Is Meta a more decentralized organization today than twenty years ago, when it was known as “Thefacebook”? Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, certainly delegates a wider range of tasks to a wider range of intermediaries in 2024 compared to 2004. But Meta is also a far larger company today. Two decades ago, it was a small start-up; today, it is a multinational, publicly listed company. Given this organizational transformation, it would be odd to describe Meta as more decentralized today than “Thefacebook” twenty years ago without accounting for scale or giving more context. It is similarly odd when historians describe the Ottoman state as being more decentralized in the 18th century than in the 16th century.1

The essays in this roundtable emerged from a panel we organized at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association that took place in Montreal in 2023. With a focus on “ecocritical terrains,” the panel sought to rethink environments in the Middle East and Tamazgha (the broader North Africa) by paying attention to more-than-human ecologies. We use “Tamazgha” to acknowledge the reimagination by the Imazighen, the Indigenous people of North Africa, of the geography of their ancestral homeland, which encompasses the expansive space extending between the Canary Islands and west Egypt, from the Mediterranean Sea to sub-Saharan Africa.1 This remapping of the territory offers tremendous environmental and ecocritical opportunities that current methods of knowledge production about the region have not permitted to emerge or become part of academic conversations.

I have defined “Saharanism” as a racializing and extractive imaginary that operates across deserts.1 Saharanism “entails a universalizing idea of deserts as empty and lifeless spaces, providing the conceptual justification for brutal, conscienceless, and life-threatening actions in desert environments.”2 Saharanism is informed by an ideology that creates, sustains, and weaponizes the ubiquitous perception of deserts as abnormal environments that are there to accommodate actions and undertakings that would not otherwise be undertaken in places that are considered ordinary. Given its extensive history and trans-desertic nature, Saharanism encompasses a wide array of disciplinary and policy thinking about deserts, which has had dire effects on deserts and arid lands globally.3

Fundamentally, this paper is an intervention on the crucial importance of the geophysical when situating and defining the space of the Maghrib.1 Considering the age-old question, “Where is the Maghrib?,” to borrow the title of an introduction to a recent special issue of Arab Studies Journal, requires attending to the Maghrib’s unique liminality, its “interstitial position between different continents and transnational cultural formations, a variety of linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, aesthetic, and other cultural elements [that] constitute the Maghrib. This position as a space-between-spaces makes the Maghrib a hub for human hybridization, literary creolization, artistic miscegenation, and cultural cross-pollination.”2 Although these cultural and identity-based narratives are crucial, I argue that framing the Maghrib’s liminality in terms of “space-between-spaces” concurrently requires accounting for the region’s geophysical dimension—its topography, morphology, volume, geological density, and material agency, among other markers.

Across the Arabian Gulf, oil rich countries are increasingly turning to space exploration as a way to diversify their economies and assert their global influence. In 2020, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman committed over $2 billion to a national space program. Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman have launched their first satellites, and Oman recently announced plans to establish the region’s first space port alongside a research center for simulated Mars missions. Yet none of these initiatives rivals the ambitions of the United Arab Emirates, which in 2017 announced plans to establish a self-sufficient colony on Mars within a hundred years. Why have the UAE and other Gulf countries turned their gaze to human space exploration, particularly around the planet Mars?

In early 2011, at the height of the so-called Arab Spring, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime (r. 1969–2011) started to disintegrate. As violence convulsed Libya, hundreds of thousands of people fled across the borders into Tunisia and Egypt—not only Libyans, but also third-country nationals who had been living and working within Libyan borders, many from sub-Saharan Africa.1 In response, and against the backdrop of a newfound revolutionary idealism, the Tunisian government chose to keep the border open.2 In February, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) established the Choucha refugee camp, located eleven kilometers from the Ras Jadir border post—Tunisia’s first refugee camp since the Algerian war in 1962.3 That same month, the filmmakers Ismaël, Youssef Chebbi, and Ala Eddine Slim drove south from Tunis to Choucha to make a film.

This article examines the “beloved’s male camel section” in classical Arabic poetry, a structural and thematic component within the traditional ẓaʿāʾin section, which depicts the departure of the beloved. It investigates the development of this significant element and explores its usage in both Umayyad and pre-Umayyad poetry, with particular emphasis on the work of the early Islamic poet Mulayh b. al-Hakam from the Hejaz region, whose contributions have been largely overlooked in modern studies. The article concludes with several key findings, notably that the beloved’s male camel section is a defining feature of Umayyad-era poetry. This study also helps pinpoint when six poems from Mulayh’s dīwān were composed and reevaluates the timeframe of another poem attributed to an anonymous poet.