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The beginning of “Tent,” the first novella:
To the foreigner, the wind in the dunes outside Liwa conveys nothing on its back. To the foreigner, the edge of the Rub al Khali is so dead the air transmits no sound and one’s voice carries no farther than inside the empty quarter of one’s own skull. But for us, these million square miles of emptiness we call the Sands, or al Rimal, are not empty. Here, our fathers worshipped The One God who created the expansive sand and sky and sea to remind us of our insignificance; from whom The Prophet, peace be upon him, received blessing and grace and His Holy Word, and to whom are turned the face and breath of those who have lived and will live here. The sand is dense with their stories; their memories reverberate in the wind, echo in the waves. This is what we hear.
The wind blew my people here many years ago. In search of water, they smelled moisture in the air and followed the scent to Liwa. The village rose around wells of water and groves of date palms on the edge of al Rimal. The settlers were from old, once-upon-a-time tribes. The clans stood shoulder to shoulder with one another, like siblings: sometimes given to quarrel, sometimes to defence of the blood. They peopled the desert in the summer and the coast in the winter. Their names are legend. They were the Manasir and the Al Bu Mahair. The Rumaithat, the Qubaisat, the Mazari and Sudan. And although the stitching of their rugs was different one from the other, though some spoke with an accent as flat as the roof of their arysh homes, they shared the common element of their faith; every one of them Maliki Sunnis. They were not Wahhabi Sunnis. These people were from the west, from the lands of the Saud, and their fighting with the Bani Yas in the 1800s and 1900s, when my grandfather and father lived, led to the creation of the frontier between Saudi Arabia and what would become this country. Continue reading →