The Fourth Shore

Before Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was born in 1858 in the Cyrenaican village of Janzur, before his name would resound through the dry mountains of the Jebel Akhdar, and before his horsemen would wear down the Italian colonial power in the desert, Libya already had a long and laborious history in which the Mediterranean world, the Saharan trade routes and the Ottoman Sublime Porte each pressed their own claims upon the coast and upon the interior. Whoever wishes to understand the life of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ must therefore begin not with his birth but with Cyrenaica itself, with the Senussi brotherhood that built up its spiritual and political role in the interior, and with the Italian colonial aspiration that wished to make the Mediterranean north coast of Africa into the so-called Fourth Shore of Italy. The consequences of that would show themselves fully and tragically in the course of his own life.

Cyrenaica in the nineteenth century

Ottoman Libya in its three regions

Ottoman Libya in the nineteenth century consisted of three regions that had little in common with one another, geographically or culturally. Tripolitania in the west, with the capital Tripoli and with broad agricultural lands along the Mediterranean coast, was the most urbanised part and the best integrated administratively. Cyrenaica in the east, with the port cities of Benghazi and Derna, was predominantly Bedouin and far more loosely bound to Ottoman suzerainty. And Fezzan in the south, a vast Saharan oasis zone with the capital Murzuq, lived from the trans-Saharan trade routes and had a cultural and political character of its own because of them.

For the life’s work that awaited Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ it was Cyrenaica that was decisive. The Senussi brotherhood chose the Cyrenaican Bedouin tribes as its first community when it spread, and the resistance against the Italian colonial expansion in the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties would be fought above all in the Cyrenaican Jebel Akhdar, in a way that mirrored the geographical and social relations of that region closely.

Cyrenaica, in Arabic Barqa, is the eastern part of present-day Libya and stretches from the Gulf of Sirte in the west to the Egyptian border in the east. It falls into three zones. Along the Mediterranean north coast lies a narrow strip of relatively fertile farmland with the ports of Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk. Directly behind it rises the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountains, a low plateau several hundred metres high whose northern slopes are densely wooded and whose higher parts carry wide pasture lands. Behind that begins the vast Saharan desert, which runs on into Chad and Sudan and is broken only by scattered oasis towns, places that have always kept an independent position of their own in the history of Cyrenaica.

The population of Cyrenaica in the nineteenth century was in its great majority Arab-Bedouin in origin. Nine large tribal confederations, together named the Saʿadi tribes, were distributed over the area in a web of alliances and rivalries; among them were the Awaqir, the Magharba, the Bara’asa, the Hasa, the Abid and the Aulad Ali, among others. In their own pasture lands they exercised a local autonomy that Ottoman suzerainty formally recognised but that in practice met little direct Ottoman administrative presence.

The Ottoman presence

The Sublime Porte had added Libya to its Empire in 1551 after the capture of Tripoli by Sinan Pasha, and for the three centuries that followed it ruled there indirectly: local ruling families carried out the daily administration as vassals under a nominal Ottoman suzerainty. From 1835, when the Ottoman authorities set out to establish their authority over Libya directly after all, that shifted slowly toward a more direct administration, with a wali installed in Tripoli and with a subsidiary administration in Benghazi for the Cyrenaican east.

In the port cities that administration from Benghazi had some effect, but in the interior, and certainly in the Bedouin pasture lands of the Jebel Akhdar and the neighbouring Saharan zone, it remained largely symbolic. The local Bedouin tribes acknowledged the suzerainty by paying a modest tax each year and by supplying several hundred horsemen when the Ottomans called for military service, but in all practical matters they kept their internal autonomy and administered justice themselves, according to a mixture of local custom and Maliki fiqh that the Ottoman authorities tolerated.

The ordering of the Saʿadi tribes

The nine Saʿadi tribes that peopled the interior of Cyrenaica took their shared name from the Banu Saʿadi tradition, in which they traced their descent to the Banu Hilal Arabs who had moved from the Egyptian lands into North Africa in a great migration in the eleventh century. Among themselves they were bound by alliances and by marriage ties, and over the centuries a settled order had grown out of that in which each tribe held its own pasture land, followed its own seasonal migration routes and had its own internal organisation.

Alongside them there lived in Cyrenaica some non-Saʿadi tribes, locally called the Maradi tribes, which were attached in a subordinate position to the Saʿadi confederations and led their existence in the Bedouin economy as clients. Cyrenaican Bedouin society was therefore layered, with free Saʿadi tribes above dependent Maradi tribes, and that layering was visible in daily dealings and worked through in the justice dispensed by the local shaykhs, which was not the same for both groups.

The Senussi brotherhood

Within this political landscape a spiritual movement began from 1843 that would change Cyrenaica from within over the decades that followed. Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀, an Algerian scholar born in 1787 near Mostaganem who had acquired a thorough learning in his years of study in Fez and in Mecca, founded in that year, in Cyrenaican territory, the first zawiya of what would grow into the Senussi brotherhood: a Sufi tarīqa that united spiritual discipline, economic independence and a political role in a single organisation.

Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀ had studied in his early years in Mecca under the Idrisi tarīqa of Sayyid Ahmad ibn Idris al-Fasi ﵀, and in his own work he built on that inheritance with an emphasis on a few points that came to stand at the centre of his later brotherhood. The Senussi teaching asked firstly for a direct return to the Quran and the hadith, without the intermediation of scholastic commentaries; secondly for a strict dhikr practice performed in common; and thirdly for zawiya communities that could support themselves, because religious devotion there went together with production of their own.

The expansion of the network

Under the leadership of Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀ himself until his death in 1859, and from 1859 under his son Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀, the brotherhood grew into a network of several hundred zawiyas spread across the vast Saharan zone between Morocco in the west, the Lake Chad basin in the south and Egypt in the east. The headquarters was moved in 1856 from the original al-Bayda in the Jebel Akhdar to Jaghbub, an oasis in the southeastern Sahara on what is now the Libyan-Egyptian border; that choice put the brotherhood at a greater distance from the Ottoman authorities and gave it room to build up its own organisation undisturbed.

For the Bedouin tribes of Cyrenaica the brotherhood became, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the central spiritual and social institution. In every larger tribal confederation there stood a zawiya, and that zawiya was at once a Quran school for the children, a court for the disputes between the tribes, a storehouse for the communal supplies and a place for the shared dhikr gatherings. With that the Senussi brotherhood in effect completed the administration of Cyrenaica: in form the Ottoman suzerainty remained standing, but in practice an independent Bedouin-Senussi administration was at work.

The Senussi zawiya as organisational unit

The zawiya in its ordinary form was thus far more than a spiritual centre; it was the administrative and economic unit in which the local community settled its collective affairs. It held a central prayer hall in which the local jamaat also met, a Quran school for the children of the neighbouring Bedouin families, a guesthouse for travellers passing through the area, a large storehouse for the communal grain supplies against drought or crisis, its own small mosque for the ordinary prayers, and a separate hall in which the shared dhikr was held according to the particular Senussi discipline.

At its head stood an ikhwan, a local brotherhood leader appointed by the Senussi headquarters in Jaghbub, who looked after the affairs of the community together with the local tribal shaykhs. He was trained at the headquarters before he received his appointment, and his work consisted of spiritual instruction, adjudication in local disputes according to the Maliki fiqh, and the management of the communal supplies. For the Bedouin population he was therefore a familiar figure in daily life, a man with spiritual authority and practical administrative sense at the same time.

The Italian colonial aspiration

While this was happening in Cyrenaica, the colonial ambitions that would end in 1911 in the Italo-Turkish war were growing within the Italian state of the second half of the nineteenth century. Italy had won its national unity in 1861 under Victor Emmanuel II and Camillo Cavour and stepped in the decades that followed into the European colonial rivalry, with a first experiment in Eritrea and Somalia in the eighteen-eighties and the eighteen-nineties, and with the catastrophic defeat of Adwa against Ethiopia in 1896, which made the Italian colonial aspirations more cautious for a time.

From 1908, when Italy under prime minister Giovanni Giolitti began to pursue a more ambitious colonial agenda, the Italian claims on Libya acquired a definite form along three roads at once: economic penetration, diplomatic preparation and military planning. The Banco di Roma opened trading offices in Tripoli and Benghazi in these years, Italian missionaries started schools in the port cities, and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs negotiated at length with the European powers about a future Italian colonial presence in Libya.

The propaganda of the Fourth Shore

In the Italian national propaganda Libya was in these years presented as the future Fourth Shore of Italy, after a usage that extended the three historic shores of the Italian peninsula with a fourth shore on the far side of the Mediterranean Sea. That propaganda leaned on historical arguments about the Roman presence in Libya in antiquity, on national aspirations toward an Italian Mediterranean supremacy in emulation of the Roman tradition, and on economic arguments about a future Italian agricultural colonisation in the Libyan mountains and coastal zones. The nationally romantic and the economically pragmatic ran through one another there, and together they made Italian public opinion ripe for a colonial undertaking.

For the Bedouin-Senussi population of Libya all of this lay in 1858 still in a distant phase, and of a direct Italian colonial threat there was in that year no question yet. The pattern of the European colonial expansion in North Africa was already marking itself out by then: the French had been in Algeria since 1830, their penetration into Tunisia would be fixed in a protectorate in 1881, and the British presence in Egypt would be formalised in 1882 in an unspoken occupation. The Italian undertaking in Libya fitted into that broader European expansion, in which no Muslim community could go on existing in its original autonomy.

Italian public opinion

Between 1900 and 1911 Italian public opinion was prepared for that undertaking step by step, in the press, in the literature and at the public gatherings of the time. Giovanni Pascoli delivered his famous speech La grande proletaria si è mossa in 1911, on the evening of the Italian declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire, and he cast the colonial plan in national-religious and social-economic language at once. Italy was, in his reading, the great proletarian nation, which would not repeat the ordinary plunder of the older European colonial powers but would carry out a truly civilisation-bringing enterprise, in which the poor Italian peasants could find their future living in the Libyan mountains.

The propaganda of the Fourth Shore was carried by lettered and political representatives of the Italian state and society. It was no marginal phenomenon but a core piece of Italian national-political life in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and it saw to it that the Italo-Turkish war and the widening of Italian colonial dominance in Libya could count on broad Italian assent. For the resistance of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ that meant that in his years of struggle he would be operating not only against a military power but also against an Italian public opinion that held its colonial undertaking to be a just cause.

The birth into a changed world

In 1858, when Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ came into the world in the Cyrenaican village of Janzur, three forces were thus at work upon the world that awaited him. Ottoman suzerainty still held Libyan sovereignty formally upright, but it weakened from year to year. The Senussi brotherhood, with its network of zawiyas and its growing organisation, was building precisely the fabric on which his own later life and struggle would rest. And the European colonial expansion, and the Italian claim on Libya in particular, would give his life’s work its tragic course.

For the ordinary Bedouin family in Janzur, and for the Mukhtar clan within the Manifa sub-tribe of the Hasa people from which the newborn child came, those three forces were not yet present in daily life in 1858. Life went on in the ordinary Bedouin manner: livestock, seasonal migrations between the higher pastures of the Jebel Akhdar in the summer and the lower pastures of the Saharan zone in the winter, communal meals of barley porridge and camel milk, and the familiar bond with the local Senussi zawiya that provided spiritual guidance close by. The forces that would rebuild his world were nonetheless already there, and they lay ready for a life that would run its own inimitable course.

The location of Janzur

Janzur was originally a small Bedouin settlement in the wide sand plains southwest of Tobruk, in the area where the Cyrenaican Jebel Akhdar passes into the dry Saharan plains of the southeastern Libyan desert. In 1858 it consisted of several dozen Bedouin tents of the Mukhtar clan and of a number of related Manifa sub-tribe households, grouped around a communal well and ringed by the wide pasture lands over which the local herds made their seasonal round. It was a settlement of modest size, entirely in keeping with the pattern of Cyrenaican Bedouin society.

Close by lay a Senussi zawiya, in the neighbouring al-Bayda area which in these years was growing into a Senussi centre, and that nearness gave the settlement a spiritual attachment that was recognisable in ordinary daily life. The Mukhtar family kept up an understanding with the local ikhwan, and by that road the newborn son would be initiated into the Senussi tradition in his early childhood, an initiation that would take a central place in the rest of his life.

The Hasa tribal confederation

The Hasa tribal confederation, to which the Mukhtar clan belonged through the Manifa sub-tribe, was one of the nine large Saʿadi tribes of Cyrenaica and held its pasture land in the eastern Jebel Akhdar and the neighbouring Saharan zone. It was a Bedouin tribe of middling size, several thousand households, with a large stock of camels, sheep and goats, and with a council of tribal shaykhs who governed local affairs together. The Hasa stood as a rule on friendly terms with the Senussi brotherhood, and the zawiya in their pasture land was the spiritual centre to which many Hasa families sent their children for their first education.

Within the Mukhtar clan, and certainly in the household of the newborn child, that tie already held a central place in 1858. The father, Mukhtar ibn Umar al-Manifi ﵀, was a respected tribal shaykh in the Manifa sub-tribe and kept up a good understanding with the zawiya nearby; he had himself had a short education there in his younger years. In his daily life he was a devout Muslim in the Senussi discipline, who performed the five prayers regularly and who took part in the shared dhikr gatherings on Friday evening.

The three forces between 1858 and 1911

In the half century between 1858 and 1911 the three forces we have discussed in this article worked on in a way that would change Cyrenaica from the ground up. The Ottoman authorities tried repeatedly in these decades to strengthen their direct rule, with a wider administration in Benghazi, with the development of the local harbour facilities and with the extension of Ottoman education, set up by Constantinople as modernisation. Those attempts ran aground, however, on the mounting internal difficulties of the Ottoman Empire, on the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, and on the geopolitical weakening of the Sublime Porte in its Mediterranean position that followed.

The Senussi brotherhood widened its zawiya network further in the same decades, founding new centres in Kufra, in the oasis towns of Chad and in the vast Saharan zone between Libya and Sudan. Under the leadership of Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀, who led the brotherhood from 1859 to 1902, the organisation reached its greatest extent and its firmest form. In 1895 the headquarters was carried further south from Jaghbub to Kufra, again a choice that kept the brotherhood out of reach of the approaching European colonial presence, and with that it laid the foundation on which the resistance under Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ could later be conducted.

The Egyptian and Sudanese influence

In its expansion the brotherhood also had to reckon in these decades with the spiritual and political developments in Egypt and Sudan, and those worked back upon Cyrenaica. The Mahdiyya movement in Sudan under Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi ﵀ from 1881 to 1885, and afterwards under his successor ʿAbd Allah ibn Muhammad ﵀ until 1898, was a great anti-colonial movement that was followed with attention in Senussi-Cyrenaican circles. In their public statements the Senussi leaders kept their distance from the Mahdiyya, for they held the Mahdi claims of Muhammad Ahmad ﵀ to be legally untenable according to ordinary Sunni doctrine, but in practice they did support the cause of the Sudanese resistance against the British and Egyptian colonial expansion.

For the resistance that awaited Cyrenaica against Italy the Mahdiyya was a school in which both the possibilities and the limits of a Sufi-led anti-colonial resistance became visible. The fall of the Mahdiyya regime in 1898, under the British-Egyptian troops of Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman, and the British-Egyptian colonial rule over Sudan that followed, were a warning to the Senussi brotherhood about the Italian colonial threat, and in the years between 1898 and 1911 its leaders prepared themselves spiritually for the confrontation that would take its tragic course in the life’s work of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀.

The Italian expansion up to 1911

The Italian colonial expansion drew nearer step by step in these decades and would be settled in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912. Between 1880 and 1900 it did not go beyond diplomatic and economic preparation: long negotiations with France and Great Britain about a future Italian colonial presence in Libya, and an economic penetration through the Banco di Roma and other Italian trading houses. From 1900 the tone grew more assertive, with the Italian public opinion campaign for the Fourth Shore and with the military preparation for the war that was on its way.

In Cyrenaican Bedouin-Senussi circles that colonial undertaking was therefore felt long before the war itself began in 1911. Under the leadership of Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif ﵀, the nephew of Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ who took over the leadership of the brotherhood in 1902, the Senussi organisation prepared itself between 1902 and 1911 for the confrontation, strengthening its internal organisation and buying weapons out of various international deliveries through Egyptian and Turkish intermediaries.

Toward the birth itself

The birth of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in 1858, his early childhood in Janzur and his upbringing in the Senussi tradition, which would make him in his youth a formed pupil of the brotherhood, are the subject of the next article. Here we have explored the wider historical background against which that life would play out: an Ottoman suzerainty that was weakening, a Senussi brotherhood that was growing, and a European colonial aspiration that in its Italian form would provide the frame within which his work would receive its tragic outcome.

The Fourth Shore, as the Italians called Libya in their national propaganda, would in the half century after 1858 become the stage of a spiritual and political struggle in which the name Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ would in the end grow into an international symbol of Muslim resistance. But in 1858, on the day of his birth in the small village of Janzur in the Cyrenaican Saharan zone, all of that still lay wholly hidden in the future, and his parents could not know that the child in their arms would one day in 1931, at the age of seventy-three, die a martyr’s death in an Italian internment camp that would let his name resound in the Muslim world into the twenty-first century.

What the birth meant for the Ummah

When in 1858 a child was born in a small Bedouin village on the outer edge of the Cyrenaican Saharan zone, in a family of modest standing and in a community that scarcely felt the wider geopolitical forces of its time in daily life, no one could suspect that his name would grow in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries into a spiritual force that would be recognised throughout the Muslim world as a symbol of the just resistance against colonial oppression. For the Mukhtar family the birth was an event of personal joy, running otherwise like every Bedouin birth of its time, and it was celebrated in the immediate community according to local custom.

For the history of the Muslim world in the half century that followed it was, seen in retrospect, the event that would give the anti-colonial resistance of the first half of the twentieth century a lasting spiritual form. Alongside Imam Shamil ﵀ in the Caucasus, alongside al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ in Senegambia, alongside Abd al-Qadir al-Jazaʾiri ﵀ in Algeria, and alongside many other spiritual leaders who had fought in their own regions and in their own times against the European colonial expansion, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ would take a distinct place of his own, in which Senussi discipline, Bedouin military craft and spiritual steadfastness came together in a unique way.

Sources

• Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance, 1830–1932, State University of New York Press (2009), pp. 28–66.
• Knut S. Vikør, Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge: Muhammad b. Ali al-Sanusi and his Brotherhood, Hurst (1995), pp. 88–156.
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Clarendon Press (1949), pp. 1–62.
• Lisa Anderson, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980, Princeton University Press (1986), pp. 56–112.
• Anna Baldinetti, The Origins of the Libyan Nation: Colonial Legacy, Exile and the Emergence of a New Nation-State, Routledge (2010), pp. 23–62.
• Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, vol. 1: Tripoli bel suol d’amore (1860–1922), Mondadori (1986), pp. 18–86.
• Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana, il Mulino (2002), pp. 56–112.
• Enzo Santarelli, Giorgio Rochat, Romain Rainero, en Luigi Goglia, Omar al-Mukhtar e la riconquista fascista della Libia, Marzorati (1981), pp. 7–48.