The twentieth-century Iranian engineer, lay theologian, and reform politician Mehdi Bazargan explained in an essay: “Conflict, one of whose quintessential representatives for human beings is Satan, is the cause of a plethora of blessed events, from the natural cycle of life on earth to the higher cycle of resurrection in the hereafter.” Three paragraphs earlier in the same essay he remarked: “Movement … is a blessing and a source of survival and evolution, while rigidity is a cause of stasis, decline, and death.”12 Hilary Austen, author of Artistry Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and Life, pointed out — in a similar vein but in a totally different context (how unleashing the artist in a business setting can help a firm “move on”) — that the opposite of chaos is not order but stagnation.13
WANTAHET
Al-Koni’s Oasis (or New Waw) trilogy begins with New Waw (Waw al-Sughra),14 continues with The Puppet (al-Dumya), and ends with al-Fazza‘a (The Scarecrow). This eponymous protagonist of the third novel appeared in The Puppet to offer good advice to that novel’s well-intentioned hero. In al-Fazza‘a, though, his destruction of the oasis — which he justifies as an appropriate reward for the community’s contempt for his benefactions — seems malicious and vengeful.15 A voice in the crowd at a food distribution in this novel warns that this may be another version of Wantahet’s infamous banquet, and the chapter called “Wantahet” gives a version of this famous banquet as part of a folktale about a contest between proponents respectively of anger, envy, hatred, and revenge. Paradoxically, the chief vassal of New Waw remarks to its demonic ruler that by repaying good with evil he has demonstrated that he is a human being, not a demon. In al-Koni’s novel Lawn al-La‘na (The Color of the Curse), the demonic protagonist, who even has an evil apprentice, is so evil that the ambiguous interplay of good and evil (or between stagnation and chaos) seems lost. He is said to have sold his soul to the “Master of Dark Tyrannies” and therefore to have returned as a devil.16 This demon in Lawn al-La‘na is also referred to as Wantahet.17
Are all these demons different forms of Wantahet, who is trying to show us the way back to Waw, the real Tuareg paradise? If God is so good that He can bring good out of evil (as Thomas Aquinas argued in a passage al-Koni has used for an epigraph), should we thank God for demons? Incidentally, the demon — in at least some of al-Koni’s many novels — is a counterweight to the tribe’s leaders, not to God, and the lost Law of the Tuareg people plays the part that might elsewhere be assumed by God. In al-Koni’s novel Anubis, moreover, the ancient goddess Tanit has top billing, not a male god or demon.
Ibrahim al-Koni obviously draws on many traditions and authors from Tuareg to Russian to Chinese and American, and adds literary and mythological allusions the way an artist applies washes or glazes to give added depth to a painting. Are al-Koni’s references to Seth and other demonic figures merely mythological washes or part of a consistent storyline that forms part of his own or of Tuareg mythology?
In The Seven Veils of Seth, the chief of the oasis community teases his visitor: “How can you expect our elders not to think ill of you when you arrive on the back of a jenny, as if you were the accursed Wantahet, who has been the butt of jokes for generations?”18 As their exchange continues, the chief reminds the visitor: “The strategist known as Wantahet also claimed he would carry people on the path of deliverance the day he cast them down the mouth of the abyss.”19 There is a more complete version of this accusation later in the noveclass="underline" “The master of the jenny at the end of time would approach villages to entice tribes to a banquet only to pull the banquet carpet out from under them, allowing them to fall into a bottomless abyss.”20 These references to the Wantahet of Tuareg mythology appear in several of al-Koni’s novels. When the translator asked Ibrahim al-Koni for further details from Tuareg folklore about Wantahet, the author replied that he starts with the folkloric scraps he has and uses them as a starting point. In his “Témoinage,” al-Koni said that he has created his own desert and filled it with his own symbols and archetypes.21
ANCIENT EGYPT: SETH
Ancient Egyptian attitudes toward Seth underwent an evolution and are not consistent across the literature and over the centuries. Put another way: the study of Seth in ancient Egyptian religion is the domain of specialists. H. Te Velde, one such expert, in Seth, God of Confusion says, for example, that if “In mythology and for many Egyptians Seth” was “the divine foreigner” or the “god of confusion, for the faithful he was also unrestrictedly god.” He adds, however, that: “after the 20th dynasty” not only were “no new temples … built” for Seth but there is no “evidence that existing temples of Seth were restored.”22
Isan in The Seven Veils of Seth is called the Jenny Master, because he rides a she-ass, and a vivid account is offered of how he learned to hate camels and love a wild she-ass.23 Similarly, the hero of Lawn al-La‘na is said to have traveled south to Africa’s forestlands on a camel with a caravan but to have returned on a she-ass.24 H. Te Velde in Seth, God of Confusion includes a chapter about the “Seth-animal,” which has been connected with various mammals, real and imaginary, including the wild ass.25 E. A. Wallis Budge in The Gods of the Egyptians says that “The Ass, like many animals, was regarded by Egyptians both as a god and a devil.”26 To be sure, there is also in the Islamic history of the Maghreb a famous Sahib al-Himar: Abu Yazid Mukallad ibn Kayrad al-Nukkari (d. 947 CE), a Berber who led a rebellion against Fatimid rule in what is today Tunisia. He was known as the Ass Master because he rode a donkey.
Te Velde quotes a text in which Seth announces, “I am Seth who causes confusion and thunders in the horizon of the sky….”27 Seth, then, is the lord of rain, although “in Egypt vegetation and the fertility of the soil is not dependent on rain, but on the inundation of the Nile.”28
A potion that al-Koni’s Isan slips into the pool causes women in the oasis to miscarry, but he can also cure their fertility problems. Te Velde says of Seth that he is “the god who brings about abortion.”29 Seth’s method of cure underscores his sexual prowess. Te Velde says, “Seth is a god of sexuality which is not canalized into fertility.”30
In The Seven Veils of Seth, both the character Isan — who doubles as Seth and Wantahet — and the repeated references to the lost Tuareg Law promote nomadism (and tribalism) and discourage settled life in an oasis where tribalism is diluted. If religions tend to promote group solidarity — whether locally or globally — it seems reasonable that a demon like Seth should, in the later eras of ancient Egypt, be portrayed as a deviant foreigner.