The Sanussi Order

The preceding article centred on the West African fitna of 1861 and 1862 and on what it meant for the Senussi response in Cyrenaica: we saw how the brotherhood took spiritual and strategic account of what a conflict between Muslims themselves did to its own work. This article picks up the chronological line of Umar al-Mukhtar’s ﵀ life again at the year 1876, when he was eighteen years old, and at the place Jaghbub, where the Senussi brotherhood under the leadership of Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ had reached its greatest organisational extent. It describes the brotherhood as it worked in those years, and it follows Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ at his first arrival in the zawiya of Jaghbub, where the formal Senussi training began that would make him a fully trained murid and at last an ikhwan leader.

Jaghbub as headquarters

Jaghbub was an oasis town in the southeastern Sahara, near the present Libyan-Egyptian border, at a distance of approximately two hundred and fifty kilometres south of the Mediterranean coast, and it owed its existence to the water sources and palm gardens that sustained an oasis economy. Since 1856 it had been the headquarters of the Senussi brotherhood. That choice was a strategic decision of Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀: it kept the brotherhood at a safe distance from the Ottoman authorities in Benghazi and Tripoli, and it set the brotherhood at the same time in the middle of the trans-Saharan caravan routes that connected the Senussi organisation internationally.

By 1876 the town had grown into a settlement of several thousand inhabitants. The central zawiya was the largest building of the complex, with adjoining quarters for the training of murids, a library, storehouses for the communal supplies and workshops for the local trades; to it belonged the palm gardens and vegetable gardens on which the community fed itself, and separate quarters for the far-branching Senussi family, which in these years exercised the spiritual leadership of the brotherhood as a clan.

The town plan of Jaghbub

The town plan brought the spiritual, administrative and economic tasks of the brotherhood together in one place. Around the central square stood the mosque on the eastern side, the Senussi residential complex on the northern side, the library with the scriptorium hall on the southern side, and the buildings for administrative affairs on the western side, and from that square the streets ran out to the outer districts, where the ordinary Bedouin families and the Senussi students had their communal dwellings.

Building was done in the Saharan manner, with thick earthen walls that tempered the heat of the climate naturally, with the flat roofs that were customary in North African architecture, and with an inner courtyard at the centre of each building where people dwelt and met one another. Whoever entered Jaghbub for the first time saw at once that this was no Cyrenaican village like his own, but a spiritual and administrative centre.

Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀

Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ was forty-nine years old in 1876 and had led the Senussi brotherhood since 1859, when he took over the supreme leadership after the death of his father Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀. He was a scholar of exceptional eloquence and of deep spirituality, and under his leadership the brotherhood attained its greatest international expansion and its deepest organisational form. The network of zawiyas grew so far that by 1876 it stretched from Morocco in the west to the Lake Chad regions in the south, with several hundred zawiyas in one connected organisation.

For the ordinary Senussi student in 1876, Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ was in his daily presence a figure of spiritual authority who embodied the brotherhood in his eloquence and in his personal piety. He delivered in the central mosque the Friday sermons in which the teaching of the brotherhood was expounded, and he received in separate audiences the pilgrim visitors and the local ikhwan for personal guidance. For the young Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, who arrived in Jaghbub in 1876, the first meeting with Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ would take a lasting place in his life.

The building of the Senussi network

By 1876 the Senussi brotherhood had an organisation that bound the separate zawiyas into one whole under the central leadership in Jaghbub. It rested on a four-part structure in which each layer fulfilled its own tasks.

At the top stood the headquarters in Jaghbub, with Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ as leader and with a Senussi council of close family members and fully trained ikhwan who together set the strategic and spiritual course. Below it came the so-called qutb zawiyas, approximately twenty in number, established in the regional capitals of the network and each with its own area of subordinate zawiyas beneath it. Below those stood the ordinary zawiyas, approximately one hundred and fifty in number in 1876, which carried out their spiritual work in the villages and in the vast Bedouin grazing lands. On the lowest layer, finally, the local murid circles: Bedouin and urban Muslims who were attached to the brotherhood without holding a formal function in its organisation.

The formation of the ikhwan

The formation of the ikhwan, the training of the leaders of the brotherhood, consisted of study and spiritual discipline and lasted on average five to eight years. Whoever was admitted to the training in Jaghbub received in the first year instruction in classical Arabic grammar according to the Ibn Malik tradition, in the basic texts of Maliki law according to Khalil ibn Ishaq ﵀ and al-Dasuqi ﵀, in the foundations of Quran recitation in the Warsh transmission that was current in North Africa, and in the basic texts of Idrisi tasawwuf, from which the Senussi tradition derived its own spiritual character.

In the years that followed there came the science of hadith, the works of Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀ himself in a thorough exposition of fiqh and tasawwuf, practical schooling in the administration of a zawiya, and the dhikr practice in which the spiritual discipline was deepened step by step. At the end the fully trained ikhwan received a formal ijaza, by which he was recognised in the Senussi network as a leader and with which he could be placed at the head of a zawiya of his own.

Mukhtar’s arrival

In the autumn of 1876, by the most usual reconstruction, the eighteen-year-old Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ arrived in Jaghbub after a journey of several weeks from his parental Cyrenaican village. The ikhwan who had the new students in his charge received him in the zawiya, and he was given, as was customary for a new Senussi student, a place in the communal dormitory for the younger students. His arrival was celebrated simply with a communal meal at which the newcomers were introduced to the fully trained ikhwan.

For the young Umar it was a great transition from the Bedouin life of his parents to the learned milieu of the Senussi headquarters. In his village and in the local al-Bayda zawiya he had already received a basic education in Quran recitation and in the first Arabic letters, but what he found in Jaghbub surpassed that in scope and in depth. According to what the Senussi tradition relates of his youthful years, he devoted himself with discipline to the new work of study, and already in his early Jaghbub years there showed itself the combination of spiritual earnestness and practical capability that would later distinguish him.

The journey from Cyrenaica

The journey from his parental village in Cyrenaica to Jaghbub was an ordinary Bedouin journey through the vast Saharan interior, over a distance of approximately four hundred kilometres that was covered in two to three weeks. Umar travelled in the company of his father Mukhtar ibn Umar al-Manifi ﵀ and of a smaller family escort who undertook the journey in a combination of spiritual support and practical protection. They moved as a caravan, with several camels for the transport of their belongings and with the ordinary Bedouin equipment for Saharan conditions: waterskins, dry provisions and the necessary tents for the overnight stops along the way.

The road led through vast sand plains whose appearance changed with the seasons, and it passed through several Senussi zawiyas where the company stayed a few days for rest and for spiritual gatherings with the local ikhwan. So the young Umar came to know the Saharan Muslim community for the first time across its whole breadth, and on the way he prepared himself spiritually for the stay that awaited him, a preparation that would sound recognisably through his years of study.

The daily rhythm

The daily rhythm of a Senussi student in Jaghbub was fixed, and it joined spiritual discipline without interruption to learned study. The student rose for the fajr and prayed in the central mosque, followed by a first session of personal dhikr according to the Senussi wird. After breakfast, which consisted simply of dates and camel milk, the morning programme began with a lesson from one of the appointed teachers on the subject of that day. The morning lessons treated in succession Arabic grammar, Maliki fiqh, the science of hadith and the literature of tasawwuf, and they took the form of a discussion in which the students participated actively.

In the afternoon the students worked in the economy of the zawiya: in the palm gardens for the communal provision, in the scriptorium hall where they copied manuscripts and so enlarged the Senussi library, in the household tasks of the community, and in a number of cases also in the teaching of younger children from the local Bedouin communities, who received their first education in the Jaghbub Quran school. After the evening prayer came the communal dhikr gathering in which all students and fully trained ikhwan took part; it was the spiritual high point of the day, after which they withdrew to the communal dormitories for the night’s rest.

The conferral of the ijaza

The training closed with the solemn transfer of the ijaza, a formal letter of authorisation in Arabic by which the fully trained ikhwan was declared qualified to transmit the Senussi wird to other murids in his own work. The conferral happened in the central mosque of Jaghbub, in a ceremony in which the whole trained community took part and at which Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ gave his blessing. For the young Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ that moment would arrive in 1884 or 1885, at the age of approximately twenty-six or twenty-seven, as the spiritual completion of his phase of training.

The ijaza also carried over the spiritual line of transmission that connected the recipient with Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀, through him with Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀, through him with Sayyid Ahmad ibn Idris al-Fasi ﵀, and through him with the succession of Idrisi teachers down to the ordinary chain of transmission reaching the Prophet ﷺ. It gave the fully trained ikhwan the spiritual authority with which he could carry out his tasks in the Senussi work.

The Sanussi teaching

The Sanussi teaching, as it was taught to the students in Jaghbub, had a number of distinct elements that gave the brotherhood its own spiritual character. First, the direct return to the Quran and the hadith as spiritual authority, without the intermediation of the scholastic commentaries that often occupied a central place in the other Sufi brotherhoods. Second, the pronounced emphasis on the salat ʿala al-nabi, the blessing upon the Prophet ﷺ, in all dhikr formulas of the tarīqa, a practice that was rooted in the Idrisi heritage and that took a core place in the Senussi tradition.

Third, self-sufficiency in the economy of the zawiya, in which the local community produced its own food, clothing and upkeep by communal labour without depending on support from outside. Fourth, spiritual neutrality towards the other Sufi brotherhoods, without claims of rivalry but with its own character preserved. And fifth, preparation for the circumstances in which the Muslim community would come to find itself, without a pronounced doctrine of jihad, but with an exhortation to personal and communal earnestness in spiritual and social responsibility.

The Senussi economy

The Senussi economy was arranged for self-sufficiency in a manner that had scarcely an equal in nineteenth-century North Africa. Each zawiya had at its disposal its own palm gardens for the dates that in the Saharan climate were a core of the food supply, vegetable gardens for supplementary nourishment, flocks of sheep and goats for milk and meat, its own forge for ordinary tools, and a group of craftsmen who practised the local trades. Besides this the zawiyas maintained trading connections via the trans-Saharan caravans, for the supply of textiles, of salt, of metal goods and of other commodities they did not produce themselves.

Such an economy needed no financing from outside and no political patronage, and that gave the brotherhood a spiritual and political independence that was uncommon. For the Cyrenaican resistance under Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ that self-sufficiency would later prove to be of great importance, for the resistance rested on the food stores and on the infrastructure of the Senussi zawiya network and needed no financing from outside. The economy of the brotherhood was, in other words, the practical foundation on which the resistance could go its own independent way.

The absence of a direct jihad doctrine

What distinguished the Senussi brotherhood from many other Sufi brotherhoods of its time was that it had no pronounced direct doctrine of jihad. Unlike the Naqshbandi-Khalidiyya in the Caucasus under Imam Shamil ﵀, and unlike the Umarian-Tijani movement in Senegambia under al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, it did not in its original teaching plead for an armed struggle against non-Muslim powers. Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀ had in his own work emphasised spiritual discipline and the building of the community, and an armed jihad against non-Muslim powers he had not explicitly advocated in his works.

That did not make the brotherhood pacifist in the ordinary sense of the word. It meant rather that it concentrated on the building of the community and on spiritual discipline, in the consideration that upon a direct attack on the Muslim community the ordinary fiqh grounds of self-defence would have to be activated. For the Cyrenaican resistance under Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in the years 1911 to 1931 that stance was of central significance, for that resistance was presented as a defensive war against the Italian colonial invasion, not as an offensive jihad in the ordinary West African sense.

The first years in Jaghbub

In the first two to three years of his training in Jaghbub, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ completed the basic formation that gave him a firm place within the Senussi tradition. He finished the study of Arabic grammar and of the basic texts of Maliki fiqh, he acquired a thorough knowledge of the science of hadith as the Senussi tradition taught it, and he made the Senussi dhikr practice his own in his personal discipline, which would give him a spiritual foundation for the whole of his life.

His teachers in those first years, insofar as they are mentioned by name in the Senussi tradition, included Sheikh Ahmad al-Mahdawi, who directed the teaching of fiqh in Jaghbub, and Sheikh Muhammad al-Sharif al-Janzuri, who in these years acted as a specialist in the science of hadith. Under their guidance the young Umar received the scholarly foundation that would later grant him the spiritual and juridical authority to lead the ordinary Cyrenaican Muslim population in the anti-colonial resistance.

The formation of his character

Alongside the scholarly formation, these years also settled the character of the young Umar, and with it the leadership he would exercise. He showed in his personal conduct a pronounced modesty that quickly earned him a respectful reception in the Senussi community, he dealt with his fellow students in the spiritual brotherhood that mirrored the Senussi attitude, and he worked with a discipline that led his teachers in Jaghbub to remark that the boy from Cyrenaica was destined for an extraordinary leadership.

His relationship with Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ grew in these years into a personal confidence, in which the supreme leader of the brotherhood saw in the young Cyrenaican a figure of particular importance for the future. In a number of cases, as the Senussi tradition relates, Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ invited him to separate audiences in which he spoke with him personally about the condition of the brotherhood and about the challenges that awaited it in the decades ahead. Those conversations were for him a spiritual preparation for the leadership that lay before him, and they gave him a spiritual depth that his fellow students did not possess to the same degree.

The library of Jaghbub

Among the distinguishing features of the Senussi headquarters was the library, which had been built up over the course of two decades and which by 1876 already counted several thousand manuscripts of classical Islamic scholarship. It had come about through direct purchases via trans-Saharan traders who acquired manuscripts for the brotherhood in Morocco, in Egypt and in Mecca, through gifts from visiting scholars who out of spiritual appreciation donated their own works, and through the copying work of the Jaghbub students themselves, who in an organised scriptorium multiplied the handwritten copies.

The contents took in the classical works of Maliki fiqh, the hadith corpus, a broad collection of tasawwuf literature including the works of Imam al-Ghazali ﵀, of Sheikh ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀ and of Sayyid Ahmad ibn Idris al-Fasi ﵀, the works of Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀ himself in complete form, and in a number of cases also exceptional manuscripts from the Andalusian and the Egyptian heritage that had ended up in Jaghbub along the trading connections of the brotherhood. For the students it was the daily working environment in which they continued their study and built out their own learning.

The pilgrim function of Jaghbub

Jaghbub was in these years also a resting place for Muslim pilgrims who on their way to Mecca took the Egyptian desert route, and the hospitality that the Senussi brotherhood extended to them belonged to its strategy of international spiritual connections. Pilgrims from Morocco, from West Africa, from Mauritania and from the vast Saharan interior stayed there some days; they received lodging and food, and in a number of cases also spiritual guidance from the local ikhwan with a view to the hajj that lay before them.

For the brotherhood that hospitality yielded an international exchange in which the pilgrims worked as connecting nodes between Jaghbub and the Muslim communities they came from. Whoever had been initiated into the Senussi tradition in Jaghbub, or had received spiritual support there, carried the Senussi name further into his own community upon his return. For the young Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, who saw all this around him in the daily course of affairs, the pilgrim function of the headquarters was a lesson in the international character of the brotherhood and in the reach of its network.

The tarbiya formation

Alongside the formal study of fiqh, hadith and tafsir, the Senussi training in Jaghbub had the tarbiya, the spiritual formation of the murid under the personal guidance of his appointed teacher. It consisted of personal scholarly conversations, of shared dhikr gatherings in smaller circles, and of spiritual trials in which the student was led step by step towards purification. The ordinary tarbiya took in exercises in self-observation, in the muraqaba in which the student learned to observe his own inner movements, and in the application of the Senussi wird in the daily and weekly rhythm that deepened his spiritual life.

For the young Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ this tarbiya was the inner preparation for the leadership he would carry. He developed in his years in Jaghbub a remarkable self-observation with which he learned to recognise and correct his own inner movements, and as a future ikhwan he acquired a spiritual steadfastness that would remain recognisable in his later work. In the joining of formal scholarship and tarbiya lay what was distinctive in the Senussi training, and in it his role was prepared.

The community of the zawiya’s inhabitants

The community in and around the Jaghbub zawiya consisted of several distinct groups that together kept the ordinary life of the Senussi headquarters going. At the top stood the far-branching Senussi family itself, with Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ as supreme leader and with his close family members in various leading positions. Below them were the fully trained ikhwan, approximately two hundred in number in 1876, who carried their responsibilities in the administrative, spiritual and economic work of the community. Below them stood the murid students, approximately three hundred in number in 1876, who were completing their training before they would be appointed as ikhwan. In the outermost layer, finally, the ordinary Bedouin families and the craft communities who lived in the town and in its immediate surroundings and who supported the economy of the whole.

With all these groups the young Umar had to do in his daily dealings. He met the Senussi family at the Friday prayers, he studied under the fully trained ikhwan, he sat with his fellow students in the tarbiya gatherings, and in his practical work in the zawiya economy he stood beside the labourers and the craftsmen. So he found his place step by step as a member of the Senussi community, and that formation prepared him for what he would later be as a local ikhwan leader in the community.

Towards the political training

From approximately 1879 or 1880 the training of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in Jaghbub would be widened in a more political direction, in a formation that prepared him step by step for his role as a leader within the Senussi organisation. To that political training, and to the manner in which it prepared him for the colonial resistance, the next article devotes its attention. In this article we have seen how the young Cyrenaican arrived in 1876 at the headquarters of Jaghbub for his formal Senussi training, how the brotherhood had in these years already become an international organisation, and how in the first years of his formation the foundation was laid of the life’s work that lay before him.

Sources

• Knut S. Vikør, Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge: Muhammad b. Ali al-Sanusi and his Brotherhood, Hurst (1995), pp. 214–272.
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Clarendon Press (1949), pp. 62–124.
• Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya, State University of New York Press (2009), pp. 66–112.
• Nicola A. Ziadeh, Sanusiyah: A Study of a Revivalist Movement in Islam, Brill (1958), pp. 56–124.
• B.G. Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods in Nineteenth-Century Africa, Cambridge University Press (1976), pp. 178–214.
• Mark Sedgwick, Saints and Sons: The Making and Remaking of the Rashidi Ahmadi Sufi Order, 1799–2000, Brill (2005), pp. 124–168 [for the Idrisi heritage].
• Anna Baldinetti, The Origins of the Libyan Nation, Routledge (2010), pp. 62–98.
• Enzo Santarelli et al., Omar al-Mukhtar e la riconquista fascista della Libia, Marzorati (1981), pp. 48–88.