The publication of Brahim El Guabli’s Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences coincides with renewed scrutiny of Saudi Arabia’s Neom megaproject and news of several Neom contract cancellations. Announced in 2017 by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman as part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s broader Saudi Vision 2030 strategy, Neom City has been touted as an inevitable, radical, and transformative desert redevelopment project, one that, if allowed to proceed, could perform the miracle of “greening” Saudi Arabia’s arid spaces while converting the kingdom into a global innovation hub. Although questions regarding the economic, environmental, and logistical viability of Neom continue to be hotly debated, it is the ideology behind such debates that El Guabli’s latest book is concerned with—and, as he argues, we should be too.

Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences advocates for the amplification of marginalized voices from North Africa and Southwest Asia through an environmental humanities lens, making it a timely and natural progression from Brahim El Guabli’s preexisting scholarship. Through an interdisciplinary research methodology that combines literary and visual analysis, political theory, and archival records comprising military documents, scientific publications, historical literature, and additional cultural materials spanning multiple languages, desert imaginary “Saharanism is a globalizing desert imaginary that undergirds the way deserts are perceived and acted upon globally” (2). The text successfully conveys the vital role deserts play in sustaining local and planetary health while bringing their overlooked exploitation to the forefront and highlighting the shortcomings of existing environmental humanities scholarship, which often fails to give these arid spaces the same attention as their “green” and “blue” ecological counterparts.

The book is organized according to what El Guabli identifies as the four central pillars of Saharanism—religious, extractive, experimental, and sexual—followed by a final chapter on counter-Saharanism grounded in Indigenous notions of “desert ecocare.” The opening chapter of Desert Imaginations concerns “spiritual Saharanism” and examines the mobilization of religious ideologies operating in conjunction with imperial desert imaginaries—ranging from the Roman to the French—and how it is used to justify domination over desertscapes and their inhabitants through narratives grounded in barbarity and moral defectiveness. El Guabli believes spiritual Saharanism is mobilized through the deployment of theological ideals such as charity, civilization, and universal brotherhood by means of violence, which ultimately work to bring desert societies into order. Key to the chapter is El Guabli’s distinction between “spiritual Saharanism” and “desert spirituality,” which provides a necessary teleological launch pad for the remainder of the text by underscoring that deserts are living ecologies shaped by contending lives and epistemologies, not passive backdrops for their unfolding.

The following chapter concerns “extractive Saharanism,” which operates by configuring deserts in the global imaginary as empty spaces composed of valuable resources requiring immediate extraction. Key to extractive Saharanism is the establishment of the desert in the global imagination as terra nullius, which justifies existing and emergent forms of exploitation in these vulnerable regions by constructing them as inherently uninhabitable. Although El Guabli examines several extractive industries unfolding within desertscapes, what is most compelling in this chapter is his attention to how extractive Saharanism operates across multiple scales—micro, macro, and human—to connect historical forms of exploitation, such as slavery, to modern and contemporary industries such as oil, mineral, and gas extraction. This chapter makes another particularly interesting intervention, as it pushes preexisting understandings of extractivism beyond conventional horizonal axes and subterranean framings by foregrounding its emergent atmospheric dimensions through solar farming. El Guabli’s careful attention to the ways solar farming is steeped in Saharanism is particularly convincing, as he successfully complicates ideas regarding sustainability and “green” development, which often reproduce rather than resist extractivist practices and complicate existing ideas regarding renewable energy sources.

The subsequent chapter on “experimental Saharanism” builds on the previous section’s foundation by examining deserts as sites of technological, scientific, and military experimentation based on the argument that deserts become laboratories by first being imagined as empty and expendable spaces, leading to lethal consequences. To substantiate this claim, El Guabli posits that the configuration of deserts as sacrifice zones requires a necessary abstraction, one that has largely been facilitated by the television and film industries. Ultimately, El Guabli demonstrates that monolithizing deserts becomes possible through their recurring interchangeability in visual culture, which enables disparate corporate and military actors to experiment across geographically distinct desert spaces while subjecting them to the same (mis)treatment. The chapter takes a strong transcontinental stance, cutting across North American and African deserts to highlight several distinct modes of experimentation, including the multibillion-dollar Medjool date industry, the UNESCO Arid Zone Programme, and Algerian nuclear sites, among other military technology testing locations. Discussion of Neom City as a contemporary manifestation of experimental Saharanism concludes the section with brio, as El Guabli not only highlights the evolution of experimental Saharanism over time but also necessarily situates the contentious megaproject in a larger matrix and longer history of extractive Saharanism through a meticulous tracing of petro-capitalism.

The fourth and final pillar, “sexual Saharanism,” pivots from overarching concerns of environmental violence to the projection of sexual fantasies onto desertscapes with particular attention to how these fantasies are acted upon and their impact on desert populations. To make these connections, El Guabli traces how deserts are imagined as sites of primitivism, lawlessness, excess, and impunity. Drawing on literary texts, works of visual culture, and ethnographic accounts, this chapter examines how sexual fantasies are realized from the colonial Sahara to the Burning Man festival and the HBO television program Westworld. Ultimately, this chapter takes a bold approach to broadening the scope of Saharanism, one that emphasizes the framework’s flexibility beyond the more obvious ecological framings of previous chapters.

Although El Guabli’s fourfold account of Saharanism is analytically rich and compelling in that it demonstrates the interconnectedness of deserts around the globe by mapping their misrepresentation across distinct pillars from a bird’s-eye view, the book’s overall organizational structure gives pause. For example, the decision to uncouple arguments concerning extractive and experimental Saharanism from the closing chapter of the text, which addresses modes of creating and sustaining ecological repair, creates a rupture in the text’s conceptual fluidity. This is compounded when the boundaries between certain Saharanisms are not clearly defined. Conceptual overlaps in chapters pertaining to extractive and experimental Saharanism raise the question of whether the two chapters should be joined, with experimental Saharanism potentially operating as a catalyzing force behind forms of extractive Saharanism, creating friction between the two chapters despite their perceived organizational harmony. In addition, although Desert Imaginations successfully portrays a global desert imaginary, opportunities to develop the text’s comparative dimension are unevenly pursued, preventing the eagerly anticipated transcontinental and transnational dimensions of Saharanism from fully emerging. Furthermore, although exciting interventions in terminology are introduced at the beginning of Desert Imaginations (e.g., istikhlā, which means to make a desert in the wilderness, proposed by El Guabli as an Arabic equivalent to Saharanism), these interventions fail to be integrated meaningfully and holistically into the greater work. Because the conceptual promise of these terms is substantial, their partial development is confusing—particularly when considering their potential to support El Guabli’s later arguments regarding the need for a relational form of desert ecocare grounded in Indigenous ontoepistemologies. This leads me to what is arguably the most significant chapter in Desert Imaginations and the thread that most closely binds the text to El Guabli’s previous work.

The final chapter of Desert Imaginations, “‘Unity of Creatures’: Saharanism Meets Desert Ecocare,” turns toward Indigenous ontoepistemologies and cultural productions to articulate an alternative mode of ecological relationality grounded in modes of care. Drawing on the works of Ibrahim Al-Koni and Abdelrahman Munif, El Guabli foregrounds concepts such as waḥdat al-kā’ināt (unity of creatures) and waḥdat al-wujūd (unity of being/existence) to emphasize the ongoing presence of counter-Saharanist modes of being in desertscapes and their role in creating meaningful forms of ecological repair. These modes of “desert ecocare” not only stand in stark contrast to the reductive logics of Saharanism El Guabli meticulously outlines in previous chapters, but also provide readers with a constructive pathway for grappling with the radical consequences of Saharanism, and invite them to push his initial conceptual framework further.

With Neom City’s construction stalled once again, Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences reminds us of the dangers of couching our conceptualization of deserts in Saharanism and underscores that these living landscapes cannot be easily transformed without producing significant social and ecological consequences. To this end, Desert Imaginations is a meaningful intervention in the fields of Middle East studies, African studies, and the environmental humanities, with its timely release and attention to the intersections of imperial violence and ecological collapse. Not only does El Guabli’s foregrounding of deserts as critical ecologies and pertinent sites of inquiry through a global desert framework fill a critical conceptual void in existing desert scholarship, but Desert Imaginations provides scholars with new ways to critically analyze deserts while acknowledging that deeper, ethical engagements with these vulnerable geographies and their inhabitants is required. Ultimately, Brahim El Guabli’s Desert Imaginations is a conceptually rich and thought-provoking read that lays the groundwork for future scholarship concerned with arid ecologies and their inhabitants, and calls readers to action, urging us all to “treat these arid living landscapes with attention, knowledge and respect” or face the consequences (195).