Gold Dust

Notes

1. See Jeremy Keenan’s ethnography of the Tuareg of Algeria, The Tuareg: People of Ahaggar (London: Sickle Moon, 2002).

2. For more information about the history and mechanics of camel herding, nomadism, and camel saddlery, see Richard W. Bulliet’s classic, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975).

3. See Susan Rasmussen, “Veiled Self, Transparent Meanings: Tuareg Headdress as Social Expression,” Ethnology 30, no. 2 (1991): 101–17.

4. Despite its manifest faults, the best-known popular work on the rock art of the Sahara remains Henri Lhote’s Tassili Frescoes: The Rock Paintings of the Sahara (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1959). For a detailed exposition of the problems and frauds of Lhote’s work, see: Jeremy Keenan, The Lesser Gods of the Sahara (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 193–225.

5. See Thomas Seligman and Kristyne Loughran, eds., Art of Being Tuareg: Sahara Nomads in a Modern World (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum, 2006).

6. In this novel, as elsewhere, al-Koni evokes the work of Muhammad al-Niffari, an early figure of Islamic mysticism. See al-Niffari’s work on the liminal points between various points of being, The Mawaqif and Mukhatabat, trans. A.J. Arberry (London: Cambridge University Press, 1935).