The Scarecrow

By Ibrahim al-Koni

SERIES: CMES Modern Middle East Literatures in Translation

Ctr for Middle Eastern Studies UT-Austin

The Scarecrow is the final volume of Ibrahim al-Koni’s Oasis trilogy, which chronicles the founding, flourishing, and decline of a Saharan oasis. Fittingly, this continuation of a tale of greed and corruption opens with a meeting of the conspirators who assassinated the community’s leader at the end of the previous novel, The Puppet. They punished him for opposing the use of gold in business transactions—a symptom of a critical break with their nomadic past—and now they must search for a leader who shares their fetishistic love of gold. A desert retreat inspires the group to select a leader at random, but their “choice,” it appears, is not entirely human. This interloper from the spirit world proves a self-righteous despot, whose intolerance of humanity presages disaster for an oasis besieged by an international alliance. Though al-Koni has repeatedly stressed that he is not a political author, readers may see parallels not only to a former Libyan ruler but to other tyrants—past and present—who appear as hollow as a scarecrow.

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Born in 1948 to a nomadic Saharan family, Ibrahim al-Koni is an award-winning Arabic-language novelist and has already published more than seventy volumes. A Tuareg whose mother tongue is Tamasheq, he was educated in Moscow and, after many years in Switzerland, now lives in Spain. He is one of the prime authorities on Tuareg culture and folklore.William M. Hutchins, Professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at Appalachian State University, has translated numerous works of Arabic literature into English, including four novels by the Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz. He has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for literary translation, both for works by Ibrahim al-Koni. He was co-winner of the 2013 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for A Land Without Jasmine by Wajdi al-Ahdal.