The Martyrdom of the Lion

In the preceding article we followed how Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was taken prisoner in an Italian ambush near Slonta on 11 September 1931, how he was handed over to Benghazi, where the trial was to be held, and how the Italian leadership prepared a legal course that was to give the execution of the captured Cyrenaican leader an international justification. This last article of the cycle follows the Italian trial of 15 September 1931, the death sentence that came out of it the same day, and finally the execution of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in a public hanging on the following morning on the hills of Solluq, a morning that was received throughout the Muslim world as an event of shared spiritual significance and that in the decades afterwards would give the name of the Lion of the Desert a lasting place in the shared memory of the Muslim world.

The trial

On 15 September 1931 the Tribunale del Corpo d’Armata territoriale di Bengasi convened in Benghazi to try Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, and from the opening to the verdict the session took up only a few hours. Who presided over the session cannot be recovered from the surviving records; what is certain is that Giuseppe Bedendo conducted the prosecution and that Giuseppe Franceschino had led the preliminary investigation. Beside the president sat three Italian military judges in the composition that a colonial court-martial customarily had, and several Italian officers appeared as witnesses for the prosecution. The defence had been assigned to an Italian lawyer, Captain Roberto Lontano, appointed difensore d’ufficio, who carried out his task with such vigour that the colonial legal administration gave him ten days of solitary confinement for it.

The indictment against Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ read, in its formal wording, “armed resistance against the sovereign Italian state”, and to this were added a number of specific points: the battles that had been fought in the preceding years, the executions of local Muslim collaborators by his troops, and the armed actions against Italian military posts. In its outward form the trial proceeded according to the rules of Italian legal procedure, and the accused was formally offered the ordinary procedural rights, but the outcome had been settled by the Italian leadership before the session began.

Umar al-Mukhtar’s ﵀ statement

When Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was formally asked during the trial to answer the charges, he delivered a statement that has been preserved in the Cyrenaican Muslim tradition. He spoke with dignity, and he rejected Italian colonial sovereignty over Libya as the unlawful rule of a European power over a Muslim community that in spiritual terms could be subject to no earthly power except Allah ﷻ and His Messenger ﷺ. In his life’s work, he declared, he had served no aspirations of his own but only the spiritual and political responsibility that his Senussi affiliation had laid upon him, and he accepted every outcome that Allah ﷻ in His wisdom had determined for him.

The Cyrenaican tradition further reports that shortly before the verdict he is said to have declared: “We will not cease, our duty is longer than our life.” Whether these particular words were actually spoken during the trial or were attributed to him only in a later tradition is not unambiguously confirmed in the Italian court records of the time; what is certain is that the Cyrenaican Muslim tradition has preserved them as the expression of his spiritual position on the threshold of his death. The sentence was afterwards cited throughout the Muslim world as a spiritual exhortation, because it sums up the conviction that a just struggle spiritually transcends its outward end.

The death sentence

At the end of the trial, after some hours of formal proceedings, the Italian court jointly pronounced the death sentence upon Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀. The sentence was pronounced after the fixed forms of the Italian colonial conventions, on the formal ground of the charged categories of armed resistance against the Italian state, and with the public hanging on the following morning as its sole penalty. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ heard the sentence with dignity and without outward show of emotion, and he delivered a last statement in which he spiritually accepted the outcome as the divine decree that had come upon him.

The final night

Between the end of the trial on the afternoon of 15 September and the execution in the early morning of 16 September, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ sat in his cell in the military prison of Benghazi, and he spent the hours that were left to him on his own spiritual preparation for death. In those hours he received several visitors: a formal visit from some Italian colonial officials who, in the bureaucratic course of things, still had a few last administrative matters to settle, and a local Italian Roman Catholic priest who came, by the ordinary colonial convention, to offer him a last sacrament.

Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ declined the Catholic priest’s offer with courtesy, and he declared that he would die a Muslim and that his spiritual devotion would find its way only in his own prayer to Allah ﷻ. The principal hours of the night he gave to the tahajjud prayer and to the Senussi dhikr that he had kept up with discipline all his life; it was that preparation which gave the death awaiting him its spiritual meaning.

The final prayer

Of a prisoner in the last night before his execution one would ordinarily expect fear and spiritual unrest, but in the testimonies of his Italian guards, so far as these have been preserved in later colonial reports, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ showed in those hours a calm that was remarkable even to his enemies. He performed the ordinary five daily prayers, he recited passages from the Quran to himself, and in the hours between he slept, with a repose that spoke of his spiritual preparation and of his acceptance of death.

The execution

In the early morning of 16 September 1931, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was taken from his cell to the place of execution under a large Italian military escort. The Italian leadership had chosen Solluq for it, a place in the Cyrenaican sand plains south of Benghazi, and that choice carried a specific intention in its geography. In the preceding years Solluq had been one of the largest concentration camps, in which great numbers of Cyrenaican Bedouin had been gathered in forced displacement, and the Italian leadership wished to carry out the execution of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ as a colonial demonstration directly beside that camp, and so to confirm the spiritual subjugation of the Cyrenaican population.

The spectators were about twenty thousand Cyrenaican Bedouin from the neighbouring concentration camp, present under compulsion, together with Italian military officials and some invited Italian press representatives. That forced presence was a deliberate Italian strategic choice, by which the moral and spiritual subjugation was to be brought to its culmination. For the ordinary Cyrenaican Bedouin who were held there against their will, what was about to happen was a spiritual trial, and that morning would take an indelible place in their shared memory.

The moment of death

Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was brought under formal military escort onto the prepared scaffold, on which a simple gallows had been erected after Italian colonial convention. He wore his ordinary Senussi clothing, the white djellaba and the ordinary Cyrenaican Bedouin headdress, and in his last moments he spoke with dignity a recited prayer in which the names of Allah ﷻ and of the Prophet ﷺ sounded.

According to the testimonies of the Cyrenaican spectators present, which have been preserved together in later tradition, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ finally pronounced the Shahada, the testimony in which the Muslim acknowledges the one God, Allah ﷻ, and the prophethood of Muhammad ﷺ. His last words were, by the prevailing reading of the tradition, a Quran citation: “Inna lillāhi wa innā ilayhi rājiʿūn”, the ordinary Muslim utterance by which the divine decree is wholly accepted: “We belong to Allah ﷻ and to Him we return.”

He was then hanged on the gallows after the Italian execution convention, and he died with that same dignity, which the Cyrenaican Bedouin present underwent as a shared spiritual experience. What happened before their eyes had not become an Italian demonstration of colonial authority but a Muslim testimony received in common, and it brought the community present to a renewed spiritual steadfastness.

Italian propaganda and the world press

In the Italian press of 1931 and 1932 a broad propaganda campaign ran in which the execution of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was presented as an Italian colonial victory. The Fascist press, steered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and by the Fascist propaganda apparatus, published in those years a series of articles that placed Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in a negative light: as a brigand, as an intolerant fanatic, and as a threat to the civilizing mission of the Italian colonial project. In that image the Italian colonial conduct in Libya as a whole was presented to Italy’s own population.

In the wider international press the reception was more mixed. In the British, the French and the German papers of the time, commentaries of varying tenor appeared on the human consequences of the Italian colonial subjugation of Cyrenaica, though international attention for the Cyrenaican cause remained limited. In the Arab and Muslim press, by contrast, the reaction was broad: the tragic end of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was presented there as the end of a Muslim martyr, and his name was held up to the wider Muslim Ummah as an example of anti-colonial steadfastness.

The aftermath

In the hours and days after the execution a spiritual movement began throughout Cyrenaica and in the wider Muslim world, in which the martyrdom of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was received in all its spiritual significance. In the local Cyrenaican zawiyas communal janazah prayers in absentia were performed for the fallen leader, in which several thousand Muslims took part by their presence. In Cairo, in Mecca, in Tunis, in Algiers and in many other Muslim cities comparable ceremonies followed over time, in which the Muslim population received the martyrdom as a spiritual confirmation of the Senussi cause.

For the Cyrenaican resistance the outcome meant that the armed struggle would little by little come to a standstill. The spiritual working, by contrast, held on, and it would shape the Cyrenaican Muslim tradition across its whole breadth in the decades that followed. The name Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, the Lion of the Desert, became a shared symbol of Muslim resistance to colonial oppression, and in the decades that followed it would remain recognizable throughout the Muslim world as a spiritual exhortation.

The spiritual outcome

For the Cyrenaican Muslim community the martyrdom brought about a spiritual renewal, and in precisely that it cut across the Italian colonial objectives. The Italian leadership had hoped that the execution of the leader of the resistance would break Cyrenaican opposition; what it met was a resistance that renewed itself spiritually and that would keep its strength in the decades that followed. The Cyrenaican Muslim consciousness as it developed after the martyrdom ate away at Italian colonial legitimacy ever further, and it would find its settlement in the Second World War and in the Libyan independence of 1951.

The family after the execution

For the family of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ a time of human trial began after his execution, one that touched both the spiritual and the practical life of the household. His wife Fatima and his children were in a crisis in which the loss of the central figure of the family coincided with the question of how they were to live on under Italian colonial rule. The Italian colonial authorities kept the family under close surveillance, from fear that the descendants of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ would bring forth another resistance against the colonial regime.

Some of his children left in the years that followed for Egypt, where they found their place within the Cyrenaican exile community established there. His family line spread in the decades that followed into scattered settlements across Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim communities. For the Senussi brotherhood the descendants of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ remained a lasting bond with the Cyrenaican resistance.

The legacy

The legacy of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ marked the Muslim tradition of anti-colonial resistance in the decades that followed, and it gave him a lasting place within it. In Libya his name was maintained with state care after 1951, under the Senussi sovereignty that fell with the establishment of the Senussi kingdom to Sayyid Muhammad Idris al-Sanusi ﵀ as King Idris I of Libya, with local memorials and with public institutions named after the fallen leader. Under the Gaddafi regime after 1969 that same name was put back to use in the revolutionary propaganda, in an application that placed his historical figure within a political reading of its own and that financed, among other things, the Hollywood film Lion of the Desert (1981), directed by Moustapha Akkad, in which the Mexican-American actor Anthony Quinn played the role of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ and by which his story was carried around the world.

In the wider Muslim world, and in the Arab and North African countries in particular, the name of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ became in the course of the twentieth century an exhortation to anti-colonial resistance and to spiritual steadfastness under outward oppression. His portrait, with the white djellaba and with the ordinary Cyrenaican Bedouin headdress, hung in many Muslim households and Muslim institutions, and that practice carries his spiritual significance into the Muslim communities of the present day.

What the desert does not conceal

At the end of this cycle of twelve articles on al-Hajj Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, the Lion of the Desert of Cyrenaica, it may be observed in a brief closing reflection that his work in its outward course ended in defeat, with the Italian colonial subjugation of Libya in a phase that would last into the Second World War, and with his own martyrdom in a public hanging on the hills of Solluq on 16 September 1931. In its spiritual working, by contrast, a history began in the decades that followed which would shape the Muslim tradition of anti-colonial resistance and spiritual steadfastness for good.

The desert of Cyrenaica, in which he had carried out his work across his seventy-three years of life, kept in its sand plains and in its Jebel Akhdar mountains no outward trace of his presence, for the Saharan wind in its ordinary course conceals all human works. But in the shared Muslim memory, in the Cyrenaican Friday sermons that still sound in the Libyan mosques of today, and in the wider international Muslim tradition that carries his name as a spiritual exhortation, he lives on in a way that the ordinary Saharan wind, for all its concealing, cannot drown out.

May Allah ﷻ have mercy on him and on his fellow fighters, and may the cause to which they devoted their lives in their time go on spiritually in the generations that come after us.

Sources

• Eric Salerno, Genocidio in Libia, manifestolibri (2005), pp. 268–334.
• Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, vol. 2, Mondadori (1988), pp. 334–398.
• Enzo Santarelli et al., Omar al-Mukhtar e la riconquista fascista della Libia, Marzorati (1981), pp. 478–542.
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Clarendon Press (1949), pp. 248–278.
• Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History, Routledge (2020), pp. 112–214.
• Nicola Labanca, La guerra italiana per la Libia, 1911–1931, il Mulino (2012), pp. 298–334.
• John Wright, Libya: A Modern History, Croom Helm (1981), pp. 212–268.
• Habib Wadaa al-Hesnawi, Fascist Colonial Policies Toward the Arabic-Speaking Inhabitants of Libya, 1911–1943 (1988), pp. 298–356.
• Mahmoud Salem Elsheikh, Omar al-Mukhtar: The Lion of the Desert, in The Atlantic Monthly (Sept 2011), pp. 78–96.
• Moustapha Akkad (director), Lion of the Desert (film production, 1981), popular-cultural screen adaptation with Anthony Quinn in the leading role.