The Men Who Swallowed the Sun: A Novel

By Hamdi Abu Golayyel and Humphrey Davies

CO-WINNER OF THE 2022 SAIF GHOBASH BANIPAL PRIZE

This gritty tale of two men’s ill-conceived quest for a better life via the deserts of the Middle East and the cities of Europe is pure storytelling

Two Bedouin men from Egypt’s Western Desert seek to escape poverty through different routes. One—the intellectual, terminally self-doubting, and avowedly autobiographical Hamdi—gets no further than southern Libya’s fly-blown oasis of Sabha, while his cousin—the dashing, irrepressible Phantom Raider—makes it to the fleshpots of Milan.

The backdrop of this darkly comic and unsentimental story of illegal immigration is a brutal Europe and Muammar Gaddafi’s rickety, rhetoric-propped Great State of the Masses, where “the Leader” fantasizes of welding Libyan and Egyptian Bedouin into a new self-serving political force, the Saad-Shin.

Compelling and visceral, with a seductive, muscular irony, The Men Who Swallowed the Sun is an unforgettable novel of two men and their fellow migrants and the extreme marginalization that drives them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hoopoe
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781649030955

Hamdi Abu Golayyel

Hamdi Abu Golayyel was born in the Fayoum, Egypt, in 1967. He is the author of three short story collections and two novels, the first of which, Thieves in Retirement, was published in English in 2007. A Dog with No Tail was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2008.

Book preview

The Great Leader Himself a Saad-Shin!

USAMA ENDS HIS NOVEL MY Doddery Dog, My Darling Dog with an appendix. He finished the novel, bethought himself of a new chapter, which he called a sort of appendix, and stuck it on the end. So I’m going to begin my novel with a fact that may, or may not (I really have no idea), belong here. And that is that the Leader, who invented the Saad-Shin, was a Saad-Shin himself!

Of course, people disagree, as they do with every leader, over the date and place of his birth. One story says he was a Jew, his mother a Jewess from Tel Aviv. Another claims he was of French extraction, his father a pilot who fell from the skies of the Second World War onto the tent of a bunch of Libyan Bedouin roaming around in the desert, and that he married their daughter, who bore him the Leader. Both stories, though, contain ideological elements, justifying the suspicion they were planted by the Leader’s historical enemies, the first most likely by the Islamists, who thought he was an infidel, the second by the Leftists, who thought he was a traitor. And talking of the sky from which the Leader’s French (supposedly, of course) father fell, it should be noted that the heavens were indeed the Leader’s natural element and daily stomping ground: first, because his gaze was fixed upon them and them alone by force of nature, as it were, his neck having an upward curve to it that tilted his face directly toward them (or, as the singer has it, his head gazing upwards from a desert, ne’er bending but to pray—a horseman who holds horses dear, and camel mares, and sitting grounds where Bedouin of yesteryear hold court); second, because, when American planes bombed the Leader’s house with him inside, he was saved by a miracle that circulated, or was caused to circulate, among our Libyan brothers to the effect that divine intervention had indeed been involved and that a ghostly hand had descended from of the sky to protect him; and third, and most important, because of the Leader’s habit of demanding of the highest heavens, in public and in front of everyone, what was he supposed to do with this people of his with whom he had been saddled and against the unbreakable rock of whose appalling, centuries-old pigheadedness all the Leader’s theories on good governance, socialism, and equality (as recorded in his Green Book) smashed themselves to smithereens? Sometimes he’d forget about the heavens and address the people directly, saying, Swear to God I don’t know what to do with you! You deserve to have the colonists come back and colonize you all over again!

But forget these two patently planted stories about the Leader’s birth. The Leader, my dear friend, was born in the Fayoum, to a family sent running to Egypt, along with so many others, by the Italians, but not, they say, by the Italians as occupiers but by the Italians as fighters defeated in the Second World War, though others say they date back earlier than that and that the family belongs to Egypt’s ancient Murabetin tribe of Bedouin. He was born in his maternal uncles’ house in the settlement of el-Baraasa in the southern Fayoum, and his mother brought him back as a child to Sirte, from where he moved to Sabha—to the first spark, to the mighty 1st of September Revolution!

Don’t think, though, that the reason the Leader invented the Saad-Shin was because he was a Saad-Shin himself. The Leader invented the Saad-Shin because he held such a poor opinion of his own people. They fell short of his ambitions and Third World theories, and he thought that Egypt—Egypt above all—deserved his leadership more. No one believed more than the Leader in the idea of Egypt as Mother of the World. His other thought was that there just weren’t enough Libyans. What’s two million on a land area of two million? And if only they were trained! Or educated! Or even just fit for work!

Anyway, what is sure is that the Leader trusted the Saad-Shin more than the Libyans and chose them for his special operations inside and outside Libya precisely because he had faith in their performance. And it was they who liberated the village of Aouzou and raised over it, for the first time in history, the Libyan flag!

The Wellspring of the Saad-Shin

THE SAAD-SHIN WERE DRAWN from the Bedouin of Egypt or, more accurately, from the Bedouin of all the tribes, including those of Libya. Ethnically speaking, there are two kinds of Bedouin in Egypt—the Bedouin of the east and the Bedouin of the west, and they differ from one another in dialect, dress, traditions, and original homeland. The eastern Bedouin came in waves of emigration from the deserts of the Levant and the northern Arabian peninsula, and share the culture and language of those places. The western Bedouin came in waves from all over the western Sahara, from Morocco to Libya, and share the culture and language of those places.

Geographically speaking, the Bedouin of western Egypt are also of two kinds—the Bedouin of the margins, or of the desert and its borders, and the Bedouin of the sown (or, to be more precise, semi-sown) valley, namely the valley that snakes through the heart of Egypt, through the middle of the desert, from Alexandria to Aswan (note that the inhabited lands of Egypt form no more than three percent of its territory and that the cultivated parts form no more than one percent of its one million square kilometers).

The Bedouin of the margins, whether east or west of the valley, have lain outside the sphere of interest of modern Egypt’s central government in Cairo ever since it was founded, following a history of successive occupations of the country, by Muhammad Ali, and they remain so. And not just outside its sphere of interest but a locus of suspicion, wariness, and—these days, in the deserts of Sinai—military conflict. It is a suspicion that, for all its cruelty and the misery it inflicts on these Bedouin of the margins, is not without justification, at least from the perspective of those who harbor it, in part because, among the Bedouin of the margins and the frontiers, in the deserts of Sinai and Matrouh, half the tribe is Egyptian and lives in Egypt, while the other half consists of foreign nationals and lives in a neighboring state. Naturally, things are crueler and have a yet more bitter impact on the life of the Bedouin of the borders when the border in question is shared with a current or former enemy, or one that is crouched waiting to commit aggression during a fragile peace that puts the life of these Bedouin, in all its aspects, on hold. Now, unfortunately, following that game-changing Arab Spring, both borders are enemy borders, with Israel, Hamas, and the Islamist terrorist groups on the east and more Islamist terrorist groups on the west, where you can also add Libya’s game-changing chaos.

Nevertheless, the Bedouin of Matrouh and of the west in general certainly enjoy greater happiness and peace of mind than those of the Sinai desert, who face the ever-present threat of being blown to smithereens. Not to mention that, until a few years ago, the former lived in seclusion, as safe in the isolation of their deserts as it is possible to be, and firm in their belief that Colonel Gaddafi was president of the Arab Republic of Egypt!

More dangerous and more pernicious is the fact that the enemy has moved into Sinai itself and in among its Bedouin. Terrorist Islamist groups have infiltrated and seek to turn it into an Islamic emirate subject to the Islamic caliphate. They are waging a ruinous war with the Egyptian army, with the Bedouin of Sinai caught between the two: if the terrorists set off an explosion, they explode; if the army shells, they’re shelled, and all the while both sides, of course, regard them with suspicion. To all of which, add the ancient wounds inflicted on their land and their identity.

About a year ago, the Egyptian government forcibly emptied all the villages of the Sinai Bedouin lying within two kilometers of the border that separates Egypt from Gaza. But that’s another issue. Let’s stick with the Bedouin of the valley, who originally gave birth to the Saad-Shin. Of course, there were large numbers of Saad-Shin from the deserts of Matrouh and Alexandria, but the Bedouin of the Nile valley were more prone to become Saad-Shin, because half their tribes are actually in Libya and the other half in Egypt.

The Bedouin of the valley, being at its heart, were a matter of concern to the modern state of Egypt since its founding by Muhammad Ali Basha. And how hideous a concern! Security-based, or security pure and simple. You can observe this in the numerous police stations and checkpoints in their neighborhoods. Even for the generation of my father himself, and of his older uncles, the word government meant simply the brutal power of the police, who could arrest him for no reason other than that he existed. And this concern certainly had nothing to do with providing any kind of services or utilities. On the contrary, the attitude was like The best thing would be stop bothering them and leave them as they are. Even after the Bedouin became sedentary and got electricity and other utilities beginning in the seventies, my uncles, when I objected to anything or wrote anything against the government, would say to me in total panic, But it’s the government, Hamdi!—meaning that brutal power that could send you behind the sun where there was no one to restrain them or even witness what happened to you.

Sometimes I think it must be the aftermath of the ancient massacre carried out against their ancestors by Said Basha, who ruled Egypt on behalf of the Ottomans. I had an uncle who pulled every trick he knew until he finally obtained the small government handout known as Sadat’s pension. It was no more than a few pounds a month, but he himself was not at all convinced that he deserved it or that the government had responsibilities of any kind toward him.

As is well known, when Amr ibn el-As launched his expedition against (or, to be more straightforward about it, conquered) Egypt at the head of the Islamic Arab army, it was a Roman province, the Romans having occupied it for a hundred years following their expulsion of the Persians. Thus, beginning in 642, Egypt changed from being a possession of the Roman Empire to a possession of the Islamic caliphate, and remained so throughout all its different periods—whatever it was called, wherever its seat might be, and whatever the lineage of its ruling dynasty—until the French expedition against Egypt in 1798. To that point, Egypt had been a subject province ruled by a governor appointed by the caliph, wherever his capital and its location, no matter what he was called or what his title or immortal surname were throughout history—whether he was Rightly-guided in Medina or an Umayyad in Damascus or an Abbasid in Baghdad or an Ottoman in Constantinople.

Of course, the Egyptians resisted the French and rose against them in the first and second Cairo uprisings, but until the French expedition they had been barely aware—I might almost go so far as to say had been definitely unaware—of their national identity, or that they were a people or a nation independent of the Islamic caliphate. Following the latter’s expulsion in 1801, Egypt reverted automatically, and with the sincere thanksgivings of the Muslim populace, to its status as a possession of the Ottoman caliphate in Turkey.

Which was, by the way, the worst of all the caliphates and occupations, not just in Egypt, but in the whole of history. And I would point out further that Egypt experienced virtually every occupation known to man—Roman, Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Turkish, Persian, Mongolian, and, finally, Western European—and that the Ottoman occupation topped them all, if only because its rule extended for four whole centuries. And all it did during those four centuries by way of assuming the burdens of government was to appoint a governor with an entourage to collect the taxes that he then sent each year, in full, to the Ottoman capital, while the Egyptian people went hungry, was treated to the abuses of enslavement and forced labor, and denied all rights. The Bedouin, on the other hand, under the Ottoman caliphate, took their due, and more, and I believe that the reason for the last of their migrations to Egypt, that of the Rimah tribe, was the affluence that the Bedouin there were enjoying. There they were, on the one hand, free of any control and, on the other, true partners of the Mameluke emirs in the running of the country, each tribe having its encampments and armed militia.

In the same year that the French expedition departed, Muhammad Ali began his rise to power in Egypt—an Ottoman Albanian cavalry soldier married to a rich woman, who bought and sold tobacco and joined the pathetic force that the Ottoman Islamic caliphate had sent to drive the French out of Egypt. And after the British drove them out for them, destroying the French fleet in the Mediterranean, the uprising against Ali Khurshid Basha, the Ottoman caliphate’s governor in Egypt, took place, the people rallying round the ambitious Albanian cavalryman, and the notables, merchants, and sheikhs of Egypt choosing him to be its governor, thus creating a rare precedent in the country’s history and in that of the Islamic caliphates that had ruled Egypt in succession, for before this, their governor had always been imposed on them from the caliphal capital, wherever that might be. These same people further pressured the Ottoman caliphate until it sent an imperial decree confirming Muhammad Ali Basha as governor. The truth is that the only thing the Ottoman caliphate cared about was the money that came to it from the poll tax imposed on non-Muslims and other taxes, regardless of who, Muhammad Ali or anyone else, ruled Egypt. At the end of the day, though, he was still wasn’t a native Egyptian. The main point, however, is that the Egyptians themselves, perhaps under the influence of centuries of enslavement, were not convinced that they were worthy of ruling their own country. True power had always lain in the hands of the Mamelukes and certain armed Bedouin tribes. When Napoleon Bonaparte arrived in Cairo, he assembled its sheikhs, notables, and merchants and asked them to choose provincial governors, that is, local rulers and administrators, from among themselves. They were taken by surprise and asked him contemptuously, Don’t you have any Mamelukes? The common people won’t trust us. Muhammad Ali, then, collected the money, in tip-top fashion, for the Ottoman Sublime Porte in his role as master, or (why not say it?) owner, of the lands of Egypt from one end to the other.

Throughout his reign, Muhammad Ali remained an Ottoman governor who owed his governorship, the obedience paid him, and the taxes he collected, to the Ottoman caliph in Constantinople, but at the same time he began to build a modern Egypt on a basis completely independent from the Ottoman caliphate, an Egypt that was an up-to-date sovereign state even if it continued to be, throughout his era, a possession of the Turkish caliphate. Even when he was fighting the Turkish caliphate, and the armies of his son, Ibrahim the Conqueror, were at the gates of its capital, Muhammad Ali was a subject governor who owed his position and his wealth to the Ottoman state.

The main thing is that, in founding modern Egypt, Muhammad Ali encountered two obstacles, each opposed to the establishment of a secure modern state that was stable in terms of its nature, its composition, and its enterprises. The first was the Mameluke emirs, who owned the land as tax farms on which they paid annually what they owed to the Ottoman caliphate but from which they collected many times more than that sum, by using the knout on the peasants. The second was the Bedouin tribes of the west, who lived a nomadic existence, tending their flocks, attacking unresisted the secure, settled villages of the Nile Valley, and joining the Mamelukes in all their wars and raids, in hope of plunder.

The