Berenice Stories

There are a number of prominent Islamists in the old Libyan province of Cyrenaica, now East Libya. They caused the Gaddafi regime considerable trouble and they have been influential in post-Gaddafi Libya. I argue, though they may profoundly disagree, that they are the heirs to the Islamic Senussi order which exercised a profound influence over the nine Sa’adi tribes of Cyrenaica and supplied the first King of Libya, Sayyid Idris al Senussi, when Libya achieved independence. Without some small knowledge of the Senussi’s and their influence on East Libya much of what is now happening there is not readily understood. There follows a very short introduction to the Senussi Order. There are but few books on the subject. The reader may find Rosita Forbes’ eyewitness account in her book ‘The Secret of the Sahara: Kufra’ interesting reading. What follows is taken from a draft for my book ‘Libya – The History of Gaddafi’s Pariah State’ and is out of context but I hope it proves a useful introduction.

During the Ottoman period, the Sufi Senussi Order was established in Libya. There follows a brief  sketch of the life of its founder and some of the history of the Order with especial reference to Libya.

Al-Sayyid Muhammad bin ‘Ali al-Senussi al-Khattabi al Idrisi al-Hasani, now known as the Grand Senussi, was born in about 1787 into a distinguished Algerian family claiming descent from the Prophet Mohammad. He was educated at the famous mosque school at Fez in Morocco where he came under the influence of the Trijaniya Order of dervishes.

He left Fez in his early thirties and travelled the pilgrim way along the coast to Tripoli, Misurata and Benghazi. He had already gathered around him several disciples and went on to Cairo where he intended to study at al-Azhar University but his reforming zeal appears to have alienated many of the Sheikhs as the professors of that august university are known. He found it prudent to decamp to Mecca and remained in the Hejaz for several years.

It was here that he came under the most important spiritual influence of his life in the person of Sayyad Ahmad bin Idris al Fasi, the founder of the Idrisiya Order. Sayyad Ahmad Idrisi was at odds with the leaders of the Maliki rite in Mecca who regraded him as unorthodox. Consequently, he and his disciples went to Zabid in the Yemen, the revered site of a mosque built in the lifetime of the Prophet Mohammed and a famous centre of Islamic learning. He was accompanied there by, amongst others, the Grand Senussi.

Sayyad Ahamd Idris died in the Yemen in 1837. The Idrisiya Order was then divided into two sub Orders, the Mirghaniya and the Senussiya. It was the latter, the Senussiya, which was organised by the Grand Senussi who moved its head quarters to Mt Abu Quabas near Mecca. It is this event which is regarded as the foundation of the Senussi Order.

The Senussi Order made such spectacular progress in the Hejaz that it made the Turkish and the Ulema in Mecca uneasy. The Grand Senussi was accused of reducing Sufi standards to suit the harsh simplicity of Bedouin life. This is an accusation which was often to be levelled at the Senussi Order over time.

In the face of mounting criticism, the Grand Senussi with a number of his disciples left the Hijaz in 1841 intending to return to Algeria. He travelled by way of Cairo and stopped for a while in the Oasis of Siwa where he opened a new lodge. It was clear to him that his homeland of Algeria was falling to French colonial ambitions and his mission in the east was out of favour with the authorities in Mecca.

It was thus that  Sayyid Muhammad ibn ‘Ali Senussi, found himself taking up residence in Cyrenaica [East Libya], near the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Cyrene. There he found, living amongst the native Bedouin, a number of holy men known as the Marabtin b’il Baraka. Like them, Sayyid Muhammad was an Arabic speaking Sunni Muslim, familiar with Bedouin life. There was also a flourishing cult of saints, the Marabtin, in Cyrenaica and tribes adjusted their annual migration to spend regular periods near the tomb of their patron saint. These tombs are often small square white structures topped by a dome. In my day, one such could be seen from the road from Benghazi to Benina airport with the tents of a visiting section of the al Awaqir tribe pitched nearby. Therefore the Bedouin found nothing unusual when, in 1843, Sayyid Muhammad, known as the Grand Senussi, and his disciples founded a Senussi lodge or ‘Zawia’ at Baida on the central Cyrenaican plateau.

The new lodge was situated at a point where the territories of three important tribes met. Probably the best way to describe a Senussi lodge is an Islamic seminary and community centre. It was made up of a mosque, classrooms, store rooms and living quarters for the head and for the brothers of the order. Senussi lodges were self-sufficient and needed land and water to support the residents and their visitors. In order to attract a lodge into their territory, local tribes had to give up some of their productive wells and arable land to support it. It was, thus, an important step because good land and reliable wells were precious resources in Cyrenaica and not often surplus to requirements.

This is how it worked in practice. When a few tribes applied for a lodge, they received a visit from a member of the Senussi family. Important visitors were always entertained to a feast and displays of wealth. By observing the interplay of personalities and their relative wealth, the Senussi visitor was able to spot the paramount sheik and areas of surplus wealth. They then set up their lodge under his protection and it was he who negotiated their title to arable land and grazing rights. The lodge was constructed where there is sufficient surplus acreage and water and was protected by the most powerful sheik amongst the tribes.

Under pressure from the Ottomans the Grand Senussi moved from Baida to Azziyat. In 1856 Said Ibn Ali founded a Zawia at Jaghbub which was to become a ‘university’ for the Senussi brotherhood. Jaghbub is situated around 280 kilometres south east of Tobruk. It is close to the Libya’s border with Egypt and with Siwa, the oasis town in the Egyptian Western Desert. As an oasis Jaghbub is not well endowed with palm trees and the water is brackish. At first sight it does not seem a promising place for the Grand Senussi to establish his headquarters. However, it was strategically placed amongst feuding tribes which he wished to pacify and convert and its proximity to Siwa was important.

Said Ibn Ali lived for six years in Jaghbub from whence he contiuued his missionary work. He died in 1859 and was buried in a tomb over which rose the kubba of Jaghbub. (According to reports Colonel Gaddafi ordered the destruction of the tomb and had The Grand Senussi’s mortal remains scattered.)

From Jaghbub Said Ibn Ali allied himself with the Zuwaya tribe, whose home is the oasis of Kufra still further to the south. The tribe offered The Grand Senussi one third of its holdings in the Kurfa Oasis if he would establish a lodge there. He commissioned a famous follower called Sidi Omar Bu Hawa to go to Kufra and establish a Zawiah at Jof and to begin missionary work. The Zuwaya traded across the dessert as far south as Chad, Wadai, Darfur and Kano and as far north as Ajadabia. The Grand Senussi’s followers travelled with the Zuwaya trading caravans to establish their missionary lodges.

In the late nineteenth century, the time was ripe for a new burst of missionary energy and the Grand Senussi was so successful that, within his lifetime, a vast theocratic empire was established. It was a missionary empire which stretched westwards into Tripolitania, eastwards into Saudi Arabia and the Western Desert of Egypt and southwards into the oasis towns of the Sahara.

At the height of its power I estimate that there were more than 140 lodges of which 51 were in Cyrenaica, 18 in Tripolitania, 15 in the Fezzan, 20 in Egypt, 16 in Arabia, and 14 in the Sahel reaching as far south as Kano. In the early stages the Order founded lodges amongst the nomadic Cha’amba tribe whose extensive homeland stretched over much of southern Algeria but I am unable at this stage to say how many nor how long they survived.

Islamic orders are a way of life. One of the better known is the Wahhabi of Saudi Arabia, but there are many others. Their aim is to achieve a complete identification with God by means of contemplation, charity, living apart from the everyday world and performing religious exercises. For the Senussi order, this was achieved by the contemplation of the Prophet Muhammad. Followers were urged to imitate the Prophet’s life until he became their sole guide and counsellor. Islam is a Bedouin faith at heart.

To quote the great traveller, Hassnein Bey, who was a rare and now too often forgotten observer of the Senussi order; ‘For his followers (The Grand Senussi) forbade all kinds of luxurious living including the possession of gold and jewellery ‘excepting for the adornment of women’ and the use of tobacco and coffee.  He imposed no ritual but demanded a return to the simplest form of Islam to be found in the teaching of the prophet. He was intolerant of any contact with Christians, Jews and those Moslems who, in his view, had strayed from the original meaning of Islam.’

The kinship between the Senussi Order and the modern Salafists is striking. I note here that Islamic scholars such as Dr Yasir Quadi suggest that Salafists acknowledge their debt to Taqī ad-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Taymiyyah the medieval Sunni Muslim theologian and reformer. It is widely held that the same ibn Taymiyyah was the inspiration for both the Wahhabi and the Senussi Orders. Here is Dr Quadi’s current definition of the term Salafi:

‘Within the context of our modern World, or to be more precise over the last half a century, the term ‘Salafī’ has come to designate an Islamic methodology, the aspirational objective of which is the emulation of the Prophetic example via the practices and beliefs of the earliest generations of Islam. This is because the first three Islamic generations, in being closest to the era of Muḥammad   and the period of revelation, are understood to best embody the Prophetic Sunnah, and thus a pristine Islam.’

It is easy to see that what the Prophet Muhammad taught the Bedouin of Saudi Arabia in the seventh century was well suited to the Bedouin of Cyrenaica, who still led much the same lives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its clear and simple principles, to do good, avoid evil and pray regularly, were appealing to a tough nomadic and semi-nomadic people who lived in tents and followed their flocks in a quest for water and grazing.

The Senussi order was a success in Cyrenaica because, as the great anthropologist E. E Evans-Pritchard once wrote: “(the Bedouin) need was for some authority lying outside their segmental tribal system which could compose intertribal or intersectional disputes and bind the tribes and tribal sections within an organisation and under a common symbol.” It was also helpful that the Turkish occupiers of Libya were largely confined to the coastal towns and lacked the arms and will to destroy it.

Many years later, during the Italian occupation of Cyrenaica, the Senussi order was given a new lease of life and became almost politicised. The Italians found it impossible to deal with the many powerful and independent tribal sheiks. They found it easier, as did the British after WWII, to deal with the head of the order, Sayyid Idris, who was to become the King of an independent Libya.

The Ikwan lived in lodges built within the tribal homelands and held prayer meetings there. The Ikhwan were missionaries in the true sense of the word and they lived cheerfully and dressed well. They were self-supporting, growing their own food and herding their own animals. Thus, they avoided living on charity. The ordinary unschooled Bedouin, Muntasabin, had little knowledge of the inner rituals and special prayers of the order, but they gave their personal loyalty to the sheikhs or leaders of the lodges in their territory. The Cyranaican Bedouin lived austere lives and thus the clear and unequivocal message of the Senussi Order suited them well, as it did their ancesters in the Nejd.

The Grand Senussi aimed to establish the conditions which would allow the Bedouin to live by their own laws and govern themselves, an aspiration which has recently plunged Libya into civil war. The Grand Senussi remained in Libya for only a few years. One of his sons, Sayyid Mohamed al Mahdi, who succeeded him, moved his headquarters to Kufra in 1895 and thence further south to Qiru in Chad in 1899. Some none too reliable estimates suggest that when Sayyid al Mahdi came to power  there were between one and a half million and three million people who owed allegiance to the order.

Sayyid Mohamed al Mahdi was a charismatic and inspiring Muslim and leader, who was both a scholar and a soldier. Under his leadership the Senussi gained effective commercial and political control of the whole eastern half of the Sahara. His power became so great that during the First World War , with Turkish and also German support, he raised the tribes in his territory against the Allies in the First Senussi War but  was defeated by the Italians and left Libya by German submarine in 1918.

The French, who were advancing there sphere of influence to Chad, were less than hospitable to the Senussi Order, so the Grand Senussi’s third successor, Sayyid Ahmad al Sheriff, moved his headquarters back to Kufra, in order to retain control of the Wadai to Benghazi slave trade route.

The Italian occupation of Libya, which commenced in 1911, entered an aggressive phase during Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Then Italians colonists launched a campaign of ‘re-conquest’. They began to pacify the defiant tribes with no little brutality. Organised resistance by the tribes was impossible so they pursued a classical guerrilla war where Italian sentries were shot, supply columns ambushed, and communications interrupted. There was a succession of small actions and acts of sabotage in different parts of the country. At first the Italians responded by courting the favour of those tribes, or parts of tribes, near the towns. By offering employment, subsidies and arms, they hoped to turn them against the rebels. In their minds there were two types of tribe, the sottomessi, that is the submitted, and the rebelli. They thought they had gained the loyalty of the sottomessi to support them against the rebelli. They were to be constantly disappointed. The sottomessi supplied arms, ammunition, food, intelligence, shelter and funds to the rebelli. Sometimes the tribal sheiks would arrange amongst themselves who would submit and who would take the field.

To their consternation, the Italians had overlooked or misinterpreted, as many do, the powerful Bedouin law. The nine Sa’adi tribes of East Libya and their clients were all Bedouin, jealous of each other and hostile to tribes other than their own. The males of each tribe were duty-bound to avenge a slain kinsman. The group of males within the tribe who shoulder this collective responsibility is called the amara dam. The other side of this coin is the duty to protect and aid a living kinsman. This is at the root of Bedouin values. The common ancestry and the kinship of the Sa’adi tribes overrode the lesser demands. The tribes were united by blood, Islam and a common way of life against the Italians.

As the Italian proconsul Graziani wrote of the Second Senussi War. “The entire population thus took part directly or indirectly in the rebellion.” However the guerrilla war was led by some notable families who have received less attention than they deserve. They were the Abbar and the Kizzih of the Awaquir, the Saif al Nasr of the Aulad Suliman, the Bu Baker bu Hadduth of the Bara’asa, the Lataiwish of the Magharba, the Abdalla of the Abaidat, the Asbali of the Arafa, the Suwaikir and the Ilwani of the Abid and the Bu Khatara bu Halaiqua of the Hasa. The homelands of the tribes which these families led stretched from the desert south of the present city of Sirte to the Marmarica in the east around the city of Tobruk. All of this territory was ideal for guerrilla warfare.

The tribal leaders were formidable but they needed the coordinating hand of a leader. They found it in the person of Omar Mukhtar who brought not only his considerable energy and talents into the field but also the network of Senussi lodges and intelligent personnel stretched throughout the tribal homelands. The Islamic Senussi order had for a long time planted seminaries amongst the Bedouin tribes of Eastern Libya. They were staffed by a leader or sheik and a band of the Ikwan (brothers) who educated the young and gave religious and practical leadership.

In the Senussi sheik, Omar Mukhtar, they had a leader who, though he was more than sixty, was an experienced soldier, a talented tactician with an almost unique ability to keep the peace between the fractious tribal detachments which he commanded, perhaps because of his Bedouin birth. His parents were members of a Minifa (Marabtin al-sadqan) tribe from the Marmarica. Between 1912 and 1931 he planned all the gruella operations, gathered and evaluated the intelligence, organised the logistics and finance and led a band of his own.

The Italians response grew more heavy handed as the war progressed. They found that the sottomessi were supplying the rebellei, so they commenced by disarming the non-combatant tribesmen. They went on to harsher methods to stop the flow of rebel volunteers, ammunition and weapons, money and food from the sottomessi. They used the well tried methods of arrests, restricting civilian movements, deportations, aerial bombardment and strafing of recalcitrant tribes. They blocked and poisoned desert wells, confiscated precious livestock and barbed wire was liberally strewn around to restrict the seasonal migrations. The rate of executions was alarming but it was in concentration camps that the sottomessi who were much depleted in health, morale and numbers.
They went after the Senussi lodges, destroying them and deporting their leaders. They captured Omar Mukhtar in September 1931 when he was ambushed near Baida. He was wounded in an arm. His horse was shot and pinned him to the ground. He was taken prisoner and tried in a hurry. The Italians made a spectacle of his final moments. He was hanged at a place called Suluq before an audience of 20,000 Libyans assembled there by their colonial masters. The rebellion was ended. A number of tribal leaders attempted to escape to Egypt.

The logistical problems posed by the huge distance and lack of fodder and water from the Italian bases on the Mediterranean coast meant that the Senussi theocracy based in Kufra was for many years beyond their reach. What is more the Italians became embroiled in World War I and had little time or resources with which to mount an attack on Kufra, protected as it was by distance and an arc of impassable sand seas.

The Grand Senussi’s fourth and last successor was Sayyid Muhammad al Idris who was destined to become King of Libya when it became fully independent.

In 1920 the Italians, still unable to move against him, adopted the pragmatic policy of appointing the future King of Libya, Mohamed Idris es Senussi, Emir of Cyrenaica with his capital at Ajdabiya and his impregnable stronghold in the Kufra oasis. In so doing the Italians began the process of politicising the Senussi hierarchy. It will be seen later this was furthered by the British during WWII.

In 1931 the Italians had built up sufficient strength to project their power across the desert and they  attacked Kufra and brutally killed the Senussi supporters there. Sayyid Idris went into exile in Egypt.

The fortunes of Sayyid Idris, the Senussi Emir in exile in Egypt, were improved by the strange and somewhat delusional act of war by Benito Mussolini. He had thrown in his lot with A. Hitler and declared war against the Allies on 10^th June 1940. On 13^th September 1940 he moved his 10^th Army across the Libyan border into Egypt. He did so in the hope of expanding his North Africa empire when the Germans completed their seemingly inevitable conquest of Great Britain and thus her subsequent departure from the de facto occupation of Egypt. Hitler seemed unstoppable. It was, therefore, very brave, even foolhardy, for Sayyed Idris to tie Libya’s fortunes to those of Great Britain at that dark time in her history.

In October 1939, when it seemed certain the Italy would invade Egypt some prominent Libyan sheikhs living in exile in Egypt met in Alexandria and formally recognised Sayyid Idris as their Emir. They informed the British ambassador that Sayyid Idris could speak for them in future negotiations. This was the first step in the long and difficult journey of Sayyid Idris, the head of the Sufi Senussi Order, from temporal to political power as King of Libya.

Following Italy’s declaration of war the Libyan Sheiks met again to hear Sayyid Idris make an impassioned appeal for the Libyans to fight with the British against the Italian. The sheiks, mostly Cyrenaicans incidentally, decided to form a Libyan Force to fight alongside the British Army in the Western Desert of Egypt. The Libyan Arab Force was raised from Libyans who had fled the Italian brutalities in Libya or who had deserted from the Italian Army. Its officers were a mixture of Libyan notables and British expatriates living in Egypt who were grated their commissions by the Emir, Sayyid Idris. This is generally recognised as the birth of the Libyan Army of today.

From this brief sketch of the foundation and spread of the Senussi Order, it will be clear that it penetrated rapidly from its first foundation lodge near Baida, mainly via the slave trading routes from Kufra to the Sudan, Chad, Mali and Northern Nigeria. It was pushed out of the Sahel states by the French. However, its firm hold on the nine Sa’adi tribes in Cyrenaica was to give it a key role in modern Libya.

John Oakes

Books by John Oakes: For books by John Oakes see… (USA): http://www.amazon.com/John-Oakes/e/B001K86D3O/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1 ….. (UK): http://www.amazon.co.uk/John-Oakes/e/B001K86D3O/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1

Update 31st December 2012

The Libyan government commemorates of Battle of Kufra http://www.libyaherald.com/2013/01/19/1931-battle-of-kufra-commemorated/

Update 17th September 2017

An article published in ‘Roar’ in Bengali about the Libyan hero Omar Mukhtar may be accessed here. It deserves a wide audience.

http://bn.bijoyerhasi.com/মরুসিংহ-ওমর-আল-মুখতার-ইতা/

Update 18th September 2017

This article on Omar Mukhtar and the Italian occupation of Libya is well illustrated and worth reading:

http://www.chezchiara.com/2010/09/omar-al-mukhtar-1862-september-16-1931.html