by Micah Roshan Reddy, Egypt Independent.

Mungo Park, the famous 18th century Scottish explorer, had few good things to say about the Muslims he encountered on his journeys through the Sahara. He spoke of the Moors as “a people who study mischief as a science and exult in the miseries and misfortunes of their fellow creatures.” “Treacherous,” “malevolent,” “ferocious” and “fanatical” were some of the adjectives he reserved for the Muslims of North Africa’s great desert, that “fearful void.”

Western publics relished the orientalist literature of European travellers like Park, whose best-sellers fired the imaginations of an increasingly literate population.

Although Park’s unrestrained racism may not find such receptive audiences these days, certain stereotypes and illusions that began with the early European explorers, and continued under colonial rule, still linger on in one form or another.

One idea that would prove to be remarkable in its persistence — a misconception widely held by French colonialists at the time — was of a neat divide between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims;” between a politically passive version of Islam accommodating imperial interests, and an Islam that was dogmatic, subversive and largely imported from the Middle East.

Fast-forward to the present day and the “War on Terror” rhetoric could just as well have been forged by the hammer and anvil of French colonial thought. All the while it has perpetuated the image of the Sahara as a hostile, unforgiving void.

It was in the early 2000s that the US began to seriously insert itself into a long history of Western blundering in the Sahara, having previously considered the region as falling within the French sphere of influence. But it was post-11 September and the game had changed.

Now, any large anarchic space inhabited by Muslims is seen as a potential breeding ground for Islamic extremists with global ambitions. For Western governments, Afghanistan is proof enough. And when these spaces happen to contain vast quantities of fossil fuels and uranium, the security imperative is amplified enormously.

Dependence on foreign oil has long been an Achilles heel of US foreign policy and a powerful political weapon in the hands of supplier states. In seeking to diversify oil sources, US companies look increasingly to new oil frontiers in West Africa, scrambling to invest in the face of growing competition from China. If the Chad-Cameroon pipeline — the result of a multi-billion dollar private capital investment that came online in 2003 — is in any way portentous of things to come, then the region looks set to assume an ever more prominent position on America’s strategic radar.

Likewise for France, the Sahara is strategically important as a source of fuel, albeit of a very different kind. Uranium feeds France’s 59 nuclear reactors, which in turn provide for 70–80 per cent of the country’s electricity needs. And around a third of that uranium comes from Niger, where French energy giant Areva is heavily involved.

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