Imam of Zawiyat al-Qusour

In the previous article we followed Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ through his Senussi years in Wadai, between 1894 and 1899: the years in which he earned the honorary title “Lion of the Desert”, in which the French colonial advance in Chad began to press against the Senussi presence, and in which he returned to Cyrenaica in 1899 or 1900 for a new Senussi assignment. This article follows him from 1902 onward in the zawiya where he became imam, the Zawiyat al-Qusour in the Jebel Akhdar region of Cyrenaica, and stays with him until the Italo-Turkish War broke out in 1911.

The Zawiyat al-Qusour

Zawiyat al-Qusour lay in the middle of the Jebel Akhdar, near what is now the town of al-Bayda. Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀ had founded it with his own hands in 1862, which made it one of the older zawiyas of the region and gave it a place at the centre of the Cyrenaican network. The choice of this mountain valley was a practical one: there were pastures and there was water. Over four decades it had grown into a community of some size, with several hundred permanent inhabitants, with farmland lying up against the zawiya, and with a prayer hall that filled on Fridays with Bedouin from the surrounding tribes.

When Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was appointed imam of this zawiya in the spring of 1902, he took on the spiritual and the administrative care of a community in the Cyrenaican region he came from himself. He was forty-four years old, formed by his schooling in Jaghbub and in Kufra and by the years in Wadai, and he took up the appointment with as much seriousness as preparation.

The transition of the supreme leadership

In that same year the brotherhood changed its supreme leader. Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ died in 1902 and his nephew Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi ﵀ took over the leadership. Nothing broke off in the process, for Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif ﵀ had already stood close to the administration of the brotherhood in the preceding years, and he carried the Senussi strategy that was in place forward unchanged.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ it meant that he began his new work in Cyrenaica with a direct line to the top, and in the years that followed a steady traffic of administrative and spiritual exchanges ran back and forth between him and Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif ﵀. What had arisen between the two men in the Wadai years grew in this way into a working relationship in which the supreme leader regarded him as one of his most dependable supports.

The daily work

The morning sessions in the mosque

The days of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ began with teaching, after the fajr prayer. His pupils were some dozens of Cyrenaican Bedouin boys from the tribal families nearby, and together they received their morning instruction in Quran recitation, in the first Arabic letters and in the discipline of the order. These mornings were for Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ the most spiritually fulfilling part of his day, for in that circle he saw the Senussi tradition pass to the generation that came after him, carried by a shared devotion.

He taught with personal attention, so that every pupil was also heard on his own. He came to know them one by one and adapted his manner of teaching to the nature of each of them, and precisely because of that the Senussi formation of that whole generation acquired a common direction.

The juridical adjudication

Alongside the teaching, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ administered justice. Bedouin families from the surrounding tribes brought their disputes to the zawiya, where their case was handled according to Maliki fiqh, and he did so in the manner customary in the order: the fiqh applied with an eye for the custom and the law that lived in the tribes themselves.

That Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was available for this made his authority accepted step by step, for whoever came to him received a ruling that counted as just and that held the Muslim community under one discipline. In the years before 1911 he became in this way the judicial authority for a wide area around the Zawiyat al-Qusour, and his rulings were broadly accepted by the local Bedouin population.

So the day of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ lay fixed. The morning belonged to the communal prayer in the central mosque and to the boys who received their education in the zawiya; the afternoon to the disputes between the tribal families, to the administration of the zawiya economy and to the work by which the Senussi presence spread further across Cyrenaica.

On Fridays Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ preached to a hall that filled with people from the villages round about. He brought them the Senussi discipline in a form in which practical learning and spiritual seriousness did not stand in each other’s way, and he spoke of what the Muslim community had to preserve of its spiritual character now that the European colonial advance was drawing nearer. In this way he prepared his people step by step for what awaited them in the decades that followed.

The personal spiritual discipline

For himself, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ kept to the Senussi wird in full in these years. He habitually rose before the fajr and, alongside the communal prayer, performed a long personal dhikr with the formulas of the order, and in the evening, after the isha prayer, he sat for a time with the Quran and with his own reflection, in which he entrusted his work to Allah ﷻ.

Alongside the fast of Ramadan, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ fasted voluntarily on a regular basis, as an exercise that gave him spiritual steadfastness. It gave him besides a bodily endurance on which he would have to draw in his later years, as an elderly military leader.

The quiet military preparation

His work as imam also included something Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ did not speak about. He was readying the Cyrenaican Bedouin tribes around him for the Italian colonial invasion that was approaching: he called the shaykhs of the tribes together at regular intervals to discuss what that threat meant strategically, and he bought weapons steadily through the networks of the order, so that the tribes were equipped for a defence step by step.

It did not happen in the open, for Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ wanted neither the Ottoman authorities nor the Italian informants on his back before the collision was actually there. Between 1902 and 1911 he built up in this way, quietly and with much care, a network of trained Bedouin fighters, and on that network the Cyrenaican resistance would later be able to lean.

His place in the Senussi leadership

In the years after his appointment Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ became ever more closely bound to the wider leadership of the brotherhood, until he held a place at the centre of its structure. He met regularly in Kufra with the supreme leadership under Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi ﵀, he corresponded with the ikhwan leaders in the other Cyrenaican zawiyas, and he travelled through the wider Senussi region for strategic consultation and spiritual exchange.

Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi ﵀ counted him among his most trusted local leaders and gave him some of the most sensitive tasks in the Cyrenaican Senussi organization: the leadership of the military preparation in his own region, the arms supply through the Egyptian intermediaries, and the diplomatic traffic with the Ottoman authorities in Benghazi about the joint defence that lay ahead.

The local tribal shaykhs

A large part of his work in these years went into tying bonds with the shaykhs of the tribes around him, in the Awaqir, in the Bara’asa, in the Magharba and in the other Saʿadi tribes, who would have to form a single leadership in the armed struggle that lay ahead. For that he travelled again and again through their territories for consultation meetings, talked through with them what the joint strategy had to look like, and gave the defensive organization they would carry together a shape in advance.

For those shaykhs, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was a spiritual authority that rose above the usual rivalry between the tribes. It was this organizational preparation that made it possible for the Cyrenaican Bedouin tribes to resist the Italian colonial advance together, under a Senussi coordination that resolved the fragmentation of the tribes into cohesion.

The Italo-Turkish War in its preparation

Between 1908 and 1911 the Italian state worked steadily toward the invasion of Libya, which would issue in September 1911 in the Italo-Turkish War. Under Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, Italy negotiated in these years with France, Great Britain and Germany about the future Italian colonial presence in Libya. The Italian army meanwhile assembled an expeditionary force of several tens of thousands of men and bought modern weapons steadily for the operation.

The Senussi brotherhood in Cyrenaica followed all of this closely, through its informants in the port cities and through its connections across the borders. Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi ﵀ discussed with the ikhwan in these years what the brotherhood would do when the moment arrived, and in those same years he made the organizational preparations for that war.

The Italian Banco di Roma

One part of the Italian colonial preparation struck at the Libyan economy itself: the arrival of the Banco di Roma. This Italian trading and credit institution opened offices in Tripoli, in Benghazi and in Derna between 1907 and 1911, and trade in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica thereby fell ever further into dependence on Italy. The bank extended ample credit to local merchants, and along that road Italy gained a grip on the economic life of the country.

For the Senussi brotherhood this economic penetration was a strategic development that prepared the Italian colonial invasion. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ followed the rise of the Banco di Roma from his position as imam with sharp attention, through the local Senussi informants in the port cities, and he did something about it: he urged the Bedouin merchants to accept no credit from the Italian bank and to keep maintaining their trading connections through the networks of the order.

The Ottoman policy

The Ottoman government answered the Italian threat by strengthening its Libyan positions step by step. The authorities in Tripoli and in Benghazi brought new troops from Anatolia and consulted with the Senussi brotherhood about a possible common defensive strategy. The brotherhood accepted that joint action was necessary, despite the tensions there had been between the two, and in 1910 and early 1911 it spoke with the Ottoman wali in Benghazi about the defence they would have to conduct together.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ that consultation meant that he came to sit ever deeper in the preparations for the war. Ottoman military officers stayed in his zawiya, and with them he spoke about the geography of his own region and about the design of the common defence; in doing so he came to know modern military planning, a knowledge that would prove indispensable in his later role as leader of the resistance.

Cyrenaica between 1902 and 1911

Between 1902 and 1911 the Bedouin-Senussi society of Cyrenaica underwent several considerable adjustments. The Ottoman authorities in Benghazi widened their administrative presence sharply: they laid modern roads between the port cities and the mountain valleys of the Jebel Akhdar, they set up an Ottoman school system that placed the local aristocratic families in an Ottoman educational environment, and they strung a first telegraph network that carried word between Cyrenaica and the Ottoman metropolitan centre more quickly.

For the Senussi brotherhood this was a development to be received with acceptance and with spiritual caution at once. The Ottoman administrative improvements yielded a modern infrastructure from which the local economy benefited; at the same time they brought with them an Ottoman political control that could erode the region’s own say in the years that followed.

The local economy

In the Cyrenaican economy something happened in these years that would sustain the armed struggle later on. The herding of sheep, goats and camels went on as it always had, but alongside it the agriculture of the mountain valleys widened steadily, with the planting of olive groves, barley fields and smaller fruit gardens. The Bedouin-Senussi communities could thereby provide more of their own subsistence, and that is precisely what a war lasting years demands of a population.

The arms purchases also ran on steadily in these years, through the Egyptian and the Tunisian intermediaries. The zawiyas set up storehouses for them, so that when the moment arrived there was something logistical to fall back on as well.

The spiritual preparation of the community

What was approaching, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ interpreted for his community in his Friday sermons. He spoke of the responsibility of the Muslims for the preservation of their spiritual independence under the European colonial advance, he explained what the Mahdiyya movement in Sudan was doing and how it was regarded from a Cyrenaican Senussi standpoint, and thus he made his people inwardly ready step by step.

The Bedouin population that came to listen to those sermons grew into them by degrees. When the Italian colonial confrontation arrived, it therefore did not find them unprepared, for they stood in a Senussi discipline that had been held before them for years.

Toward the Italian invasion

In the summer of 1911, when the Italian colonial preparation could no longer be hidden, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ pressed ahead from his position at the Zawiyat al-Qusour. He travelled to one Bedouin community after another to prepare the local tribal shaykhs for the joint defence, and he took the last organizational measures for the Senussi organization of the anti-colonial resistance. To the outbreak of the Italo-Turkish War in September 1911 and to the first phase of the Cyrenaican resistance under his leadership, the next article will devote its attention.

Sources

• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Clarendon Press (1949), pp. 124–148.
• Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya, State University of New York Press (2009), pp. 138–168.
• Anna Baldinetti, The Origins of the Libyan Nation, Routledge (2010), pp. 134–168.
• Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana, il Mulino (2002), pp. 112–168.
• Sergio Romano, La quarta sponda: La guerra di Libia 1911–1912, Bompiani (1977), pp. 14–68.
• Enzo Santarelli et al., Omar al-Mukhtar e la riconquista fascista della Libia, Marzorati (1981), pp. 168–214.
• Knut S. Vikør, Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge, Hurst (1995), pp. 376–412.