The Desert Has Everything

Abstract

This essay is constructed as a constellation of episodes composing a brief history of the Orientalist discourse focused on dryness as a condition of either ruin or inferiority. The deliberately fragmented narrative draws on sources such as Orientalist travel literature, historical events, popular culture, and findings from scientific journals to highlight how environmental imaginaries can be constructed and assembled differently, subsequently shaping problematic practices around the built environment.

Keywords:

• environmental Orientalism
• South West Asia and North Africa
• environmental history
• archival research

Wadi al-Uyoun was an ordinary place to its inhabitants, and excited no strong emotions, for they were used to seeing the palm trees filling the wadi and the gushing brooks surging forth in the winter and early spring, and felt protected by some blessed power that made their lives easy… For caravans, Wadi al-Uyoun was a phenomenon, something of a miracle, unbelievable to those who saw it for the first time and unforgettable forever after.

—Abdelrahman Munif¹

The opening of Abdelrahman Munif’s seminal book, Cities of Salt, describes how landscapes are imagined radically differently by those who occupy them and those who pass through them. The everyday and ordinary to some is seen as an unbelievable phenomenon to others. Munif highlights how perceiving, understanding, and narrating the natural environment intrinsically relates to how the built environment is imagined, constructed, and inhabited. In the context of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), Orientalist discourse and practices in the form of texts and images have been used to flatten its historically diverse patchwork tapestry of landscapes into a homogeneously dry representation, categorizing them as either a stage of active ruination by an inept Indigenous population or as inherently inferior.

Edward Said, a founding voice in postcolonial studies, describes Orientalism as a systemic practice and discourse: a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”² Said argues that “the Orient has helped define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience,” and speaking, thinking, and writing about the complexity and variety of SWANA landscapes adheres to and further expands Said’s definition to a specific environmental perspective. ³

A nascent field, Environmental Orientalism is currently limited in scope to traditional historical narratives, and its relationship to the built environment, both in the early postcolonial era and today, has yet to be fully revealed. Said writes: “Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.”⁴ Within SWANA and, especially within the context of narratives and practices around deserts and desertification, Said’s call to action suggests a discursive continuity between colonial environmental histories and contemporary sustainable strategies in the region that significantly affect architectural, infrastructural, and agricultural projects.

Along these lines, Diana K. Davis describes imperial powers’ practices in SWANA that aimed at othering the environment and the systemic weaponizing of narratives that conceal the heterogeneity of the biophysical environment in order to control and exploit its resources. Moreover, given the history of imperial actors manipulating scientific knowledge, environmentally Orientalist practices continue to have a relatively tenuous relationship with facts and objective science⁵ that could be traced back to the Napoleonic colonial campaigns in Egypt starting in 1798. Others, such as Said himself, argue that Orientalism predates this from antiquity.⁶

Said also argues that “without examining Orientalism as a discourse, one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively in the post-Enlightenment period.”⁷ Thus it is incredibly timely to explore the relationships between the construction and projection of an imaginary desert vis-à-vis the historical emergence of Western environmentalism—both forms of veiled and exploitative resource extraction—and how these historical projects and practices have been amplified by the ongoing entanglements between digital tools and so-called natural landscapes.

With the drastically increasing rate of climate change, understanding the historical narratives and environmental imaginaries in which specific spatial strategies and architecture emerge enables critical analysis of the contemporary built environment. Within this context, the following episodes attempt to provoke the following questions: How does an other landscape emerge in SWANA through crosscultural interactions? How does this othered landscape influence the built environment? What other models can be reintroduced into the SWANA’s production of its built environment? Moreover, if these exist, how might they be uncovered?

* * *

In 1845, Calcutta-born British author William Makepeace Thackeray, of Vanity Fair fame, traveled from Cornhill, in the heart of London’s financial center, to Khedivate Cairo, where Muhammad Ali Pasha reigned over one of the most bustling and cosmopolitan North African cities.

En route to Cairo, Thackeray arrived in Jerusalem and took some time to explore its surroundings. Writing about the landscapes he witnessed, Thackeray constructs a rather odd image of a landscape that “seemed to me to be frightful.”⁸ Not a minimalist, he carries on to describe

parched mountains, with a grey bleak olive-tree trembling here and there; savage ravines and valleys, paved with tombstones—a landscape unspeakably ghastly and desolate, meet the eye wherever you wander round about the city… there is not a spot at which you look, but some violent deed has been done there: some massacre has been committed, some victim has been murdered, some idol has been worshipped [sic] with bloody and dreadful rites. ⁹

Thackeray uses the word ‘parched’ elsewhere in the text to abstract and reduce the variety of landscapes and environments into a homogenous unproductive desert. It is hard to think that evoking a very different landscape from his familiar English is just innocent and without intention, given the historical lineage of deploying language and images that other landscapes for imperial gain.

Thackeray’s disdainful language leaks beyond the boundaries of the desert, as he exhibits a particular disdain for the flora of the Mediterranean coast and its littoral, hints of which can already be seen in the quote mentioned above. For example, in the Iberian Peninsula, Thackeray and his company “went on a dismal excursion of three hours, in the worst carriages, over the most diabolical clattering roads, up and down dreary parched hills, on which grew a few grey olive trees and many aloes.”¹⁰ As will be made explicit later, Thackeray did not consider aloes pleasant, as could be misunderstood given its rising status in popular gardening today. Even when he writes positively, as in Gibraltar, he suggests “in spite of the scanty herbage and the dust on the trees, the Alameda is a beautiful walk.”¹¹ While around Athens, he remarks that in a “yellow, barren plain, a stunted district of olive-trees is almost the only vegetation visible.”¹² When he arrives in Constantinople, Thackeray describes the outer edges of the Seraglio Gardens as “planted with trees, and diversified by garden-plots and cottages, had more the air of the outbuildings of a homely English park.”¹³ Back to Jerusalem, he writes that amongst “a rare date-tree… the chief part of the vegetation near was that odious tree the prickly pear,—one huge green wart growing out of another, armed with spikes, as inhospitable as the aloe, without shelter or beauty.”¹⁴ Even when the landscape is not parched, it is filled with repulsive flora that produces nutrient fruits.

Furthermore, on his way to Syria, Thackeray explicitly connects conceptions of the built and natural environment by devaluing architecture to a function of the used material already parched and unproductive. To do so, he describes houses made of “a great heap of sun-baked stones, surmounted here and there by minarets and countless little whitewashed domes; a few date-trees spread out their fan-like heads over these dull-looking buildings; long sands stretched away on either side.”¹⁵ Thus, buildings, landscapes, infrastructure, and the material that connects them (i.e., sunbaked bricks) are all complicit and unworthy. Later in his trip, along the Suez Road across the desert landscape of the Sinai Peninsula, he writes: “the desert did not seem to me sublime, only uncomfortable.”¹⁶

* * *

The French painter and writer Eugene Fromentin finished Le Pays de la Soif (The Land of Thirst) in 1869: a large painting, 143 cm wide and 103 cm high, depicting six men, scarcely covered with white fabric robes, at the edge of death in the desert (Figure 1). As the painting’s title suggests, the men are dying, or have already died, from thirst. The title comes from the last words of a travel memoir, Un Eté dans le Sahara (A Summer in the Sahara), that Fromentin published in 1856 to document a trip he had taken across the Algerian Sahara in 1853, and the painted scene interprets and reimagines a story he recounts in its final pages.

Figure 1. Eugene Fromentin, Le Pays de la Soif (The Land of Thirst), 1869, oil on canvas, 103 x 143 cm. Courtesy of Sailko.

While in the Sahara, he was told that a caravan, setting off at a similar time of the year, had been “surprised by the desert wind,” leading to the death of eight travelers and several animals. Fromentin’s painting, finished around fifteen years after his trip, unfortunately does not parallel the reflections one reads in his memoir.¹⁷ Along his journey, Fromentin acknowledges the patchwork tapestry of desert landscapes as he writes of

“palm trees, the first I saw; this little golden-colored village, buried in green foliage already laden with the white flowers of spring; a young girl who came to us, accompanied by an old man, with the splendid red costume and the rich necklaces of the desert… the whole desert thus appearing to me in all its forms, in all its beauties and in all its emblems; it was, for the first time, an astonishing vision.”¹⁸

Writing through the eyes of a painter, Fromentin acknowledges that “there are two things I long to see again: the cloudless sky above the shadowless desert.”¹⁹ Why does the shadowless desert transform into a painting rife with death? Fromentin’s scene echoes Linda Nochlin’s analysis of French Oriental art, whose seminal essay titled “The Imaginary Orient” argues how the concept of absence is instrumental in analyzing and understanding these representations.²⁰ Describing this idea through Jean-Leon Gerome’s The Snake Charmer—the painting that Edward Said chose to put on the cover of the first edition of Orientalism—Nochlin reveals the conscious mechanisms at play at the time of these paintings and the multifaceted concept of absence: the absences of history, the observer, the artist’s agency, and finally, the absence of scenes of work, or more accurately, the proliferation of scenes of idleness.

What Nochlin means by the absence of history is that it is difficult to contextualize and situate these paintings. They purposely depict the Orient as unchanging and unmoving, stuck in some vague bygone era. In the case of Le Pays de la Soif, there are no clues as to whether the scene is from the early 1850s or from some time much earlier, given the story which inspired Fromentin. One could have surmised the context through clothing items, but with his choices, it takes work to ascertain. Another crucial detail of the painting is the absence of a more local time in the scene, gleaned by the almost total lack of shadows, which Fromentin paints so short in length that they barely appear, portraying a sense of an unchangeable, static desert, where everything is perpetually parched due to the high noon sun.

The second type of absence that Nochlin describes is the absence of the observer, usually associated with the omission of the Western body in Orientalist paintings, further suggesting that what is depicted is an objective truth. To explain this, Nochlin compares French Oriental paintings with other coeval French masterpieces. For example, she describes how Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet place the viewer in the center of the activity in the scene, as in the case of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, in which the beholder is immediately transferred inside the space of the painting, and in active conversation with the central female figure.

The absence of the artist’s agency in the French Oriental Paintings is evident in how they deploy extreme realism, purporting to depict reality as it is, much like documentary photography or botanical illustrations. In this sense, it seems the artist has no artistic agency beyond recording the scenes at hand, which contrasts with French Impressionism, the style most celebrated in France at the time, as described above. Finally, most French Oriental paintings illustrate a group of people engaging in idleness, and in the case of Fromentin’s scene, one can argue that the alleged harshness of the landscape and the people’s idleness are in some way results of one another.

However, Fromentin’s relationship with the Sahara had not always been as myopic as the one emerging from the painting, and, in the earlier pages of his travel memoir, he is much more nuanced, as if the writer and the painter see the landscape differently. For example, on crossing a Roman bridge to El Kantara, a village 150 kilometers southwest of Constantine and at the most northern edge of the Sahara, he writes that “you fall, by a rapid slope, on a charming village, watered by a deep stream and lost in a forest of twenty-five thousand palm trees. You are in the Sahara.”²¹

Fromentin goes further, recounting a story heard among the French, asking rhetorically,

“Is it true that the first military column which, in 1844, crossed this famous bridge, stopped with a sudden movement of admiration, and that the music began to play with enthusiasm? I only know about this what I have been told; but that evening, the sight I had before my eyes would have made me believe in this tradition.”²²

* * *

Fromentin’s work exists within the framework of France’s 132-year-long colonial project in Algeria—starting in 1830 and ending at the time of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962—and so aptly portrayed in the 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, directed by Italian Gillo Pontecorvo.

In 1837, the French Ministry of War began planning for what would later become a 39-volume publication titled Commission d’Exploration Scientifique d’Algérie (The Scientific Commission for the Exploration of Algeria). These documents construct a narrative that paints the Algerian desert as a once highly lush Roman territory that has since been degraded by the Indigenous population through overgrazing, burning, and the inability to care for the productive landscape.²³

Comparing it to the environmental downfall of Rome, Greece, and Spain, Jean-André-Napoleon Perier, responsible for the medical volumes, writes:

“In the distant past, our conquest was the seat of flourishing colonies. The magnificent ruins which one encounters at every step in certain provinces, and which our arms will raise one day, attest to its prosperity of another age. This land, then the object of powerful exploitations, was neither deforested nor depopulated as we see it today; with Sicily and Africa proper, it was the breadbasket of Rome…. Ignorance and the degeneration of man have given rise to agricultural decadence and the invasion of endemics.”²⁴

Perier’s solution to this problem comes through the lens of a hygiene-based critique when he suggests that “Hygiene points out the sources of the evil: let the superior administration neglect nothing to hasten the progress of sanitation. It is above all for the ploughshare that this honor is reserved: to cultivate, is it not to clean up?”²⁵ This early hygiene-based critique becomes a recurring and enduring theme in French master planning narratives in their colonies, traveling as far east as Damascus. One hundred years later, in 1936, Michel Ecochard, French planner and architect, echoed Perier’s hygiene-based critique in his proposal for the Damascus Masterplan.²⁶ In his project, drawn together with the Danger Brothers, themselves longstanding French colonial actors, Ecochard suggests that their plan aimed to develop a city centered on “security, hygiene, order and aesthetics.”²⁷

What is explicit in Perier and Ecochard, and what the succeeding Orientalist paintings would continue to affirm, is that the idleness of the Indigenous population has led this once abundant land into ruinous desertification and, not by chance, in 1927 French officer Louis Lavauden coined the term desertification in his book The Forests of the Sahara, proclaiming that “this devastation is relatively recent” and that it “is purely artificial… a uniquely human action.”²⁸

Lavauden is even more specific in his diagnosis, telling us that “the spirit of destruction that characterizes the Arab (nomad) suffices, in this region, to explain the desert.”²⁹ In a review of the book appearing in the Empire Forestry Journal, the critic named only by their initials T. F. C, notes Lavauden’s suggestion that “in the northern part (presumably of Algeria and Tunisia), which he terms the zone pseudo-désertique, it may be possible to win back some areas to general vegetation, if the activities of the nomads and their flocks can be restricted and fires prevented.”³⁰

* * *

Thus, dryness becomes a way to imagine, speak, and write about the diverse landscapes across SWANA: an extremely broad brushstroke that conceals the complexity and multiplicity of its environmental imaginaries.

Etymologically, the word dry originates from the Middle English (1150–1500 CE) drye, meaning dry, parched, or withered. Despite its earlier Proto-Germanic root of draugiz, standing for ‘barren’ or ‘strong,’ it is used today to describe the absence of water, suggesting brittleness or fragility, a far cry from an earlier meaning that implied strength. Its source is a Proto-Indo-European term meaning ‘to strengthen/become hard.’ Across Scandinavia, many cognates of the word ‘dry’ have historical meanings such as hard, lasting, and ample, perhaps because dryness was considered a positive quality in Scandinavia’s relatively wetter and colder environments.³¹ In contrast, dry landscapes were conceived as dangerous and fragile, planting the seeds for a constructed imaginary rooted in environmental Orientalism, resurfacing today, for example, with greening, xeriscaping, or other technoscientific strategies, which export European landscaping techniques over parts of the Global South.

* * *

Narratives and false science around desertification are linked to a long-standing Western forest imaginary of abundance and prosperity constructed in opposition to a desert imaginary rooted in scarcity and desolation. So much so that in the premise of Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis, Michael Williams acknowledges that “if this book is seen to have a Eurocentric focus it is for good reason. First it is a matter of the origins of innovation and change in the forest, and second, of the availability of evidence.”³²

Ironically, contemporary links between desertification and deforestation as problems emerging strictly within arid landscapes ignore deforestations within Western centers and their hinterlands, such as in Classical Greece where, “given the central importance of trees in early human existence for warmth, shelter, construction, and agricultural land, it should be no surprise that each activity was a step on the road to forest clearing and in unison led to deforestation.”³³

The forest imaginary is also profoundly linked to the technical advancement and innovations of imperial and military activities.³⁴ Timber was the primary fuel source and raw material for military shipbuilding and territorial expansion. For example, at the culminating point of the Venetian Empire in the fifteenth century, there was “indignation in the breasts of the Lords of the Arsenal at the thought that noble oaks, which they considered sacred to the sea, should be consumed by charcoal burners.”³⁵ The combination of forces such as the inland expansion of agriculture and the devastation of forests, the increase of timber trade with the Muslim world, and its significant demand for shipbuilding, contributed to vastly reducing timber supplies posing immediate economic threats to the Venetian maritime empire. The increased harvesting of forests around the lagoon led to the downstream silting up of the lagoon itself and the relocation of the shipyards further inland, away from the Arsenale and the Venetian seat of power due to increased transportation time and difficulty.³⁶

These factors forced the Venetian Council of Ten to respond to the acute externalities of deforestation, resulting in a series of policies between 1470 and 1492 that aimed at curbing deforestation and “replanting of all cut-over woods at the edges of streams or salt water.”³⁷ These included the requirement of licenses from the central government in the Arsenale for cutting oak trees, allocating portions of common land for oak groves separated from livestock, and an oak census that included a registry of cuttings and seedlings. This story of sudden alarm at environmental depletion leading to data collection and increased extraction at an increased distance away from economic and political centers would not be alien today.

Unfortunately for the Venetian Empire, these policies did not work as intended as they came up against “villagers near the forests and the private shipbuilders or timber merchants,” or Indigenous populations and capital, to use a more current language.³⁸ The failure of these policies through the 1500s resulted in an existential crisis for the Venetian project, subsequently opening the door for French, British, and Dutch expansion into the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, which gave birth to Western environmentalism as we know it today.³⁹

Along these new directions, emerging state powers built upon a lineage of forest protectionist measures such as the landmark Nurenberg Ordinance of 1289, issued by Rudolph I, which

“required the restoration to forest of lands on both sides of the Pegnitz River which had in the preceding fifty years been cleared and transformed into cultivated fields. In these regulations, ordering the return of lands to woods, a transition from purely negative prohibitions to positive forest protection measures took place. Much later, French and British colonial governments were able to draw upon the skills and practices that had developed as a part of this early transition in Germany.”⁴⁰

* * *

One of the earliest, or at least almost scientific, references to deforestation already emerged in the fourth century BCE in the work of one of Aristotle’s students, the early ecologist Theophrastus of Eresus.

“In his De Causis Plantarum Theophrastus writes about the relationship between deforestation, drainage, and freezing, stating that the country around Larisa in Thessaly, where formerly, when there was much standing water and the plain was a lake, the air was thicker and the country warmer; but now that the water has been drained away and prevented from collecting, the country has become colder and freezing more common. In proof, the fact is cited that formerly there were fine tall olive trees in the city itself and elsewhere in the country, whereas now they are found nowhere, and that the vines were never frozen before but often freeze now.”⁴¹

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Theophrastus worked at a time when Alexander’s increasing military expansion resulted in the transfer of seeds and plants across vast territories, anticipating the future French and British colonialist botanical garden projects.⁴² Nevertheless, Theophrastus’s work would remain unknown until its translation in the 1400s, coinciding with the deployment of a forest imaginary and the rise of Western imperial projects.⁴³

* * *

In 1735, Bertrand-François Mahé de La Labourdonnais, the French Governor of Mauritius, laid the foundations for the Pamplemousses Botanic Garden, also known as Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanical Garden (Figure 2).

Figure 2. A tropical garden in the Pamplemousses district in Mauritius. Jacques-Gérard Milbert, line engraving from Le Voyage Pittoresque a l’Ile de France, 1812. Courtesy of Alamy.

La Labourdonnais began an experimental garden on his property and introduced cassava manioc, brought from Brazil, as a resilient crop to feed the Indigenous population and fend off famines. Coincidentally, under his command, the French captured Madras in 1747 using ships built from timber extracted in Mauritius, causing significant deforestation.⁴⁴

The Pamplemousses Garden flourished and became a blueprint for other gardens, most notably the Calcutta Botanical Garden established by Colonel Robert Kyd in 1787. These two gardens became test sites for professionalizing botanical sciences and ecological studies. Through these practices, we start to see the emergence of specific types of scientific explorations and taxonomies that map Indigenous plant life to understand and commercially exploit their uses and values. Thus, the botanic garden used consistent amounts of wood to fuel military and expansionist ambitions parallel to scientific investigations and knowledge extraction. Furthermore, in direct contrast to desert imaginaries, it symbolizes the search for an earthly paradise or a lost garden of Eden.⁴⁵

* * *

In 1758, François Quesnay published the Tableau Économique, in which he describes physiocracy as an economic system based on the claim “that agriculture was the source of all wealth and that agricultural products should be highly priced,”⁴⁶ privileging agricultural land and agricultural production as the “exclusive” forces in the economy.⁴⁷

Physiocracy contrasted with mercantilism, based on the trade surplus that the French, English, and Dutch East India Companies had been imposing and continued to engage at the culmination of their imperial expansions. Despite its short life, physiocracy enabled cultural shifts in the relationships between the natural environment and economics by focusing on agriculture.

For the physiocrats, agricultural production socially regulated the population,⁴⁸ and Quesnay, in the Tableau Économique, explicitly categorized those not engaged in agriculture as the Sterile Class, in a not-so-transparent nod to the relationship between deserts and agriculture, or lack thereof.⁴⁹ Thus, in centering agriculture as the sole economic driver and regulator, physiocracy suggested that communities within deserts could not develop economic relations and, by extension, have governance systems or generate thriving possibilities.

* * *

There is a narrow and fertile strip of land on the northeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, at most 20 to 30 kilometres wide and 280 kilometres long.⁵⁰ Almost ten times longer than its width, this “continuous fertile strip of garden: palms, fig trees, mangoes, mulberry trees, and pomegranates” is nestled between an impenetrable mountain range of striking red, muted yellow, and dark brown hues, dotted with its fair share of green to the west, and the blue waters of the Gulf of Oman to the east.⁵¹

In the early 1500s, Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese writer and officer stationed in India, who also happened to be Ferdinand Magellan’s brother-in-law, arrived on this fertile coastal strip. Specifically, Barbosa arrived in Khorfakkan, on the east coast of what is today the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and noted that the village was surrounded by “gardens and farms aplenty.” Like others before and after him, Barbosa seemed surprised that this hinterland was so productive and abundant.⁵²

In 1902, S. M. Zwemer, an American missionary nicknamed the Apostle to Islam, traveled extensively across the Arabian Peninsula. In one critical journey made predominantly on camelback, Zwemer traveled eastward from Abu Dhabi to Muscat, crossing through Al Hajar, those red and brown mountains mentioned above. Al Hajar is a significant mountain range running along the eastern UAE and the Northeast of Oman, separating the relatively flat desert plateau of Arabia from the eastern and fertile coastal plains of the Gulf of Oman.

Zwemer described the landscape at the beginning of his journey as a “bare desert of white sand without pasturage.”⁵³ Approaching Al Hajar on the second day of the expedition, he passed “villages and cultivated fields.”⁵⁴ On reaching Al Hajar, Zwemer describes how “the low coast, which is characteristic of all the Arabian littoral from Kuwait [sic] down the gulf, ceases here and gives place to rugged headlands.”⁵⁵ Finally, it is on crossing through to its eastern foothills that Zwemer witnesses the “continuous fertile strip”⁵⁶ that is irrigated by the aflaj (plural of falaj), purposefully constructed open-air and subterranean channels that manage the water coming down from the mountains, its wadis (valleys), oases, and wells.

Zwemer’s journey across the coast alternates between the extremely bare and the verdantly abundant, the absence and presence of water sources and infrastructure. Zwemer tells us that sometimes “water is scarce on the route,”⁵⁷ but at other times, despite the heat being “intense… it was refreshing to come to an oasis where water burst from a big spring, and trees and flowers grew in luxury.”⁵⁸ In a particularly crucial passage about the inhabitants’ relationship to such a scarce resource, Zwemer paints an image of a rugged mountainous landscape dotted with “fresh-water wells and the watch-tower.”⁵⁹

* * *

The environmental imaginary that Fromentin helps construct and proliferate proved very effective in passing the test of time. In 1941, Hergé, a Belgian cartoonist, published the ninth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, Le Crabe aux Pinces d’Or (The Crab with the Golden Claws). Generally, the story is set in Morocco, where Tintin follows the tracks of an international opium smuggling ring. It is also the first time the audience is introduced to Captain Haddock, soon to be Tintin’s longtime fellow adventurer. Coincidentally, this is also where Fromentin’s legacy comes in. At one point in the story, their plane crashes into a desert landscape. Tintin and Captain Haddock immediately find a pile of camel bones. While Captain Haddock assumes they collided in Spain, Tintin corrects him and points out they are in the Moroccan Sahara. With this revelation, Captain Haddock immediately believes that the camel has died from thirst and is thrown into a delirious fit. Captain Haddock can only murmur the words “the land of thirst” six times in as little as five panels on a single page.

* * *

“Drought. It’s drought again! When drought seasons come, things begin to change. Life and objects change. Humans change too, and no more so than in their moods.”⁶⁰

These are the first words in Jordanian-born Saudi novelist Abd Al Rahman Munif’s 1977 novel, Endings. In it Munif tells the story of a village called Al Tiba transforming from a period of relative comfort and complacency to one of severe drought, with the promise of constructing a dam at the center of a modernization dream, moving the town away from the desert. As with most of his work, Endings is told through the voice of an omnipresent narrator, portraying a pseudo-protagonist that disappears into the desert, and its themes also pit modernization against a land-based worldview.

However, as with other of Munif’s works, geography is deliberately fictional, and Al Tiba is not an actual place but one that exists somewhere in the Arabian Desert, as does its story. Despite being nestled between mountains and a desert, “in the spring Al Tiba blooms and becomes fragrant all around and fills with flowers and plants of wonderful colors and forms,”⁶¹ and “in Al Tiba, the sky is close and clear, its nights induce a trance that cannot be found elsewhere. Its fruits, yogurt, fresh cheese, sheep, and poultry cooked over wood are unmatched.”⁶² This state is not constant, and the threat of a generational drought has pushed its youth to leave towards urban centers and implore its elderly that “we have told you hundreds of times: this land can’t even feed the rats, and you hold on to it as though it was heavenly; leave, go to the city where you will have a better life.”⁶³

Yet drought is not the only threat Al Tiba needs to brace itself for, as “years ago, the mountains around Al Tiba were filled with gardens, but when the Turks came to build their railroad, they cut down all the trees in search for timber.”⁶⁴ In these inflection points among contrasting landscape descriptions, Munif’s nuances fully emerge. Not oblivious to the difficulties, Munif suggests that while the drought condition can be negotiated, the waves of unilateral modernization and the systematic erasure of land-based knowledge present a much more significant existential threat.

In 1988, not long after the publication of Endings, The New Yorker published John Updike’s review of Munif’s most known novel, Cities of Salt, the first of five volumes collectively known by the same name. Updike is well known for his Rabbit series, a pentalogy deeply connected to postwar America in its style, themes, and perhaps most importantly, for its critique of the physical environment, set in a fictional town in Pennsylvania.

Cities of Salt builds on many of the themes explored earlier in Endings. Written in Arabic and translated into English by Peter Theroux, Cities of Salt enrages Updike and pushes him towards an overly problematic language. In the first lines of the review, Updike writes that “the most fabulous geological event since Krakatoa surely was the discovery of oceans of petroleum beneath the stark and backward Muslim realms,” leading to “dusty remoteness… able, with scarcely a dent in their national revenues, to shower all the blessings of an advanced welfare state upon their sparse populations.”⁶⁵

While acknowledging the initial value of “dramatizing the impact of American oil discovery and development” in the Gulf, Updike’s discomfort with the tone and style of the novel emerges when he writes:

“It is unfortunate… that Mr. Munif… appears to be insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer; his characters are rarely fixed in our minds by a face or a manner or a developed motivation; no central figure develops enough reality to attract our sympathetic interest… what intelligible conflicts and possibilities do emerge remain serenely unresolved.”⁶⁶

Comparing Cities of Salt to other Western novels such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, Updike laments that the story does not have “that sense of individual moral adventure—of the evolving individual… [it] is concerned, instead, with men in the aggregate.” Resorting to lazy metaphors, Updike writes that “the novel’s people and events are seen as if through a sandstorm, blurred by a hopeless communal grief.”⁶⁷

A casual reading of Munif’s novel is enough for the reader to see why Updike is livid. For example, about halfway into the story, the supposed protagonist, Miteb al-Hathal, a patriarch defeated by what he considers the irreversible and rather unfortunate tides of modernization, walks into the desert and never returns. The novel continues, and other pseudocentral figures come and go. Whereas Updike was looking for a protagonist—a central figure for the reader to sympathize with, as the Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom from his pentalogy—Munif, writing in Arabic, centers the desert. In his review, Updike actively ignores the tradition of Arabic heritage and storytelling from which Munif emerges and where the Western idolatry of individualism cannot be found. In absenting this tradition and reducing Cities of Salt to an unresolved narrative that could have been, Updike dismisses the desert and its material and socioeconomic complexities that Munif describes so beautifully and with nuance as largely insignificant and unworthy of reading.

* * *

While Munif narrates the desert’s transformation and, by extension, its inhabitants, Libyan novelist Ibrahim Al Koni resists a falsely constructed imaginary of deserts, claiming that

“the question of the desert is, first and foremost, an existential question. Actually, the desert is not just a desert. It is a symbol of human existence. The desert… is truly a paradise. In reality, the desert is not a place. A place has preconditions; the most important is the presence of water… in that sense, the desert becomes a transcendental place… a shadow of a place. Wherever there are human beings, there is a novel or even an epic story. If there are doubts about the desert as a place, then surely we can doubt the presence of time in the desert as well. In the desert time stands still, it is eternal, the past, present, and future prevail in the same moment.”⁶⁸

Where Fromentin’s painting assumes time at an eternal standstill, where it is perpetually a summer noon sun, Al Koni conceives of time in his novels as a metaphysical and unseen condition. More importantly, for Al Koni: “The desert has everything… it means freedom. What is freedom? It means death. In the desert we are close to death, in the desert we stare death in the eye, and this is a miracle.”⁶⁹

The first of Al Koni’s works to be translated into English is The Bleeding of the Stone, which centers around the Waddan, a mythical wild sheep known for its meat, and a young goat herder, Asouf, whose lives are threatened by hunters. In the book’s opening pages, “Asouf plunged his arms into the sands of the wadi to begin his ablutions.”⁷⁰ In seeking cleansing from the sand, Asouf’s relationship with the desert challenges its constructed imagination as a space of desolate despair and transforms it into a purification space.

For Asouf, the desert is not to be feared, even when it foreshadows his death, as “the desert is a treasure. A reward for those who want salvation… it has bliss, it has death, it has what is desired.”⁷¹ Asouf is not intimidated by drought or the harsh sun but rather by the water’s incompatibility with desert landscapes, as heavy rains lead to ruination and death. For example, “the flood had set on them its old, immemorial weapon—treachery. He’d seen no sign of it coming. The sky had been clear since morning, quite bare of clouds, and this had led him to go out early with his goats. At night, too, he’d noticed no lightning, heard no remote rumbling of thunder…. Man in the desert had to die by one of those two opposites: flood or thirst.”⁷²

The novel’s closing words lament how “the son of Adam is only satiated by the earth,” recalling the image of Asouf’s ablutions in the desert sand and emphasizing once again the two opposing worldviews emerging throughout the novel: Asouf’s care for the earth and the hunter’s view of the earth as a place for perpetual extraction.

* * *

In 2013, Breaking Bad, a highly acclaimed TV series set in New Mexico, came to a close. Throughout the episodes, the Chihuahuan Desert is deployed as a mirror to Walter White, the main protagonist and antihero chemistry teacher who turns towards a life of crime after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

The first episode opens with three short silent scenes of the desert landscape, each stepping further from the composition’s primary subject and looking slightly higher to the blue sky, suggesting that there is not much value in looking at the desert’s ground. First, the viewer is within an ominously touching distance of a few entangled cacti, disrupting a rather stark horizon line in the background. In the second scene, it seems the viewer has taken a few steps back to reveal a couple of hoodoos, spire-like rock formations, slowly being covered by a shadow cast from outside the scene, with the horizon line again disrupted. In the third scene, the viewer looks upwards in a different direction at rock formations slightly further ahead. Suddenly, the fourth scene cuts to a full view of a clear blue sky and an increasingly audible threatening ringing sound before khaki pants with a clasped leather belt appear to drop from the sky in slow motion. Finally, the stillness is disrupted when the pants hit the ground and are driven over by a loud, speeding RV, clearly escaping something, in which the driver wears a gas mask and trunks, crashing off the road. He immediately steps out, removes the mask, and puts on a light pistachio-colored shirt, merging with the landscape.

While there are hints throughout the series, until the trailer for the fifth and final season emerges, the symbolism of the pants-dropping from the sky explicitly emerges. The trailer opens with scenes of the Chihuahuan Desert with Walter White, played by Bryan Cranston, reciting Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias. The poem, published in 1818, describes a meeting between the narrator and a traveler “from an antique land,” narrating the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country.⁷³

In the poem, the narrator recounts how:

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert… . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.⁷⁴

In the image of trunkless legs of stone, we now understand Walter White’s criminal empire to be similar to that of Ozymandias, the Greek name for a long-ruling and well-regarded Pharaoh whose empire is no longer.

In the third-from-last episode of Breaking Bad’s fifth and final season, also titled “Ozymandias,” much of what the desert has symbolized throughout the show is on display. The first scene goes full circle, returning to the first episode with the RV in the desert and Walter White’s pistachio-colored shirt, reiterating the antihero’s mirroring with the desert. In the following scene, Walter White’s brother-in-law is killed by a gang member and buried in the desert in the same spot.

* * *

In the preface to the 1999 book Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, James Corner writes that the usage of the word landscape is “diverse and rich, embracing urbanism, infrastructure, strategic planning, and speculative ideas alongside the more familiar themes of nature and environment,”⁷⁵ and the intricacy and diversity of the definition imply that “the recovery of landscape is such a promising cultural enterprise.”⁷⁶

Thus, despite the notion that “landscape is a slippery word,” given its complexity, it is defined here as “shaped land, land modified for permanent human occupation, for dwelling, agriculture, manufacturing, government, worship and for pleasure.”⁷⁷ In short, if a definition of landscape as that which “happens not by chance but by contrivance, by premeditation, by design” is adopted, then the construction of environmental imaginaries that other landscapes for imperial gain become a matter that is deeply connected to the built environment.⁷⁸

Arguably, there is no direct translation of the word describing Western landscaping practices in Arabic, the language used in much of SWANA.⁷⁹ However, the lack of a direct translation does not imply the nonexistence of activities using soil and plants to organize and beautify space. In fact, the absence of a direct translation suggests a radically different attitude towards land and landscape compared to Western environmentalism, which has become globally mainstream after centuries of continued imperialism.

Whether through mainstream desert greening projects or other technoscientific strategies, an Orientalized view of the built environment has taken over parts of the Global South, where landscaping implies imported French or English practices. In response to these complexities, an alternative type of landscaping practice and discourse is emerging in the region: xeriscaping. Appearing to be the antithesis of narratives and practices that attempt to green the desert, xeriscaping is touted as a more viable and environmentally sound solution. However, xeriscaping exists along the same historical continuum, othering landscapes and, by extension, creating urgency around an imported solution.

* * *

The term xeriscaping was coined by a special Denver Water Department task force to describe a landscaping practice that had water conservation as a primary generative condition. In response to a 1977 drought in the Western US, homeowners turned from grass to gravel and plastic, which was considered a “self-defeating” solution.⁸⁰ An example of how this is making its way to the Arabian Peninsula can be found in a project from the 2019 Sharjah Architecture Triennial by Cooking Sections, a London-based artist duo, which resulted in a public garden titled Becoming Xerophile with the title composed of the prefix xeri- derived from the Ancient Greek xeros, or ‘dry,’ and philos, ‘loving,’ rendering xeriscaping a subtle euphemism and urging us to love dryness.⁸¹

Cooking Sections are known for their ongoing site-specific work Climavore, which explores how we might eat as the climate changes. In collaboration with engineering firm AKT II, the artist duo created a series of nine circular holes (or bowls) in a flat urban plot of land as a “new model of non-irrigated urban gardens for Sharjah and other cities in arid environments.”⁸² The project’s premise lays bare the foundational flaws in which desert landscapes are viewed in trying to “reimagin[e] the role of desert plants,” or xerophytes.

Nevertheless, while xerophytes are drought-tolerant plants able to survive in arid or semiarid landscapes, it does not mean they do not need any water. Never mind that the site’s urban landscape is far more coastal than a desert; Cooking Sections miss the potential of bringing forth historical landscape practices with sociospatial values while still stumbling into environmentally Orientalist tropes that misrepresent the entire Arabian Peninsula, an area of relatively complex and diverse ecological conditions, as a dry desert in need of care.

For example, using words such as “urban gardens,” they suggest supplanting landscaping models that are not necessarily relevant to the context in which the project is deployed. In fact, it indicates a supplanting of an imported model of urban gardens and pockets that might not be unusual in London. Moreover, even though the plants are not traditionally used for ornamental purposes, they become aestheticized as ornaments in the circular organization of the xeriscaped portions, enabling and encouraging an environmentally Orientalist gaze. What is left is a technical solution for a technical problem: nonirrigated gardens in regions that experience water scarcity.

Finally, this approach ignores a significant fact about using xerophytes: they like water. Drought-tolerant plants have adapted to survive without water during its absence, but that is not the same as not needing water to thrive. Mesquite plants, for example, “use more water than oaks under optimal conditions.”⁸³ Thus, the aestheticization of xerophytes has unintended consequences in that by looking less green, less English or French, they have convinced the public that they are a more reasonable environmental solution. Becoming Xerophile suggests that the project uses “watering without water”⁸⁴ and “watering with stones”⁸⁵ without explaining how the xerophytes will find water to store in the first place. A significant oxymoron is here: “Drought-tolerant species can tolerate drought—but they grow slowly under droughty conditions and often are less aesthetically pleasing than when grown with abundant water.”⁸⁶ In this sense, more water will inevitably be used to achieve more ornamental gardens.

Therefore, despite its potential ecological value, xeriscaping only represents a viable sociospatial solution in some parts of SWANA, and the way it has been commodified and aestheticized bears no semblance to historical landscape practices in the region. Second, it reproduces imported and ill-fitting sociospatial organizations without considering that its actual ecological footprint, if deployed in SWANA, is yet to be measured.

* * *

In her review of James P. Mandaville’s Bedouin Ethnobotany: Plant Concepts and Uses in a Desert Pastoral World, Hilary Gilbert, a British anthropologist working in South Sinai, reveals the historical breaks that occur when conceiving and constructing a binary understanding between urban centers and agricultural frontiers in a region with deep historical pastoral practices.

Mandaville’s book is a direct challenge to constructed desert imaginaries as it documents “how Bedu see, use and categorize a critical aspect of the world around them: plants.” ^87,88 However, the relationship between language and imaginaries is at stake here. Gilbert explains how Western categories of landscape do not resonate in other regions. Specifically, she describes how her translation of bi’a—a literal Arabic translation for the environment—was challenged by the local inhabitants of “mountains, grazing flocks and walled gardens,”⁸⁹ who preferred using, instead, haya—the Arabic word for life. Such a discrepancy in the translation made her uneasy, and only after protesting did she realize that the “category error” was hers,⁹⁰ suggesting that such Bedouin-inspired Western reformulations and categorizations of the landscape ideas “created a distinction where none existed.”⁹¹

Other mainstream translations of the natural and built environments fall extremely short as they continue to operate on the binaries constructed by Western categories. For example, another typical translation used to describe landscape within the discipline is al mash-had (scene) al bee’i (environmental), or more specifically, the environmental scene. Similarly, translations for the built environment can be al mash-had (scene) al hadari (urban), or al mash-had (scene) al ‘omrani (architectural).

* * *

Contemporary environmentalism, rooted in categorization and colonial bureaucracy, has developed an increasingly digital endeavor, given the accelerating reliance on big data and machine learning to produce more accurate models, simulations, predictions, and strategic solutions. This acceleration generated a global shift from historical and cultural environmental practices to supposedly neutral and data-driven relationships with the environment.

In November 2020 the renowned science journal Nature published an article with the curious title “An Unexpectedly Large Count of Trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel,” describing a data-centric tree mapping study conducted by the University of Copenhagen and NASA.⁹² A secondary source of the same article had the equally curious title “Artificial Intelligence Reveals Hundreds of Millions of Trees in the Sahara.”

In the essay, one learns that:

“whereas the monitoring of forests has been carried out on a routine basis, attempts to quantify the density of trees outside of forests have been limited to small sample sizes or local field surveys. This is because of the scattered nature of dryland trees, which limits assessments based on commonly available satellite technologies (at a resolution of 10 to 30 m) to the canopy coverage per area, which leaves a blind spot with respect to the number, location and size of isolated trees. The limited attention devoted to the quantification of individual trees in drylands has led to misinterpretations of the extent of canopy cover, and to confusion related to the definition of canopy cover (that is, the characteristics of woody plants included in calculations of ‘coverage’). Products designed to assess global tree cover are poorly designed to quantify tree cover in drylands, which has resulted in the prevailing view that dryland areas such as the Sahara or Sahel are largely free of trees.”⁹³

A question about the number of trees within a desert landscape is entangled within a forest imaginary, and, in a supposedly objective scientific article, words such as “unexpected” and “reveals” exist along the same continuum in which language is used to construct false imaginaries. The titles promised a singular breakthrough in the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, where the ability to gather and synthesize information enables insights that could not have been possible before. However, the punchline was simpler and flatter than the promise; these trees had been there, in plain sight, long before the study was conducted. They just hadn’t been counted before. If the study reveals anything, it is that it has algorithmic bias.

* * *

Upon the adoption of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in 1994, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defined desertification as “land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas, collectively known as drylands, resulting from many factors, including human activities and climatic variations.”⁹⁴

Regarding the human causes of desertification, the IPCC suggests that these include “expansion of croplands, unsustainable land management practices and increased pressure on land from population and income growth.”⁹⁵ This definition does not explicitly situate desertification within a larger global socioeconomic framework, and the text remains unclear about the reasons for expanding croplands and unsustainable agricultural practices.

The specific taxonomy of land use is also relevant within the IPCC’s framework, which includes the six types of Forest, Cropland, Grassland, Wetland, Settlement, and Other Land.⁹⁶ Nowhere do we see here a recognition of desert or drylands—be they arid, semiarid, or anything else on the spectrum—with the assumption that they are all subsumed by the Other Land category, as if these types of landscapes do not exist or do not warrant dedicated scientific study, effectively amplifying their status as unproductive and barren landscapes.

Swedish geographer Lennart Olsson highlights the complexity of the desertification debate when he writes in 1993 that “twenty years of scientific research and development endeavors have not been able to significantly improve environmental security of dryland communities in Africa. A main reason has probably been that the desertification problem has mainly been considered an environmental issue, dealt with primarily by natural scientists using natural science-based methodologies and data.”⁹⁷ In short, Olsson calls for a view of desertification that is more socioeconomic and less solely environmental or, as we have tried to argue, historically constructed.

* * *

The constellation of episodes above attempt to reveal how an othered landscape emerges in SWANA and, by extension, how this othered landscape influences the built environment. The disciplinary stakes suggest the urgency of reformulating a language and a relationship between SWANA’s natural and built environments. Uncovering alternative land-based spatial practices that are historically rooted, ecologically viable, and culturally relevant can emerge through integrating archival research, fieldwork, and building practices.

For example, the photographic and textual archives of John D. Whiting (1882–1951), a member of the American Colony in Jerusalem whose work spanned between the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, reveal landscape practices that are imagined as a haya, a life, to borrow from Hilary Gilbert’s experiences. Whiting traveled extensively around Jerusalem, including in the Syrian Desert, continuously photographing the landscapes and, perhaps more importantly, the people engaging with these landscapes. His photographic archives and extensive articles for National Geographic helped uncover how some land-based practices shaped spatial organizations and social interactions, showing evidence of landscaping practices that oscillate between abundance and scarcity.

On a trip in May 1938, Whiting documents the waterwheels around Palmyra and Hama in Syria. These waterwheels have been the lifeblood of the Northern Arabian desert for centuries, with agricultural practices also reported within Whiting’s work, such as in a photo captioned “Women and Children Gleaning,” which suggests an attitude towards land as repetitively generous.

However, beyond conventional conceptions of abundance, a key image from his archive, captioned “Bedouin Woman Digging for Kimme (Desert Truffle),” comes from a 1939 trip across the desert. While this image does not show an explicitly human-made landscape, it implies an environmental imaginary in which the desert is not seen as barren but one where food can be foraged, offering ways to shape the landscape to better support these practices (Figures 3 - 6).

* * *

Desert truffles are edible fungi that grow and live entirely beneath the desert’s surface. The desert truffle, or terfeziaceae, does all of this independently, with some help from autumnal rainfall and a symbiotic relationship with helianthemum, or sunrose, a genus of flowering plants. The truffle is native to the arid and semiarid regions of the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East, as well as the Kalahari Desert and Australia, and is a staple food in the areas in which it grows.⁹⁸ It is rather felicitous that the desert, long constructed in the Western imaginary as a desolate and unforgiving landscape, is an abundant source of sustenance.

Figure 3. John D. Whiting, Palmyra. May 13th & 14th. Khan Rastan, May 16, Diary in photos, vol. III, 1938. Library of Congress.

Figure 4. John D. Whiting, Women and Children Gleaning, Diary in photos, vol. III, 1938. Library of Congress

Figure 5. John D. Whiting, Bedouin woman digging for kimme (Desert truffle), 1939. Library of Congress.

Figure 6. John D. Whiting, Pottery at Latakia, Diary in photos, vol. III, 1938. Library of Congress.

The terfeziaceae has all but eluded the archive, and whatever traces of the desert truffle can be found, we see it under two circumstances. First, it is constructed as an implicit risk to the European truffle, a potential compromise, or perhaps even a counterfeit. Second, it is imagined as a bystander in sinister events, an outlaw in Europeans’ and, more generally, Westerners’ consciousness. Much of the communication from the British Political Agents in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used this endemic fungus to disparage the natural environment and the material and social practices around the region’s climate.

In 1830, John Lewis Burckhardt described the desert truffle’s culinary uses and growing conditions with some accuracy but could not help but compare it to the “true truffle.”⁹⁹ The safe assumption here is that he is referencing European truffles, which his contemporary, French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin had with characteristic confidence written about the French variety saying: “bref, la truffe est la diamant de la cuisine,” or “in short, the truffle is the diamond of the kitchen.”¹⁰⁰ In his 1825 book Physiologie du Goût (Physiology of Taste), Brillat-Savarin had not stopped at praising the French truffle but implicitly indicated that while the Romans knew about truffles, they were not fortunate enough to know about the French truffle.

European efforts continued to construct the desert truffle as a counterfeit. We read that the desert truffle is “wrinkled and gnarled when dug up” and looks like “lobed potatoes, wizened walnuts or dried prunes.” This really sets up the desert truffle to lose in a fight with the “white, fragrant truffles of Piedmont, Alba, and Umbria and the ‘black of Perigord’ that grow around the roots of European oak and hazelnut trees.”¹⁰¹ Thus, the desert truffle emerges in this discourse as a risk and a threat to the actual truffle, a compromise in taste and texture: a counterfeit imitation.

Even when the truffle is not made a counterfeit, it at best appears as a bystander in the background of sinister events. For example, on March 6, 1929, the British political agent in Kuwait received news that “two tribesmen had been robbed while hawking and collecting truffles.”¹⁰² Or, in a 1935 archival document titled “Field Notes on Saudi Arabia” prepared by Donald Banks of the UK Air Ministry, the desert truffle makes a rare and honest appearance, yet with no other explanation, as a luxury food item for the Bedouin, next to rice and mutton, gazelle, and other foods.¹⁰³

* * *

Whiting’s archives include numerous scenes of material and building cultures that emerge from the desert landscape. Typically, there are many images of people engaging with and inhabiting earthen materials. Evidence of a thriving pottery craft emerges when, on a 1938 trip between Hama and Aleppo in northern Syria, he photographs a series of villages characterized by their earthen beehive domes (Figure 7).

Figure 7. John D. Whiting, Bee-hive village between Hama and Aleppo, Diary in photos, vol. III, 1938. Library of Congress.

Through the thousands of photographs, one in a village called Moseilmeh along a railway towards Baghdad depicts a dynamic and continuously transforming built environment built on a desert imaginary far from scarce, desolate, or parched. Seen in black, its foreground shows wet earth, its middle ground raw earthen material ready for shaping, and in the background is a domed beehive house under construction amongst a series of already built and presumably inhabited domes. Also in the middle ground are several children and an adult, echoing this dynamically produced environment (Figure 8).

Figure 8. John D. Whiting, Moseilmeh, Beehive Village on Baghdad Railway. Library of Congress.

That the photograph is archived as a double, multiplying and amplifying this landscape’s complexity, is a proverbial punch to all falsely constructed narratives. Beyond stone and earthen construction, Whiting’s images reveal a strategic use of timber, such as in a 1938 photo with two carpenters hand-sawing logs into planks (Figure 9). Beyond this craft, the waterwheels dotted across the landscape were particularly interesting to the photographer, seen numerous times across his archives.

Figure 9. John D. Whiting, Hand-sawing of logs into planks, 1938. Library of Congress.

Working together as a complex diorama, these photographs suggest that the desert has everything.

Acknowledgments

Portions of this text along with some of its arguments have appeared in: Faysal Tabbarah, “Curator’s Not,” in In Plain Sight: Scenes from Aridly Abundant Landscapes, ed. Faysal Tabbarah and Meitha Almazrooei (Beirut: Kaph Books, 2023), 9–23; Faysal Tabbarah, “A Goodly and Clean River Runneth,” in Architecture of the Territory: Constructing the National Narrative, ed. Shereen Doummar, Elias Tamer, Edouard Souhaid, and Lynn Chamou (Zurich: Park Books, 2022), 285–301. The portion on the desert truffle has appeared in: Faysal Tabbarah, “Ghostly, Counterfeit Fruit,” in Space Wars, ed. Asaiel Al Saeed Aseel Al Yaqoub, Saphiya Abu Al Maati, and Yousef Awaad (Kuwait: NCAAL, 2021), 92–102.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Faysal Tabbarah

Born in Aleppo, Faysal Tabbarah is an associate dean and associate professor of architecture at the College of Architecture, Art and Design at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) and cofounder of the experimental architecture and design studio, Architecture + Other Things (A + OT), which is based in Sharjah. He is also the curator for the National Pavilion United Arab Emirates at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. Tabbarah’s work, across teaching, research, and practice, explores the relationships between regional environmental and architectural imaginaries, or how people bring their natural surroundings to bear on how they understand and shape their world, to develop alternative building practices that are rooted in their surrounding material and cultural environments. To achieve this, Tabbarah’s work moves between computational tools, emergent technologies, materials research, and historical archives.

Notes

1 Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt (New York: Vintage, 1989), 1.

2 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2019), 27.

3 Said, Orientalism, 2.

4 Said, Orientalism, 5.

5 Diana K. Davis, “Imperialism, Orientalism, and the Environment in the Middle East,” Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Ohio University Press, 2011): 1–22.

6 I have explored ideas around environmental Orientalism and the built environment in: Faysal Tabbarah, “A Goodly and Clean River Runneth,” in Architecture of the Territory: Constructing the National Narrative, ed. Shereen Doummar, Elias Tamer, Edouard Souhaid, and Lynn Chamou (Zurich: Park Books, 2022), 285–301.

7 Said, Orientalism, 3.

8 William Makepeace Thackeray, Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (Project Gutenberg, 1999), chap. 13, “Jerusalem” (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1863/pg1863-images.html).

9 Thackeray, Notes on a Journey, chap. 13, “Jerusalem.”

10 Thackeray, Notes on a Journey, chap. 2, “Lisbon-Cadiz.”

11 Thackeray, Notes on a Journey, chap. 4, “Gibraltar.”

12 Thackeray, Notes on a Journey, chap. 5, “Athens.”

13 Thackeray, Notes on a Journey, chap. 7, “Constantinople.”

14 Thackeray, Notes on a Journey, chap. 13, “Jerusalem.”

15 Thackeray, Notes on a Journey, chap. 11, “A day and night in Syria.”

16 Thackeray, Notes on a Journey, chap. 15, “To Cairo.”

17 Eugene Fromentin, Un Eté dans le Sahara (Libraire Pilon, 1856; Project Gutenberg, 2011), chap. 1, “From Medeah to El-Aghouat, 22 May 1853” (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37914/37914-h/37914-h.htm).

18 Fromentin, Un Eté dans le Sahara, chap. 1, “22 May 1853.”

19 Fromentin, Un Eté dans le Sahara, chap. 1, “22 May 1853.”

20 Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 33–59.

21 Fromentin, Un Eté dans le Sahara, chap. 1, “22 May 1853.”

22 Fromentin, Un Eté dans le Sahara, chap. 1, “22 May 1853.”

23 Diana K. Davis, “Desert ‘Wastes’ of the Maghreb: Desertification Narratives in French Colonial Environmental history of North Africa,” Cultural Geography 11 (2004): 359–87.

24 Perier uses Latin to remark that “Rome was largely supported by the fertility of Africa.” See J. A. N. Perier, Commission d’Exploration Scientifique d’Algérie (Paris: Imprimerie Royal), 29–30. A portion of this passage was first encountered in Davis, “Desert ‘Wastes’ of the Maghreb,” 362.

25 Perier, Commission d’Exploration, 30.

26 Faysal Tabbarah, “A Goodly and Clean River Runneth,” in Architecture of the Territory: Constructing the National Narrative, ed. Shereen Doummar, Elias Tamer, Edouard Souhaid, and Lynn Chamou (Zurich: Park Books, 2022), 285–01.

27 Cabinet Danger and Michel Ecochard, “Damas, Syrie: Dossier d’un Plan D’aménagement et Extension,” 1936, Aga Khan Trust for Culture, 6. Part of the Aga Khan Collection.

28 T. F. C, “Les Forets du Sahara by L. Ladauden,” Empire Forestry Journal 7:1 (1928): 91. A portion of this passage was first encountered in Diana K. Davis, “Desert ‘Wastes’ of the Maghreb: Desertification Narratives in French Colonial Environmental history of North Africa,” Cultural Geography 11 (2004): 360.

29 Davis, “Desert ‘Wastes’ of the Maghreb,” 360.

30 T. F. C, “Les Forets du Sahara,” 91.

31 “Dry.” Wiktionary. Accessed June 6, 2021. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dry.

32 Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis, an Abridgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), xvii.

33 Williams, Deforesting the Earth, 67.

34 Richard H Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 27.

35 Frederic Chapin Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1934), 222.

36 Chapin Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders, 220.

37 Chapin Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders, 220.

38 Chapin Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders, 220.

39 Grove, Green Imperialism, 27.

40 Grove, Green Imperialism, 26. Geographer and environmental historian Clarence J. Glacken noted a progressive “transition from purely negative prohibitions to positive measures for forest care,” where efforts had been slowly building, and protecting, a forest imaginary through a series of forest protection orders. Specifically, already between the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century CE, German kings had issued several orders to control timber extraction, with some evidence suggesting that these laws aimed at protecting forests for shipbuilding and hunting. See Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1967), 338.

41 Donald J. Hughes, “Theophrastus as Ecologist,” Environmental Review 9:4 (Winter 1985): 296–306.

42 John Scarborough, “Theophrastus on Herbals and Herbal Remedies,” Journal of the History of Biology 11:2 (Autumn 1978): 353–85.

43 Grove, Green Imperialism, 20.

44 Grove, Green Imperialism, 175–76.

45 Grove, Green Imperialism, 3–4.

46 Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “physiocrat,”, accessed May 22, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/20140704162049/http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/physiocrat?q = physiocracy#physiocrat.

47 Yves Charbit and Arundhati Virmani, “The Political Failure of an Economic Theory: Physiocracy” Population 57:6 (Nov.–Dec. 2002): 855–83.

48 More specifically, “the number of men, their geographical distribution, and their living conditions are determined by the land.” See Charbit and Virmani, “The Political Failure,” 855–83.

49 Quesnay identifies a productive class (those working in agriculture and other extractive practices), a proprietary class (landowners), and a sterile class (including all that do not directly engage with agricultural activities, such as craftsmen and merchants). See Oxford Dictionaries, “physiocrat.”

50 John Craven Wilkinson, Water and Tribal Settlement in South-East Arabia: A Study of the Aflaj of Oman, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 12. The use of Oman here is historical and does not refer to the current Sultanate of Oman. The area of focus in the book includes parts of the mountainous interior that lie in the Western Al Hajar within the Trucial States that formed the UAE in 1971.

51 S. M. Zwemer, ‘Three Journeys in Northern Oman,” The Geographical Journal 19:1 (January 1902): 54–64.

52 Duarte Barbosa, The Book of Duarte Barbosa, vol. 1, trans. Mansel Longworth Dames (London: Bedford Press, 1918), 73.

53 S. M. Zwemer, “Three Journeys,” 54–64.

54 Zwemer, “Three Journeys,” 58.

55 Zwemer, “Three Journeys,” 57.

56 Zwemer, “Three Journeys,” 62.

57 Zwemer, “Three Journeys,” 60.

58 Zwemer, “Three Journeys,” 58.

59 Zwemer, “Three Journeys,” 58. A version of this section appears in: Faysal Tabbarah, “Curator’s Note,” in In Plain Sight: Scenes from Aridly Abundant Landscapes, ed. Faysal Tabbarah and Meitha Almazrooei (Beirut: Kaph Books, 2023), 9–23.

60 Abdelrahman Munif, Endings (Interlink Books, 1998), 1, translated by the author.

61 Munif, Endings, 19, translated by the author.

62 Munif, Endings, 22–23, translated by the author.

63 Munif, Endings, 21, translated by the author.

64 Munif, Endings, 23–24, translated by the author.

65 Updike, “Satan’s Work and Silted Cisterns,” 117.

66 Updike, John. “Satan’s Work and Silted Cisterns.” The New Yorker, 1988.

67 Updike, “Satan’s Work and Silted Cisterns,” 117.

68 “Ibrahim Al Koni: In the Desert we Visit Death,” interview with Ibrahim Al Koni, Louisiana Channel, May 22, 2023, https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/ibrahim-al-koni-desert-we-visit-.

69 “Ibrahim Al Koni: In the Desert we Visit Death.”

70 Ibrahim Al Koni, The Bleeding of the Stone (Interlink Books, 1990), 1.

71 Al Koni, The Bleeding of the Stone, 24, translated by the author.

72 Al Koni, The Bleeding of the Stone, 69, translated by the author.

73 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” The Poetry Foundation, accessed February 13, 2023, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias.

74 Shelley, “Ozymandias.”

75 James Corner, preface to Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 1.

76 Corner, Recovering Landscape, 1.

77 J. E. Asis Spencer, “East by South: A Cultural Geography,” quoted in Landscape Planning for the Arid Middle East: An Approach to Setting Environmental Objectives, by Safei-Eldin A. Hamed (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 20.

78 Hamed, Landscape Planning, 20.

79 I am trilingual, with Arabic as my so-called first language. I have also consulted experts in both the language as well as native Arabic speaking planners about the absence of a direct translation with similar results.

80 C. Wilson, J. R. Feucht and Susan Carter, “Xeriscaping: Creative Landscaping,” Colorado State University extension, accessed October 18, 2021, https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/yard-garden/xeriscaping-creative-landscaping-7-228/.

81 Wiktionary, s.v. “xeri-,” accessed June 6, 2021, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xeri-.

82 Cooking Sections, Becoming Xerophile, Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2019, accessed October 18, 2021, https://www.climavore.org/seasons/becoming-xerophile/.

83 Linda Chalker Scott, The Informed Gardener Blooms Again (Seattle: University of Washington Press: 2010), 101.

84 Cooking Sections, Becoming Xerophile.

85 Cooking Sections, Becoming Xerophile.

86 Chalker Scott, The Informed Gardener, 101.

87 Bedu (plural), or Bedouin (plural), is the Arabic word describing nomads or pastoral nomads.

88 Hilary Gilbert, “Bedouin Ethnobotany: Plant Concepts and Uses in a Desert Pastoral World by James P. Mandaville,” Review of Middle East Studies 47:1 (Summer 2013): 115–17.

89 Gilbert, “Bedouin Ethnobotany,” 115.

90 Gilbert, “Bedouin Ethnobotany,” 115.

91 Gilbert, “Bedouin Ethnobotany,” 115.

92 Martin Brandt, Compton Tucker, Anti Kariryaa et al., “An Unexpectedly Large Count of Trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel,” Nature 587 (2020): 78–82.

93 Brandt et al., “An Unexpectedly Large Count,”: 78–82.

94 “Chapter 3: Desertification,” IPCC, accessed March 28, 2021, https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/chapter-3/

95 “Chapter 3: Desertification,” IPCC.

96 “Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF),” Department of Environmental Science Aarhus University, accessed March 28, 2021, https://envs.au.dk/en/research-areas/air-pollution-emissions-and-effects/air-emissions/reporting-sectors/land-use-land-use-change-and-forestry-lulucf/.

97 Lennart Olsson, “Desertification in Africa—A Critique and an Alternative Approach,” GeoJournal 31:1 (September 1993): 23–31.

98 J. Feeney, “Desert Truffles Galore,” Aramco 53 (September/October, 2002): 22–27.

99 John Lewis Burckhardt, “Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys Collected During his Travels in the East, by the Late John Lewis Burckhardt,” [34v] (59/470), British Library: Printed Collections, W 2259, in QDL.

100 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût (Paris: Charpentier, 1838), https://archive.org/details/physiologiedugo02savgoog/page/n122/mode/2up.

101 Feeney, “Desert Truffles Galore,” 22–27.

102 Persian Gulf News Summary, 1926–1930, East India Company [220r] (446/902), British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/L/PS/10/1177, in QDL.

103 See Donald Banks, “Field Notes on Sa’udi Arabia, 1935” [26v] (57/248), British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/R/15/5/384, in QDL. A portion of this section has appeared in: Faysal Tabbarah, “Ghostly, Counterfeit Fruit,” in Space Wars, ed. Asaiel Al Saeed Aseel Al Yaqoub, Saphiya Abu Al Maati, and Yousef Awaad (Kuwait: NCAAL, 2021), 92–102.