The Birth of the Lion of the Desert

In the preceding article we followed the political training of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in Jaghbub and in Kufra, and we saw how between 1880 and 1900 he was prepared within the Senussi formation for a leading role in the brotherhood. We described the Senussi strategy against the Italian colonial threat that was taking form, the weapons purchases of those decades, the marriage bonds that tied him to the Senussi organisation through family as well, and the move of the headquarters from Jaghbub to Kufra in 1895. This article follows his first great leadership assignment: the Senussi undertaking in the Chad-Wadai region between 1890 and 1899, from which came the honorary title “Lion of the Desert” that would stay attached to his name for the rest of his life and throughout the Cyrenaican tradition.

The Senussi expansion in the south

The motives behind the southern strategy

The Senussi expansion into the southern Sahara arose from three considerations that reinforced one another. The first was the European colonial advance in North Africa: the French presence in Algeria had been extended since 1830 to Tunisia in 1881 and would move further towards the Chad-Niger region, so that the brotherhood had to prepare for that movement in good time. The second was economic, for the southern Saharan zone lay along the trans-Saharan trade routes, with their trade in gold, salt and slaves, and that trade could strengthen the financial position of the brotherhood. The third was spiritual: among the Muslim communities of the region, Senussi discipline could bring the existing Muslim organisation into one common form.

Under Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ those three considerations became a single strategy, which in the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties extended the southern part of the Senussi network into the Chad-Wadai regions and as far as the neighbouring Sahelian zones. It had three main aims. The zawiya network had to be laid out in an area that would be exposed to French and British subjugation, since an early Senussi presence could place the local Muslim communities in an attitude of resistance. The economic ties had to be secured with the broad trans-Saharan trading space, whose central node lay in the Chad region. And the spiritual work had to reach the Tubu, Kanembu and Kanuri communities, which out of their own Muslim traditions could carry the network.

For the young Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, his appointment as leader of the Wadai undertaking meant that he was now helping to build the strategy of Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ himself. He was designated in 1893 or early 1894 for the leadership of a Senussi mission to Wadai, and that designation spoke of the confidence Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ placed in his formation. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ left Kufra in 1894, thirty-six years old, with a long caravan, charged with establishing the Senussi presence in the communities there.

Wadai and the reception of the Senussi mission

Wadai was a broad Sahelian sultanate in the central Chad basin, at a distance of approximately one thousand kilometres southwest of Kufra, and it was a Muslim kingdom that had built up a spiritual and political tradition of its own since the seventeenth century. Its rulers, in the eighteen-nineties under Sultan Yusuf, maintained broad spiritual ties with Sufi brotherhoods in North Africa and in Egypt, and they received the Senussi with spiritual hospitality.

That reception gave Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ a working base at once. Together with the local Wadai ulama he founded a Senussi zawiya at a central place in the sultanate; he settled in a settlement near the capital Abeche and began immediately with the Senussi initiations among the Muslim population, so that spiritual guidance and organisational building went together from the first. In the five years that followed, his network in Wadai and in the neighbouring areas grew to approximately ten zawiyas, each with an appointed local ikhwan who did his own work under his leadership.

Wadai within the broader Senussi expansion

What he did in Wadai did not stand alone. In those same years the consolidation of the headquarters at Kufra was carried further, additional zawiyas were founded in eastern Niger and in northern Chad, and the ties between all those areas were held together under the central leadership of Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was therefore working within a movement that made the Senussi brotherhood the most influential Muslim organisation of the whole Saharan zone.

The correspondence with the Senussi headquarters belonged to that work: Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ reported precisely on his progress and received instructions for the next phases of his task. The letters travelled with the trans-Saharan caravans, under secrecy and with careful logistical preparation, and they formed a core of the Senussi coordination between undertakings scattered across the whole Sahara.

The Lion of the Desert

The honorary title “Lion of the Desert”, which in the decades that followed would be inseparable from the name of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, arose in these Wadai years. The local tradition relates that a Senussi ikhwan, in a Friday sermon in one of the Wadai zawiyas, compared the young Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ to a lion who served his community in the vast Saharan desert, a comparison meant to hold courage and personal earnestness in a single image. The community took it up, and within a few years the Senussi tradition carried the honorary title along with his name as a matter of course.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ himself the honorary title was no more than an expression of Senussi admiration, and his personal humility did not allow him to find it fitting: in his Friday sermons in Wadai and in his separate conversations with the local ikhwan he said again and again that spiritual leadership belonged to Allah ﷻ and not to the spiritual leader himself, and he refused to give it undue attention. Accept it he had to, for in the local community it did its work, and in the Senussi tradition, later throughout Cyrenaica and in the wider Muslim world, “Lion of the Desert” has never again been separable from his name.

The French colonial expansion

While the Senussi were settling in Wadai, France was pressing into the Chad basin, and that advance would determine what became of the region. The French colonial authorities had been engaged in their expansion in West and Central Africa since 1870 and carried it on towards Chad in the eighteen-nineties, in a series of military expeditions that ended in 1898 in the decisive Battle of Kousseri; there the French troops broke the local power of Rabih az-Zubayr ﵀ and formally established French colonial rule over Chad.

For the Senussi undertaking in Wadai this altered the circumstances in which it had begun. In the decades that followed, the authorities of the sultanate came under mounting French political pressure, which ended in 1909 in the capture of Abeche by French troops. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ meanwhile had to keep the Senussi presence standing, and that demanded spiritual discipline and political caution at once.

The return to Cyrenaica

In 1899 or early 1900, after approximately five years of Senussi work in Wadai, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ received an invitation from Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ to return to Cyrenaica for a new assignment. He handed the leadership of Wadai to an appointed successor and set out on the long caravan journey back by way of Kufra. In the local Wadai community his departure was received with considerable sorrow, for in his five years of work he had become a central spiritual figure there, and the local ikhwan rode out with him together for the first stage of his return journey.

In Kufra, Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ received him in audience and expressed his appreciation for the work the young Cyrenaican had completed in Wadai. At that meeting he was given his new assignment: the leadership of an important zawiya in the Jebel Akhdar region, an appointment that was the beginning of his growth towards the Senussi leadership over the whole of Cyrenaica. He carried it out with spiritual discipline and practical industry, and in the years that followed he grew into one of the most respected Senussi leaders of Cyrenaica.

Family life after the return

After his return to Cyrenaica in 1899 or 1900, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ resumed domestic life with his wife Fatima and with the children who had grown up in his absence under her care. The reunion was heavy with feeling; their shared life had to be found again and the household built up anew, with his Bedouin habits from before and his Senussi discipline in the same house. Fatima had kept the household standing in her own way through all those years, and she received her husband with dignity and with the spiritual bond they shared.

The children knew their father chiefly from the accounts of their mother and of the family members nearby, and on his return father and children had to learn one another again on both sides. In the years that followed Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ built a close family bond with them, and he gave much attention to their spiritual formation, in which the Bedouin tradition and the Senussi discipline came together.

The work in the Cyrenaican zawiya

In his new position Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ lived among the Cyrenaican Bedouin communities, bound to them personally and through family, and at work daily in the local zawiya. There he received students from various Bedouin tribes and carried out Senussi initiations for the Muslim population, by which the Senussi presence in his area came to stand more firmly. He also gave judgment in local disputes according to Maliki fiqh, and in his Friday sermons he gave the community a spiritual guidance that confirmed his authority.

The Tubu people and their role

In his Wadai work Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ also met the Tubu, a Saharan people who lived scattered from the northern Chad basin into the southern Libyan desert and who led a distinct, recognisable form of Saharan life. They lived by animal husbandry and by trade at once and were markedly skilled in finding their way and in making war in the desert, and it was precisely those two skills that would give them a pronounced role in the Senussi work still to be done.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ the dealings with the Tubu carried his spiritual work beyond the Wadai community itself. He carried out Senussi initiations among Tubu clans and there came to know their tradition, and that knowledge would prove indispensable to him as a military leader in the Saharan zone. The Italian colonial expansion in Libya would place the Tubu population in a direct confrontation, and it was the Senussi-Tubu bond that brought forth from it a core element of the anti-colonial resistance.

The shift in Senussi leadership

While he was working in Wadai, the supreme leadership within the brotherhood itself was shifting. Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ drew his successors step by step into the responsibility: his nephew Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi ﵀, in these years in his early thirties, was given an active role in the Senussi leadership and took on practical administrative tasks in increasing measure. For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ that movement meant that on his return to Cyrenaica he would be placed in a new position within the Senussi leadership, a development that would prove indispensable to his later role as leader of the Cyrenaican resistance.

Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi ﵀

Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi ﵀ was approximately thirty-two years old in 1894, a nephew of Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ and a formed scholar who in his younger years had studied in Mecca and in Cairo before he would take up the supreme leadership of the Senussi brotherhood. He was eloquent and of a deep spiritual earnestness, and he won his uncle’s confidence by degrees for the transition that lay ahead.

The understanding that grew in these years between Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif ﵀ and the young Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ became one of the bearing bonds of the later anti-colonial resistance. In the years between 1902 and 1918, when Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif ﵀ held the supreme leadership, he called upon the spiritual and practical abilities of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, and it was on the cooperation between those two men that the resistance would be built.

The work in the Wadai zawiyas

In the years between 1894 and 1899 Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ built the net of Senussi zawiyas in the Wadai region and the neighbouring zones one by one. The first came in 1894 or early 1895, at a place near Abeche, with the consent of Sultan Yusuf of Wadai and with broad participation from local Muslim scholars who bound themselves to the Senussi cause. In the years that followed, four or five additional zawiyas came in the neighbouring Wadai villages, which did the ordinary Senussi work: Quran teaching, juridical adjudication, and the tightening of Muslim discipline on the spot.

For the local Wadai population that meant a stricter and more disciplined continuation of the Muslim tradition it already had. The Senussi wird was performed communally in the local mosques, the Senussi conventions of self-sufficiency and shared building entered the villages, and in the adjudication of disputes the ordinary application of Maliki fiqh was widened along Senussi lines.

The internal organisation

At the head of that net stood Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀. Each local zawiya was led by an appointed local ikhwan, and those ikhwan came together at regular times in the central zawiya of Abeche to discuss with Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ the progress of the work and the matters facing the community. Spiritual and administrative considerations ran through one another in those discussions, and for Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ they were a practical training in the administrative leadership that would sound through in his later role as leader.

The return journey through the Sahara

The return journey from Wadai to Cyrenaica took several months, with a caravan undertaking that crossed the Saharan zone between Chad and Libya. Along the way Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ passed through a number of Senussi zawiyas, where in scholarly conversations with the local ikhwan he took stock of what his Wadai work had yielded and of what lay ahead for the Senussi brotherhood in the wider Saharan zone.

For his personal spiritual life those months were a reflection: on what the Wadai years had brought and on the form his Cyrenaican work would have to take. In the evening hours, after the communal prayers in the caravan camp, he kept long hours of personal dhikr in the Senussi discipline, and he thought strategically about the Italian colonial threat whose traces were becoming ever more visible in his native Cyrenaica.

The Tubu cavalry tradition

Of everything the Tubu brought with them, it was their cavalry tradition that would weigh heaviest for the Cyrenaican resistance. In Saharan warfare they had developed a military skill of their own: on swift camels and with their local knowledge, their fighters waged a desert guerrilla war that left the ordinary European military conventions of the time far behind. For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ the understanding with the Tubu in his Wadai years was a practical training in precisely that warfare, and the knowledge he gained of their military skill would support him as a military leader.

In the decades that followed, the Tubu would fill a role of their own in the Cyrenaican Senussi resistance, with broad participation in the armed exchanges against the Italian colonial troops and with strategic support in the southern Cyrenaican Saharan zone. For the success of that long resistance, the understanding with the Tubu, whose foundation had been laid in Umar al-Mukhtar’s ﵀ Wadai years, would prove decisive.

The French advance into Chad

Between 1890 and 1910 France subjugated the Chad-Niger region step by step, militarily and administratively, and the local Muslim communities that were subjected to it offered resistance. French troops under generals such as Émile Gentil and later Henri Gouraud carried out expeditions in those years that damaged the local political organisations in the form in which they existed. At the Battle of Kousseri in 1898, where Rabih az-Zubayr ﵀ met a martyr’s death, the definitive French colonial rule over Chad began.

For the Senussi brotherhood in Wadai and in the zones around it, that advance was a strategic challenge. In his Wadai years Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ watched the French military methods closely, he obtained intelligence through local Tubu and Wadai informants about the French movements that were afoot, and he passed his reports on them to the central Senussi leadership in Kufra.

The visit to the Mahdi survivors

In those same Wadai years Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ also met some of the survivors of the Mahdiyya movement in Sudan, which in 1898 had fallen to the British-Egyptian troops of General Kitchener and whose remaining members formed a refugee community in the Saharan zone between Chad and Sudan. Those meetings were a schooling in what a failed anti-colonial undertaking costs a community, and they gave Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ a learned insight into what colonial military methods do to a Muslim population that has offered resistance out of its spiritual conviction.

In his conversations with the Mahdi survivors, so far as later tradition has preserved them, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ thought through the form anti-colonial resistance had taken in the nineteenth century. What he understood there would set him apart when he himself came to stand as leader of the Cyrenaican resistance in the Italian confrontation.

Towards the Imam position of Zawiyat al-Qusour

In the years around 1902, when Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was forty-four years old, a further step in his responsibility within the Senussi organisation arrived. In that year the Senussi supreme leadership passed from Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ to his nephew Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi ﵀, and he was appointed imam of the Zawiyat al-Qusour, a zawiya in the Cyrenaican Jebel Akhdar region that held a central place in the regional Senussi network. To that appointment, and to the way it prepared him for his leadership of the Cyrenaican resistance, the next article will devote its attention.

In this article we have followed how the young Umar, between 1894 and 1899, developed a practical form of leadership in the Senussi undertaking in Wadai, how he there received the honorary title “Lion of the Desert” that would accompany the rest of his life and the Cyrenaican tradition, how the French colonial advance in Chad began to touch the Senussi work in its southern zone, and how the return to Cyrenaica in 1899 or 1900 brought his growth towards the Senussi leadership in his own native region into a new phase.

Sources

• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Clarendon Press (1949), pp. 186–214.
• Knut S. Vikør, Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge, Hurst (1995), pp. 334–376.
• Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya, State University of New York Press (2009), pp. 158–198.
• Jean-Claude Zeltner, Pages d’histoire du Kanem: Pays tchadien, L’Harmattan (1980), pp. 156–214 [for the Wadai-Senussi context].
• Dennis D. Cordell, Dar al-Kuti and the Last Years of the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, University of Wisconsin Press (1985), pp. 124–168.
• Pierre-Alban Thomas, Les rezzous Sénoussistes au Tchad, Karthala (1979), pp. 56–124.
• Nicola A. Ziadeh, Sanusiyah: A Study of a Revivalist Movement in Islam, Brill (1958), pp. 186–214.
• Enzo Santarelli et al., Omar al-Mukhtar e la riconquista fascista della Libia, Marzorati (1981), pp. 134–168.