Michael Asher

In 2005, Asher became an activist in deep ecology, an eco-philosophy based on the idea that all life is of intrinsic value, irrespective of its value to human beings, and that humans have no right to interfere with nature except for essential needs.

Asher began running treks by camel for small groups in the desert of Morocco in 2001. He later extended these to the Bayuda Desert of the Sudan, and in the Ennedi Plateau of Chad, and the Chalbi desert of northern Kenya. Asher cites these expeditions as 'real thing' adventures, crossing true wilderness without the support of motor vehicles, covering 25–30 km a day, carrying everything on camels' back.

In 2000, Asher was commissioned to go to Iraq with a film crew to investigate the story of the SAS patrol, Bravo Two Zero, celebrated in the popular books of two of its members, Steven Mitchell and Colin Armstrong, under the pseudonyms Andy McNab and Chris Ryan. Following in the patrol's footsteps in the Iraqi desert, Asher interviewed many eyewitnesses in Arabic, whose testimony cast doubt on the authors' sensationalised accounts.

In 1992, Asher crossed the Western Desert of Egypt, by camel, from Mersa Matruh on the Mediterranean coast, to Aswan in southern Egypt. He travelled with a single Bedouin companion: for almost a month the two travellers did not see another human being, and two of Asher's five camels died on the way.

In 1988-9, Asher worked as Project Officer for the WHO/UNICEF Joint Nutrition Support Program, among the Beja nomads of the Red Sea Hills, eastern Sudan. He later returned to Darfur, western Sudan, with a team working under the aegis of UNEP, to make a study of the Janjaweed horsemen-militias involved in the civil war. Asher has been employed by the British Council, to train the police in Nyala, Darfur, the Sudan, and in Wau & Kwajok, Republic of South Sudan, in human rights, as part of the SAJP (Security and Access to Justice Programme). More recently he worked for UNPOS (UN Political Office, Somalia), training the UN-mandated peace-keeping forces, AMISOM, in human rights and the treatment and handling of disengaged guerilla fighters. Asher has taught courses in Feudalism, Absolutism and Democracy at the International School of Kenya (ISK), English Literature, Language & Linguistics, at Hillcrest International Schools, Kenya.

On a visit to Khartoum, Asher was asked by UNICEF Sudan to organise a camel caravan in the Red Sea Hills to take aid to Beja people cut off by drought and famine. On this expedition Asher met UNICEF PR officer Mariantonietta Peru, an Italian: they married in 1986. A graduate of the University of Rome, Peru was a fluent Arabic speaker who had studied at the White Fathers institute, and at Ain Shams University in Cairo: she was also a UNICEF-trained photographer. Together, Asher and Peru planned to realise a vision Asher had conceived years earlier: the first ever crossing of the Sahara breadth-wise, by camel and on foot. Influenced by the work of British author Geoffrey Moorhouse—who had unsuccessfully attempted this crossing in 1972— Asher decided, contrary to his original idea, to make the crossing from the Atlantic in Mauritania to the Nile in Egypt.

Setting off from Chinguetti in Mauritania, in August 1986, with three camels, they passed through Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and the Sudan, and finally arrived at the Nile at Abu Simbel in southern Egypt in May 1987, having made a journey of 271 days and 4500 miles by camel, the first recorded crossing of the Sahara from west to east by non-mechanical means.

In 1982, Asher went to live with the Kababish tribe – a traditional nomad tribe, living in Kordofan in the Sudan - as one of them. He remained with them over most of the next three years, learning their dialect of Arabic, travelling thousands of miles by camel, working as a herder, accompanying nomad migrations, and salt-caravans.

Disillusioned by his experiences as a police anti-terrorist officer in Northern Ireland, Michael Asher went to the Sudan in 1979 to work as a volunteer English teacher in remote regions. In his first vacation he bought a camel and rode 1500 miles across Kordofan and Darfur, joining up with a camel-herd being taken north to Egypt along the ancient caravan-route known as the Darb al-Arba'in (Forty Days Road). This experience was the basis of his first book, In Search of the Forty Days Road

In 1978-9, he worked for the RUC Special Patrol Group anti-terrorist patrols, but left after less than a year. He took a job as a volunteer English teacher in the Sudan in 1979.

Michael Asher FRGS (born 1953) is an author, historian, deep ecologist and desert explorer who has covered more than 30,000 miles on foot and camel. He spent three years living with a traditional nomadic tribe in Sudan.

Michael Asher was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, in 1953, and attended Stamford School. At 18, he enlisted in the 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment, and saw active service in Northern Ireland during The Troubles of the 1970s.

Following the success of this book, Asher was commissioned to write a number of other non-fiction works combining military history with North Africa, the Middle East, and the desert environment. These include Get Rommel, about Operation Flipper, the British attempt to assassinate Erwin Rommel in Libya in 1941, Sands of Death, about the Flatters expedition of 1881 and the Tuareg, The Regiment, a history of the SAS Regiment, and Khartoum, the Ultimate Imperial Adventure, the story of the fall of Khartoum, the Gordon Relief Expedition and the reconquest of the Sudan. Besides his biography of Wilfred Thesiger,Thesiger – A Biography, he has also written a life of T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence – the Uncrowned King of Arabia. As a historian, Asher is noted for his integrity, adherence to fact, forensic approach and iconoclasm, and his distrust of the 'hagiographic' and 'mythologizing' school of historiography. His most recent fiction work is a military adventure series Death or Glory, featuring as protagonist an SAS officer. Tom Caine, a former Royal Engineer, who has worked his way up through the ranks. The series is set in WW2.

Asher's early writings were influenced by Arabian Sands, explorer Wilfred Thesiger's account of his travels among the Bedouin of Arabia's Empty Quarter in the 1940s. Like Thesiger, Asher felt that the nomads lived a richer life than those in industrial civilization: he has said that while living with them he wanted simply to become one of them, but realised that this was ultimately impossible, as their world too was on the brink of change. In Thesiger – A Biography and Last of the Bedu, Asher rejected what he claimed was Thesiger's paternalism, citing the questionable spectre of "a rich man telling poor men that they are better off poor." Asher declared that it was for the nomads themselves to decide their own future. Later, as a member of the Deep Ecology Movement, Asher refuted this view, arguing that industrial civilisation deliberately destroys indigenous cultures and expropriates their land and resources.

He studied English Language & Linguistics at the University of Leeds, at the same time serving in B Squadron, 23rd SAS Regiment. He also studied at Carnegie College, Leeds, where he qualified as a teacher of English and PE.