Ibrahim Al-Koni

The Egyptian critic Jaber Asfour writes about the genius of Al-Koni: “Al-Koni is a creative genius, though he is underappreciated in the Arab world. Anyway, he has won international awards worthy of his genius. He is the only Arab who has crafted a comprehensive and integrated myth with depth, characters, meanings, and both physical and spiritual dimensions—the myth of the desert”.

On the mythological dimension of Al-Koni’s works, the critic Salah Fadl writes: “Al-Koni's works translate mythological worlds and cosmic spaces, rooted in nature, animals, and humans, where plants, shadows, and animals take on the role of social beings. Al-Koni reconstructs the memory of the desert, opening up a reservoir of poetry and narrative, and gives back to Libya its lost status in the Arabic literature”.

In describing Al-Koni's worlds, the critic Fakhri Saleh writes: “Ibrahim Al-Koni molds his narrative world with a unique vocabulary and elements while expanding his perspective on existence. He unravels the world of the desert, revealing its infinite expansion and endless secrets, reversing the essence of human experience in the face of scarce resources and harsh conditions.”

Said Al-Ghanmi writes about the literary precedence in Al-Koni's works: “In these works, Al-Koni tries to end the city's monopoly on the novel in modern times, as described by Lukács following Hegel. He tries to write a desert epic to prove that the desert can generate its own novel that is as technically complex as the urban novel. If the source of the city's richness and fertility lies in its material wealth, Al-Koni has shown that the desert can also transform its drought and subsistence economy into an unmatched symbolic wealth. It is not material wealth, for the desert certainly lacks it, but a wealth coming from the symbolic system and its symbolic capital which invests even in the stones. Much like the city, the desert is based on developing the rich symbolic capital that can turn the sandy wasteland into a paradise of symbolic freedom, and the economy of the vows into a mobile spiritual treasure. It can even turn every stone, bird, place, or mountain into a flood of symbolic meanings that the city's narrative lacks.”

The critic Faisal Darraj writes about the universality of the major human questions in Al-Koni's works: “After Al-Koni has contemplated the desert world, recreated it, and laid all the small and large questions of Man, he returns, like any great novelist, to the distant history, so that he may touch upon the mysteries of the present and make his questions clearer... His writing is some form of historical documentation, and in his ‘historical novel’, he raises present and future questions about humanity. For him, history is a subject of knowledge, a space for the contemplation of philosophical issues, and a vast theater that tells the tales of the finite and the infinite, existence and non-existence, and the tales of the universal and regressive human power that was initially created and formed as a part of a dream in a society where everybody is equal in the freedom of speech and right to life”.

The writer and translator Salah Fadl argues that the works of Al-Koni, abundant as they are, yet they have a distinctive property: “It is not only this initial appearance of abundance, but it extends to the prominent qualitative characteristic of these works, as they translate the mythological worlds and cosmic space in all its dimensions, which are rooted in nature, animal, and Man, and matured in copying the language and transferring it from the first level of epic poetry to the mature and organized narrative level, where plants, shadows, and animals play the role of social beings in the process of existence that has not yet begotten the civilization, a virgin existence”.

And about that unknown world that Al-Koni created in his works, Abdo Wazen writes: “Perhaps what made Ibrahim Al-Koni the novelist of the desert par excellence is first being the descendant, by birth and origin, of the North African desert, and second being a real novelist who knows the secrets of the narrative game and its techniques. This ‘Tuareg’ man, who experienced the life of the desert, wilderness and the tribal norms, traditions and rituals succeeded in shedding light on that unknown world but without giving away its cover. In writing about this mythological world, he did not seek to present it as an alienating or ‘exotic’ material that tempts readers, but rather he tried to embody it through language and narrative in a real and sincere way”.

Al-Koni's global significance has also been acknowledged by international institutions, scholars and translators:

In a poll conducted by the French magazine Lear for the 2006 issue, the magazine ranked the author as one of the 50 most important global novelists of the 21st century.

Journalist Ursula Lindsey writes about Al-Koni's desert in Arabic literature: “The Arabic novel is, to a large extent, the product of a middle-class urban experience, and it has focused heavily on this medium in its course. If the desert and Bedouins ever appear in it, they are symbolic figures (except for some noteworthy recent examples that include the Egyptian writers Hamdi Abu Jalil and Miral al- Tahawi). In this context, Al-Koni may be the owner of the largest collection of works written in Arabic that focus on the desert and its mobile population”.

Al-Koni addressed the impact of colonialism and modernity on traditional societies, and in this regard, the professor at The Western Cape University Fatima Fiona Molly writes: “Just like Chinua Achebe, the dean of the African novel, Al-Koni is interested in the effects of colonialism in the early twentieth century on his culture and the lifestyle of his tribe. Like Tayeb Saleh, who, unlike other writers highlighted here, wrote in his first language, Al-Koni was concerned with the deeper philosophical impact of modernity on non-modern social forms. Despite the different motives and the influence of employing myths, the accounts and stories of Al-Koni, as are those of Wole Soyinka, are saturated with references to myth, but in the case of Al-Koni, they are the myths of the Tuaregs, whose roots extend to the civilizations of ancient Egypt and the mythical world of Islam.”
 
About the magic of Al-Koni desert, the translator and professor of Arabic literature at the University of Tokyo, Nobuo Aki Notohara, writes: “In Al-Koni’s novels what entices is not only the strange place, but this novelist is also an accomplished artist who mastered the language discourse. He is good at creating influential characters, and he has deep knowledge of how to build a contemporary novel masterpiece. I reckon he's a grand novelist and one of the great storytellers in contemporary world literature. All the abovementioned attracted me his works, but I must confess again that I have been fully devoted to the culture of the desert. I have expressed many times that I have lost my confidence in the literature of the settlers, and here Al-Koni's novels have opened a new horizon for me to delve deeply and substantially into the culture of the desert people”.

The German translator Hartmut Fendrich writes: “Ibrahim al-Koni is considered an exceptional phenomenon in the world of Arab literary production... He writes about the desert as a symbol of the human existence and the return to all the mythical treasure of the Mediterranean world, and this is unique in the Arabic literature. For me, Al-Koni deserves a Nobel Prize for literature”.

The independent American journalist and Arabist Marcia Lynx Qualey writes: “The source of Al- Koni′s difference is not just his language, which takes its inspiration from classical Arabic texts. It′s also the desert setting, religious syncretism and the poetry of the Tuareg people. As in much of al- Koni′s work, landscape and animals are not mere background. Part of what he contributes to world fiction is a new lens on the relationship between human, animal, spirit and landscape.”

The Arabist and translator Roger Allen writes about Al-Koni: “Ibrahim al-Koni is an authentic novelist voice, and exciting as well, not because he introduced the readers of Arabic to a space, history and culture that seems to most people unknown and unfamiliar, but because in his novels he brings back to memory the values of the primeval times."