The Ancestors and Successors Hexagon - Part I: The Call of What Was Far Away

"God is in freedom… and freedom is in travel."
In The Call of What Was Far Away, Al-Koni returns to the desert, a place where everything is either a gift or a curse—or both. The novel shines a light on the story of Sultan Ahmed Al-Qaramanli, ruler of Tripoli for over a third of a century. It highlights his political wisdom in dealing with the French, his persistent efforts to gain independence from the Ottoman Empire, and his resistance to Turkish control over Tripoli. For Sultan Ahmed, Tripoli should be ruled by a Tripoli leader. As a shrewd commander and strategist, he believes that kindness often invites treason and betrayal. His final words on his death bed encapsulate the wisdom of the great desert: “If you take a weapon, use it, and if you use it, you must use it well. This is the wisdom of your mother, the desert!”

The novel's protagonists are constantly confronted by destiny’s messages, which play a crucial role in shaping their lives and fates. Their struggle to comprehend and use these messages to their advantage forms a central theme of the story. Al-Koni excels at crafting a strange and untamed world—one where the real and the imaginative intersect, where human nature is laid bare, and where ancient pagan beliefs persist beneath a thin veil of Islam.

What stands out in this novel is Al-Koni’s exploration of the psyche of desert people. They avoid the scent of the sea like a plague and fear the life of settling down, which they call the “tomb life” of coastal dwellers. For them, the desert is not just a homeland; it is the cradle of their free spirits. They can endure any form of injustice except the one that chains their freedom. To preserve this freedom, they are even willing to abandon their children, leaving them to the mercy of invaders, believing that offspring only bring ingratitude. In this vein, Mustafa Salim writes: “Al-Koni builds the epic around the conflict between the freedom that embraces imagination and travel—a sacred legacy inherited by both the desert and the sea—and the temptations of power, which he calls 'the sin of stability’. Al-Koni draws inspiration from the figure of Ahmed Al-Qaramanli, whose father’s lineage ties him to the sea, and his mother’s to the desert. Through Ahmed and his heirs, Al-Koni reflects the dramatic tension between power and freedom, exposing the illusions and sins of power that led them to either suicide or homelessness in the streets and alleys of Tripoli. He champions freedom as a commandment, a religion for both the desert and the sea, in contrast to the shackles of power and its limitations. This dialectic drama shapes the lives of five generations of the Al-Qaramanli family”.