rhyme in the introduction to Jihad of the Libyans: “I have come to her in the summer when the lizard licks his lips from the heat of her sun, and I have come to her in the winter when the snakes cannot move from the bitterness of the cold” (Qashat, 1989a, p. 7). Despite its harshness, Qashat’s Sahara hosts human inhabitants who, like the lizards, snakes, and gazelles, live in harmony with the environment. For him, the relationship between the desert and its people was timeless and immutable. Qashat mocked European claims of ‘discovering’ and ‘mapping’ the Sahara, writing that “for us Arabs of the region, the original inhabitants of the Sahara, we cannot put a date on our discovery of the Sahara, just as man cannot put a date to his discovery of speaking, singing, or dancing; or water and air; or light and dark” (Qashat, 1989a, p.22). Native Saharans have adapted to the desert’s life threatening extremes through intimate knowledge of the terrain and improvements to its water sources. “Every time I wandered east and west through the Sahara,” Qashat writes, “my appreciation and wonder increased for her noble people, who have laid out its paths, dug its wells, and connected its shores with great trust and patience” (Qashat, 1989a, p.9). He describes a symbiosis between human and natural world in which, in contrast to non-arid lands, the balance of power favors the environment. People must adapt to the desert, not the other way around. Far from being a problem to be overcome, Qashat embraced the austerity of the Saharan lifestyle for its purifying and edifying qualities. “Shepherding is the dominant profession,” he writes, “which does not merely fill the time, but makes man more contemplative and closer to god, far from the city and its amusements, and the villages and their gatherings; it sends man far into the desert, and whenever he wanders he finds his cattle are his only goal” (Qashat, 1989a, p.24). Because “man is worth nothing in this desert,” its inhabitants have an innate sense of determination and strength. When Qashat met Polisario fighters who had been imprisoned by Spanish colonial authorities, they told him that “entering prison has become something normal for Sahrawis, it is like a necessity of life in the Sahara” (Qashat, 1974, p. 89).
For Qashat, the modern history of the Sahara was defined by its inhabitants’ struggle against European domination. He couches this struggle in religious, political, and nationalist terms, variously describing armed resistance efforts as jihad against a “French crusader invasion,” a “defense of the homeland [watan] against internal colonialism,” and a “revolution against imperial colonialism.” He refuses the tendency of postcolonial historians to treat Saharan resistance movements as spatially and historically isolated to a particular national geography. Rather, he sees a pan-Saharan struggle against attempts to impose French sovereignty stretching from the early 19th century, when European explorers attempted their first trans-Saharan voyages, through the end of formal colonialism and into contemporary political struggles in the Sahel. Everyone from the Kanem-Bornu ruler Muhammad al-Amin al-Kanemi (d. 1837) to the Tuareg rebel Muhammad Kaocen (d. 1919) and the Tubu politician Goukouni Oueddei (president of Chad, 1979-1982), equally merits the title of Libyan mujahid. Qashat dismisses the modern borders between nation states like Libya, Niger, Chad, Tunis, and Mali as “walls imposed by the French and African reactionaries.”[5] Global events like the World Wars and the Great Depression are subsumed within this master narrative, becoming mere backdrops to ongoing armed clashes between Saharan groups and colonial troops. Other colonial powers like Italy, Spain, and Britain are reduced to secondary roles in the overarching French drive to rule the Sahara. This anti-colonial framework structures all of Qashat’s writing and activism.
Figure 1 “Arrows showing the paths of movement of the Libyan jihad in the Sahara” (Qashat, 1989a, p. 310). In Qashat’s geographical imaginary, the borders of postcolonial nation-states (represented by dotted lines) are less fixed and permanent than geographic.Thankfully, native Saharans have been prepared for resistance by their desert lifestyle. For Qashat, the region’s inhabitants share a cultural unity and vast freedom of movement, with wide-ranging political organizations like Sufi tariqas and tribal groupings facilitating alliances against European rule. Whereas French ethnographers developed paranoid obsessions with these networks as vehicles for a vast Muslim conspiracy, Qashat praised them for the same qualities. Whenever a rebellion was defeated in one location, jihadis could quickly share knowledge and resources to rekindle the revolution elsewhere. Thus, for example, Qashat claims that followers of the defeated Sahrawi jihadi Ma al-‘Aynayn (d. 1910) regrouped to the leadership of Mohammed Kaocen during his 1917 revolt against French rule in Niger (Qashat, 1989a, p. 181). Indeed, the Sahara’s very remoteness was the greatest asset of the out-gunned rebels. In his travels with armed groups in Dhofar and the Western Sahara, Qashat repeatedly praised the revolutionaries’ physical toughness and their ability to hide using rough terrain.[6] “In lopsided battles we achieved victory through our will and our faith,” he writes, “and through the strength of our fighters in defending their lair the Sahara” (Qashat, 1989a, p.10). In this way, the desert proves to be the ideal place for anticolonial revolutions to launch. “The Qaddafi tribe played an important role in the jihad against Italy,” he reminds readers, “using their knowledge of the unknown places in the Sahara to take refuge there as an impregnable shield” (Qashat, 1989a, p. 258).
This anecdote points to the prime goal of Qashat’s various publications on the Sahara and its inhabitants. Ultimately, his work served to burnish the image and boost the revolutionary credentials of his patron, Muammar Qaddafi. Qashat’s appeals to Pan-Arab sentiment in the 1970s and 80s were addressed to an audience living in the shadow of Egypt’s humiliating loss to Israel in the 1967 war. Qaddafi modeled his early revolutionary movement on Nasser’s Free Officer Movement in Egypt and moved quickly to claim leadership of revolutionary struggle in the Arab World following Nasser’s death in 1970. With Egypt’s turn to the neoliberal West and rapprochement with Israel under Anwar Sadat, Egyptian-Libyan relations quickly soured, resulting in a brief armed conflict in 1977. Qashat painted the pre-Sadat era as a golden age for Arab cooperation, boasting about collaboration between Libya and Egypt to support the anticolonial struggle in Algeria. He also reports a political summit at which Nasser supposedly told Qaddafi “I see myself in you as a young man” and later declaimed in a radio address that “I leave you safe in the hands of my brother Muamar Qaddafi, a champion for Arab nationalism” (Qashat, 1989a, p. 259-60). With Nasser’s fiery rhetoric still within living memory for most Arabic readers, it must certainly have been tempting to harness that image to Libyan leadership. Yet, as other scholars have noted, Qaddafi’s brand of Arab nationalism had even broader ambitions than Nasser’s, with a pronounced turn to Global and Pan African struggle at the end of the 1970s (Sicker, 1987). Qashat reflects these tendencies when he concludes Jihad of the Libyans with the grandiose claim that “Qaddafi was able to meet attack with attack, arms with arms, and force with force […] For the first time in nearly a hundred years of our conflict with the French the battle has moved to more places, and the globe has become a theater for the conflict between us and the enemy, between the supporters of freedom and the supporters of colonialism” (Qashat, 1989a, p. 260).
In burnishing the reputation of his patron, Qashat’s Saharan Arab nationalism often asserted Libyan chauvinism at the expense of neighboring countries, and his praise for Qaddafi sometimes stretched the limits of belief. He notably declined to include icons of Algerian nationalism like Emir Abdelkader and Ahmed Bouzian in his list of Saharan jihadis, and he pointedly criticized Moroccan and Mauritanian policies in Western Sahara.[7] In justifying his use of the title Jihad of the Libyans to describe the history of anti-colonial resistance across the Sahara, he writes that “I have specified the Libyans because they alone are still carrying the burden of countering the French expansion in the Sahara; though this does not diminish from the value of the jihad announced by their brothers in religion and nationality (qawmia) across the Sahara” (Qashat, 1989a, p. 11). Yet elsewhere in the book he dismisses neighboring countries like Chad and Niger as “natural extensions” of Libya, and goes so far as to claim that “thousands of Libyans are found in Egypt, so its land is considered an extension of the land of Libya. There are no natural barriers, just as the inhabitants are of the same lineages and origins […] most of the citizens from Alexandria to the border with Libya are Libyans.” Writing in 1988, at the end of nearly a decade of Libyan intervention and armed conflict with the central government in Chad, Qashat’s declaration that “Libyans are in favor of revolution and liberation, for the Islam of Chad and the Arabness of Chad [while] France is in favor of the occupation of Chad” was a self-interested claim that would have convinced few outside of Qaddafi’s orbit.[8] Nonetheless, Qashat remained committed to a Saharan Arab nationalism which united marginal groups across the region under Libyan leadership. He continued to promote anticolonial struggle at a time when other Arab states were seeking political accommodation with their former colonial powers, and perhaps this explains his ideology’s appeal despite its obvious biases towards the Libyan state. On his trip to Dhofar, he quoted an anonymous Dhofari fighter begging for solidarity from fellow Arabs and praising Libya as the inspiration for further revolution: “we revolted for the sake of Arab dignity [...] is this not the freedom which you call for in Libya? [...] is this not the socialism you call for? We revolted for the sake of stopping the partition of the region as a first step to full Arab unification that you are calling for” (Qashat, 1974, p.22).
Negotiating Ethnic Difference Within Saharan Arab Nationalism
Qashat’s Saharan Arab nationalism highlighted the tensions between universal claims and local realities inherent to any national project. The Sahara was home to a great diversity of people, which colonial ethnographers had preferred to categorize along ethnic and racial lines. Qashat, by contrast, stressed the essential cultural unity of these groups as Saharan Arabs alike in their Islamic faith, prophetic descent, and desert lifestyle. His attention and praise for rural and nomadic populations like the Sahrawis, Tuareg, and Dhofaris, so long marginalized in the urban politics of the Mashriq, revealed the shortcomings of mainstream Pan Arabism. Indeed, his trips to Dhofar and Sagia al-Hamra introduced him to communities fighting not just European colonial occupation but also postcolonial states (Morocco and Oman) which were nominally committed to Pan Arab nationalism. His writings reflect a period, before the rise of movements for local independence and cultural autonomy, when the appeal of anticolonialism was still strong enough to constitute a basis for regional Saharan Arab solidarity.
For Qashat, the relationship between the Sahara and its Arab inhabitants preceded historical time. He draws on genealogical understandings of Arab identity, grounded in Islamic tradition, while avoiding a master narrative of migration and assimilation. Qashat’s Saharan Arab nationalism revealed the persistence of precolonial modes of identification in which Arabness was capacious and flexible. Because political authority in the region had long been based on descent from the Prophet Muhammad, West African rulers from groups like the Hausa, Fulani, and Kanembu all claimed descent from Arabian tribes and therefore qualified for inclusion in Qashat’s Saharan Arab community. “The talk of the Arab migrations after the Islamic conquest, and that they Arabized the region, is naive,” he declared emphatically. “The inhabitants of North Africa were Arab before Islam, cherishing their Qahtani Arab lineage before the arrival of the prophet and before the Arabs of the Mashriq knew anything about Islam” (Qashat, 1989a, p. 37). The reference to the Mashriq betrayed a certain resentment of the cultural and political dominance of the Arab East, against which Qashat was eager to demonstrate the learning and progress achieved by Arab Islamic civilization in the Sahara. This includes refuting stereotypes of the region as backward and superstitious. “The Sahrawis love freedom,” he wrote of the Western Sahara, “and their Arabness and their religion are very dear to them. They follow Arab news and they know what happens everywhere. The East has a distorted view of Sagia al-Hamra, for in general opinion it is a center of fqihs, sorcerers and witchcraft” (Qashat, 1974, p.57). On the contrary, he argues, the Sahara had been the cradle from which “the Almoravid revolution exploded to save the Arabs on the shores of al-Andalus” (Qashat, 1974, p. 47).
Local ethnic and linguistic variation across the Sahara could exist alongside these claims of Arab identity without apparent contradiction or conflict. Qashat gestured towards multiculturalism in his praise of the ancient Arab roots of the Hassaniyya, Tamasheq, and Mehri languages, as well as his pledge that the Libyan state “will play a role in restoring [the Sahara] and maintaining the mosaic tableau of its people” (Qashat, 1989a, p.12). Arabness was fundamental but did not necessarily preclude the adoption of other ethnic identities; in Qashat’s Sahara, it was possible to be both Arab and Tuareg, Berber, or Fula. Alongside his insistence that the Sahara’s Arabness preceded the Islamic conquests, he also discussed the ancient migration of “Arab tribes” like the Sanhaja and Hausa who “mixed with the black inhabitants [zunouj] of the region, forming points of contact and intermixture, around 10 degrees latitude north, taking from the Sahara a shield to defend against enemies from the north: Romans, Vandals and others” (Qashat, 1989a, p. 16). Thus the intermarriage and “mixing” of Arab and Black African groups produced much of the local ethnic variation found in the Sahel. Yet these local particularities should never eclipse the importance of establishing an Arab-Islamic basis for Libyan leadership of revolutionary struggle. Indeed, Qashat was suspicious of attempts to reify ethnic identities in opposition to the essential Arabness of the Sahara, seeing such discursive maneuvers as colonial tricks. The Tuareg leader Kaocen, he writes, was “an Arab African mujahid [...] not acknowledged in the borders which the colonizer drew and not recognized among the ethnicities (jinsiyyat) which the ruling regime in the Arab Islamic countries imposed on the Sahara” (Qashat, 1999, p. 2-3). Thus Qashat’s nationalism has an anti-sectarian character in the way it could include so many diverse groups under the larger banner of Saharan Arab identity.
This flexibility is particularly evident in Qashat’s treatment of the Tuareg, or “the Arabs of the Sahara” as the subtitle of his book indicates. He demonstrates the ancient roots of Tuareg culture in Arab language and genealogy. “The Tuareg are a Muslim Semitic people (sha’b) guarding their original civilizational identity,” he writes, “and their national language is Tamasheq [...] one of the old dialects of Arabic which Islam perfected when it united the languages of the Arabs with the language of the Quraysh.”[9] As discussed above, in the 1970s, the Qaddafi regime identified dissident Tuareg groups in Niger and Mali as potential allies in the Central Sahara. To further these aims, Qashat was at pains to stress the intertwined nature of Arab and Tuareg lineages. The Tuareg are not racial others, as colonial ethnography suggested, but close kin and allies in the fight against colonialism. Thus, for example, he writes that “I found many Tuareg elders trace their descent to the Arabs, they guard their family trees in their pocket or in lockboxes, showing their origins in the Quraysh or Prophet” (Qashat, 1989b, p. 83). Qashat goes on to quotes approvingly from Ibn Khaldoun that there is no difference between Arabs and Berbers, for it is “well known that they are all from Yemen,” and recounts a poem of Tuareg elder Mohammed Mbarek al-Lamtouni “which shows the Tuaregs’ recognition of their Arab descent from the Hamiri and the Quraysh.” In Qashat’s genealogical account, the two groups are so close that it is possible for Arab tribes to take on Tuareg identity as well as Tuaregs to take on Arab identity. Thus, for example, he claims that the Kel Afughas are the descendants of Moroccan sharif Mohammad al-Mokhtar, who settled in the Sahara and married a Tuareg woman. Their descendants became Tuareg because “children follow the mother according to the Tuareg custom (which is an ancient Arab custom).” Elsewhere, he asserts that Sahrawi tribes like the Tekna and Taghant “mixed with Arabs until they forgot Tuareg language and customs and became all Arabic speakers” (Qashat, 1989b, p. 98-99). He exploits the historical flexibility of local genealogical reckonings to include the Tuareg within his Saharan Arab nationalism.
Yet, Saharan Arab nationalism was not without its own contradictions. Because Arabs of the Sahara are by definition united against colonial occupation, local African agents of colonial rule are liable to fall beyond the bounds of the national community. This boundary making could take on a racial dimension, as Qashat’s account of the 1963 Kidal Revolt against the Malian state makes clear. With the failure of the OCRS, Qashat paints a bleak picture of the postcolonial Sahara as even worse than French colonialism. “When France withdrew they left all the administration in the hands of the zunuj,” he laments, “and the Arabs and Tuareg were oppressed anew by new rulers, with no difference between them and the colonizers. Thus, the Arabs and Tuareg found themselves moving from one colonization to another, from one oppression to another with no difference between the white Christian Frenchmen and the Black Muslim Africans.” Qashat’s opposition between the nomadic groups of the Sahara and Keita’s collaborationist government takes on a racial tinge, with the bounds of Saharan Arab identity closed to the Black politicians who refuse to recognize Tuareg sovereignty. Yet, he is not so much insisting on the racial whiteness of Tuaregs and Arabs as he is condemning the association between certain African leaders and continuing colonial domination. After cursing French colonization for “imposing ignorance and poverty on the Arabs and the Tuareg” and bringing the region to this wretched state of affairs, he then invites Tuaregs of the Sahara to “return to their Libyan nation and live with their Libyan brothers.” The Libyan Arab Republic, he writes, “is today the only guarantee and the only refuge for the inhabitants of the Sahara.” He offers Arab nationalism under Libyan leadership as the last remaining solution for the “drought, injustice, and racism of the Blacks [who have] oppressed the Tuareg and stolen their resources” (Qashat, 1989b, p. 263-68). The Tuareg reflects how postcolonial political conflicts tended to reify racial boundaries. Despite the flexibility of Qashat’s Saharan Arab nationalism, it could also be used to exclude those groups deemed insufficiently committed to anticolonial struggle.
Conclusion: Qashat’s Saharan Arab Nationalism in the 21st Century
In a 2014 article on Omani communities in the Indian ocean, Mandana Limbert argued that Arab identity is best understood via studies of the Arab World’s periphery. “Through attention to the Middle East’s margins,” she writes, “we might better understand the various meanings of, and shifts in, notions of Arabness” over time (Limbert, 2014, p. 590). In the Maghreb, cultural production and political ideology has increasingly emphasized the region’s multicultural Arab, African, and Amazigh past. Studies like Jeffrey Byrne’s Mecca of Revolution and Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik’s Maghreb Noir, have pointed our attention to the importance of North Africa in Pan Arab, Pan African, and Global Left artistic, intellectual, and militant networks in the postcolonial period (Tolan-Szkilnik, 2023; Byrne, 2016). Governments have also realized the importance of the multicultural Maghreb, with states like Morocco beginning to utilize folkloric framings of Amazigh and African heritage as “sources of soft power” in a bid for regional prominence (Aidi, 2020, p. 66).
This paper has answered Limbert’s call for expanded understandings of Arab identity by attending seriously to the revolutionary ideology of Qaddafi’s Libya as articulated by Muhammad Qashat. I follow Katlyn Quenzer’s analysis of the “anti-colonial, anti-imperial nature of Gaddafi’s political ideas,” which treats the often-vilified ruler as a strategic international actor rather than simply an irrational sponsor of terrorism (Quenzer, 2023). In his ties to regional armed groups and his promotion of nationalist publications through the Center for Saharan Studies, Qashat played a key role in the Libyan state’s attempt to claim the leadership of revolutionary Pan Arabism in the Sahara. This project involved the development of a Saharan Arab nationalism which tightly linked desert lifestyles, Arab culture, and revolutionary struggle as core components of a shared identity which united people from the Western Sahara to the Tibesti Mountains. Qashat’s conception of Arab identity was flexible and capacious, allowing for the inclusion of ethnic groups like the Tuareg in a shared political community. Yet it also struggled to reconcile the ideal of unity with the reality of political conflict in the era of decolonization, as his racialized description of Malians during the Kidal Revolt reveals. Nonetheless, Qashat’s ideas represented a significant challenge to the international political order; they serve as a reminder of a past, however distant, in which it was possible to imagine people from across the region united in revolutionary struggle by a shared love for their desert homeland.
In some ways, the vision of unity in global revolution died with the fall of the Qaddafi regime in 2011. Across North Africa, Arab nationalism has come under increasing critique by indigenous activists using the language of cultural autonomy and national sovereignty. This includes in Libya itself, where Berber, Tuareg, and Tubu activists have demanded linguistic and cultural rights long denied them by the Qaddafi state (Kohl, 2010). This new generation of thinkers and politicians would likely object to Qashat’s assertion that the Tuareg were merely a branch in the family tree of the Arab umma. The new faces of Tuareg nationalism are the guitar musicians in bands like Tinariwen, and they embrace distinctly indigenous cultural markers, like the Azawad flag and the Tifinagh alphabet, that refute Arab identity entirely (Joffe, 2014). But this does not mean that Qashat has been entirely forgotten. His ideas find echoes in the work of writers like Ibrahim al-Koni, an author born to a Tuareg family in Ghadames who has achieved significant fame for his Arabic language novels. In works like Bleeding of the Stone and Gold Dust, he imbues the desert with magical realist elements to explore the desires of the region’s inhabitants for freedom and emancipation (Saker, 2024).
Qashat himself survived the Libyan revolution and continues to publish regularly on topics related to Saharan history, folklore, and poetry. He posts poetry on an almost daily basis to a Facebook account that claims his published works include 111 books in total. The tone of his work has taken a more melancholic tone since his revolutionary heyday, while retaining much of the original combativeness which made Jihad of the Libyans and The Tuareg appealing to Arabic readers. He continues to denounce Western intervention and “NATO’s wrecking of Libya” in poems like “From Tripoli to Damascus” (Qashat, 2025). Nearly fifty years later, Qashat continues to use Saharan Arab nationalism to assail colonial legacies in the region.
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