8. Luc-Willy Deheuvels, “Le lieu de l’utopie dans l’oeuvre d’Ibrahim al-Kawni,” in La Poétique de l’espace dans la littérature arabe moderne, ed. Boutros Hallaq, Robin Ostle, and Stefan Wild (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002), 25.
9. Ibrahim al-Koni, “Le ‘discours’ du desert: Témoinage,” in La Poétique de l’espace, 97–98.
10. The title of the English translation—The Seven Veils of Seth—is based on the author’s inscription in the copy of the Arabic novel he sent the translator.
11. David S. Noss, A History of the World’s Religions, 10th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 355.
12. Mehdi Bazargan, “Religion and Liberty,” in Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 82.
13. Hilary Austen, interview by Peter Day on Global Business, BBC World Service, in an episode entitled “Thinking about Thinking,” updated March 31, 2011.
14. The novel al-Waram (The Tumor), in which the ruler finds that his official robe has fused with his skin, is related to this trilogy but seems to stand outside the plot sequence of the trilogy per se. The four volumes have been marketed separately in Arabic.
15. In a private conversation at Georgetown University on April 28, 2011, Ibrahim al-Koni said he had the first international blockade of Libya in mind when he wrote The Scarecrow.
16. Lawn al-La‘na (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 2005), 14.
17. Ibid., 236.
18. The Seven Veils of Seth, 75.
19. Ibid., 76.
20. Ibid., 143.
21. Al-Koni, “Témoinage,” 97.
22. H. Te Velde, Seth, God of Confusion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), 138–139.
23. The Seven Veils of Seth, 129 ff.
24. Lawn al-La‘na, 15.
25. Te Velde, 13–26.
26. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904; New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 2:367.
27. Te Velde, 106.
28. Ibid., 54.
29. Ibid., 29.
30. Ibid., 55.
31. Ibid., 140.
32. Ibid., 141.
33. Ibid., 148.
34. Ibid., 147.
35. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998; New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 280–281.
36. Ibid., 244.
37. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, vol. 9, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), part 1, 4–5.
38. Ibid., 256.
39. Robert D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 252.
40. Ibid.
41. Roger D. Abrahams, African Folktales (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 155.
42. Ibid., 156.
43. Noel Q. King, African Cosmos: An Introduction to Religion in Africa (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1986), 10–11.
44. Pelton, 142.
45. Sabry Hafez, “The Novel of the Desert: Poetics of Space and Dialectics of Freedom,” in La Poétique de l’espace, 67.
46. Ibid., 66.
47. Ibid., 76.
48. Ibid., 80
49. Ibid., 161.
50. Ibid., 162.
51. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 11.
52. Ziad Elmarsafy, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 107.
53. Ibid., 108.
54. Ibid., 110.
55. Ibid., 129.
56. Ibid., 112.
57. Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, trans. Afkham Darbandi & Dick Davis, rev. ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 182. See also Faridu’d-Din Attar, The Speech of the Birds, trans. P. W. Avery (Cambridge, UK: The Islamic Texts Society, 1998), 293 for a less memorable but more complete translation of the same passage.
58. Elmarsafy, 130–138.
59. Attar, xvii — xviii.
60. Al-Koni, “Témoinage,” 101.
61. Marc Slonim, introduction to The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), ix.
62. Ibrahim al-Koni, al-Majus, 4th printing (Beirut: al-Multaka Publishing, 2001), 47.
THE SCARECROW
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Some weave huge figures of wicker,
and fill their limbs with live humans,
who are then burned to death when the figures are set afire.
With an ill omen you take home a woman
whom Greece will come to claim with a great army….
THE OMEN
1
“Taking the matter seriously is actually a grave threat.”
The hero repeated this phrase twice and pulled from his pocket a scrap of blue cloth that he wound carefully around his right index finger. Then he began to wipe his eyelids very cautiously.
Across the room from him, the chief merchant said, “The threat does not lie in taking it seriously. The danger comes from another site that is closer to us than our jugular veins.”
The council members gazed at him with interest, but he did not turn to face his peers. Instead he traced a symbol on the ground with his finger and then concluded cryptically, “The threat lies in the title!”
More than one voice asked, “The title?”
“In the awe-inspiring title of leader.”
They exchanged covert glances, and the hero interjected, “You’re right! The tribes have learned from long experience that a man remains a man like any other until the Spirit World tests him with leadership. Afterward he is changed and transformed much as nursing infants are when their mothers neglect them and leave them in areas that aren’t safeguarded by knife blades. I think our late comrade is a prime example of what I’m talking about.”
They retreated into silence again. They traveled far away, wandering in other realms. They circled the deserts and descended into the caverns. The cavern into which suspicious people descend during hours of despondency, however, is not merely enveloped in gloom — it is also bottomless, because it is a cavern that is not temporally perceived or located in space.
Even so, the peers heard a voice issue from Imaswan Wandarran’s cavern: “What is the secret reason for the change, I wonder? Shouldn’t we consider this a symptom of a major defect?”
From the cavern symbolized by the cryptic mark he had traced in the dirt with his finger, the man with two veils spoke again. “We wrong the man on whom we bestow the title of leader if we think he possesses a choice in the matter. We forget that the leader is a miserable creature because he isn’t his own master.”
He fell silent. Ah’llum urged him to clarify his statement: “Take one more step, because we haven’t understood.”