The Tragic Fitna

In the previous article we saw how Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was born in 1858 in a small Bedouin village in the Cyrenaican Saharan zone, into a world shaped by three forces: the Ottoman weakening, the Senussi expansion and the Italian colonial aspiration. This article interrupts the course of his life for a while in order to dwell on an event of 1861 in West Africa, the tragic fitna between the Umarian-Tijani state and the Massina-Qadiri Imamate, which had a lasting influence on the form the Senussi brotherhood would take and on its strategic choices in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Senussi leaders in Cyrenaica followed the West African developments with considerable attention through travelling merchants and pilgrims, and what happened at Hamdullahi became for them a spiritual warning that would resound recognisably in the Senussi strategy of the decades that followed.

The West African background

The wider Muslim world in 1861

The year 1861, in which the run-up to the Umarian-Massina fitna became visible, was elsewhere in the Muslim world too a year of shifts that occurred at the same time. In the Ottoman Empire Sultan Abdulaziz took up his office after the death of Sultan Abdulmecid I, and in his early years he carried forward the modernisation of the state apparatus that his predecessor had begun with the Tanzimat reforms. In Egypt Said Pasha ruled as khedive under Ottoman suzerainty, in a modernisation that step by step prepared the way for the British colonial intervention of 1882. In Morocco Sultan Muhammad IV held on to Alawi sovereignty while France and Spain increased the colonial pressure on his outer borders.

The Senussi leaders in Jaghbub followed that state of affairs closely, and for their own strategic reflection it was of central importance. They saw the West African fitna not as an isolated incident but as part of a broader pattern, in which the European colonial expansion, the internal Muslim conflicts over tarīqa claims and the questions of modernisation grew together into a fundamental challenge to the Muslim Ummah.

In an earlier article in this cycle, under the hero al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀, we discussed how the Umarian jihad state reached its greatest territorial extent in its expansion against the Bambara kingdom of Segu in 1859, how in the years that followed the tension between the Umarian state and the Massina Imamate rose over the extradition of the Bambara leaders who had fled to Massina, and how in May 1862, in the tragic battle before Hamdullahi, the Massina imam Ahmad III ﵀ met his martyr’s death, by which the scale of the inter-Muslim fitna became visible to the West African Muslim world. Beyond it too this was an event observed with considerable embarrassment in every spiritual circle, and the Senussi leaders in Cyrenaica were no exception.

The year on which this article has its focus brought the run-up to the actual armed confrontation between the Umarian-Tijani state and the Massina-Qadiri Imamate, with the diplomatic escalations that would issue the following year in the attack on Hamdullahi. Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀, who had taken over the chief leadership of the brotherhood in 1859, received in Jaghbub in that year detailed reports about West Africa from the travelling merchants who in these decades maintained the trans-Saharan caravan routes between Cyrenaica and the West African interior.

The trans-Saharan exchange of information

In the second half of the nineteenth century those routes carried a continuous exchange of trade and information, through which what happened in one region became known on the other side of the desert. From Kufra to Murzuq in the central Saharan section, and then via Bilma in the Chad-Niger border area to Kano and from there further westward to Timbuktu and the Senegambia region, Bedouin merchants travelled in caravans of several hundred pack animals with textiles, salt, dates, slaves, gold and spiritual manuscripts. What they brought alongside that material cargo were political tidings, which they passed on to the local Muslim communities at every stage of the journey.

For the Senussi brotherhood that exchange was a central component of its international network: the leaders in Jaghbub maintained correspondence with the spiritual leaders throughout sub-Saharan Africa along those same merchant routes. The reports from West Africa were not read in passing at the Senussi headquarters but ordered by ikhwan appointed for the purpose, who then discussed together with Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ what the tidings meant for the Senussi strategy.

The Egyptian al-Azhar response

In Cairo, in the years after the Hamdullahi fitna, the learned circle of al-Azhar reflected on the spiritual significance of inter-Muslim conflicts and on the legal grounds on which a confrontation between different Sufi brotherhoods might be prevented. Egyptian scholars of exceptional stature conducted learned correspondence about it with the Senussi leaders in Jaghbub, in which the Muslim brotherhood as a whole was placed above the tarīqa differences; their names have not been preserved in the record.

That reflection yielded a number of learned fatwas that developed a comparable line in the wider Muslim world, with inter-Muslim unity above the tarīqa-specific claims. For the Senussi brotherhood this Egyptian support was a spiritual confirmation of its own neutrality in inter-Muslim conflicts, and it gave the Senussi tradition an international dimension that remained recognisable in its later expansion.

The awareness in the Cyrenaican zawiyas

The impact of the West African fitna on the wider Muslim population of Cyrenaica was slow to get under way, for the local Bedouin communities reflected only in the course of the 1860s and thereafter on what inter-Muslim conflicts meant for the Muslim Ummah. In the local mosques and in the zawiya gatherings on Friday evening the events in West Africa came up repeatedly, and the local ikhwan gave with them the spiritual explanation in which the fitna was set out as a warning.

For the ordinary Cyrenaican Bedouin population that meant a daily instruction in a Muslim brotherhood that transcended the tarīqa differences. For the young Bedouin boys who received their first education in the local zawiyas, and among whom Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ would belong in his sixth or seventh year of life, that instruction was a central element of their spiritual formation: mutual solidarity above the tarīqa differences became so natural in their adolescent years that it remained recognisable in their later work.

The Senussi response to the West African developments

In 1860 and 1861, as the confrontation between the Umarian state and Massina drew nearer, the Senussi leaders spoke among themselves about the spiritual and strategic consequences for their own work. That happened in the Friday sermons in the central mosque of Jaghbub, where the West African situation was explained in its spiritual significance; in separate meetings of the Senussi council, where the consequences for the Senussi presence were raised in practical terms; and in the private deliberations of Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ himself, in deep spiritual reflection.

What those discussions yielded can be summarised, insofar as it has been preserved in the Senussi archives in later copies, in three main points that remained recognisable in the Senussi strategy of the decades that followed. First, the commitment to a pronounced avoidance of inter-Muslim conflicts such as the Tijani-Qadiri confrontation that was becoming visible in West Africa. Second, a Senussi form of their own, built up step by step, which acquired a place of its own in its spiritual distinctness without contesting the other Sufi brotherhoods in its area as rivals. Third, the preparation for the European colonial expansion, the shared challenge that in the decades thereafter would affect all Muslim communities.

The fitna in later Senussi historiography

In later Senussi historiography, and above all in the works that Senussi scholars in Cyrenaica produced in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Hamdullahi fitna acquired a fixed place as a point of warning and as a spiritual learning process for their own tradition. Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi ﵀, the nephew of Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ who took over the chief leadership of the brotherhood in 1902, returned to it repeatedly in his Friday sermons, and he held up the outcome of the West African fitna as a warning with a view to the Senussi confrontations with external powers that were still to come. He emphasised that unity within the Muslim Ummah, even where there were differences in tarīqa affiliation, had to remain an absolute priority if the Muslim community wished to preserve its spiritual and political position in the face of the European colonial expansion.

This interpretation, carried on from the end of the nineteenth into the first decades of the twentieth century, was the immediate spiritual background in which Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was formed during his years of education in Jaghbub. He heard the Hamdullahi fitna explained as a spiritual warning, in the Friday sermons and in the scholarly conversations that filled his adolescent years in the Jaghbub zawiya, and he acquired from it a deep awareness of what inter-Muslim conflicts do, which he would recognisably carry forward in his later work.

The spiritual interpretation of the fitna

In the Friday sermons that Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ delivered in Jaghbub in 1861 and 1862, and that his appointed ikhwan carried to the zawiyas of Cyrenaica, the West African fitna received an interpretation that placed Muslim unity above the tarīqa-specific differences. He spoke of the common Muslim brotherhood that transcended those differences, of the way in which inter-Muslim conflicts render the ordinary aspirations of the Muslim community vain, and of the duty of every spiritual leader to preserve that unity recognisably in his own work.

For the ordinary Bedouin population of Cyrenaica this was a spiritual guidance that joined solidarity with the West African Muslim brothers to caution closer to home. In the local zawiya gatherings they held communal prayers for the West African victims of the fitna, and they received the exhortation to maintain the common unity in their own Cyrenaican surroundings.

The reports from the West

In the Senussi archives of Jaghbub, insofar as these have been studied in later copies by E.E. Evans-Pritchard and by modern historians, a number of the West African reports have been preserved that the Senussi leaders received in the years 1860 to 1864. Among them are short accounts from trans-Saharan merchants who had come in caravans from the West, learned correspondence from Mauritanian and Moroccan Sufi leaders who stood on friendly terms with the brotherhood, and in a few cases letters that originated directly from the Umarian state or from representatives of the Massina Imamate, in which each side laid its own position before the Senussi leaders in the hope of spiritual support or mediation.

The reply to them was one of spiritual distance and of exhortation to Muslim unity, and the brotherhood refused to bind itself to either of the two parties. It did support, in broad terms, the pleas for a peaceful outcome, and in a number of cases it conducted learned correspondence with both sides in which the common Muslim brotherhood was placed above the tarīqa-specific differences. The attempts at mediation, as we saw in an earlier article, did not succeed, but the Senussi stance of spiritual neutrality in inter-Muslim conflicts was lastingly established through this learning process.

The spiritual differences between the Tijaniyya and the Qadiriyya

Behind the Umarian-Massina fitna lay a spiritual history of differences between the Tijaniyya and the Qadiriyya in West Africa, which deserves attention here if the outcome of the fitna is to be understood. The Tijaniyya, founded by Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Tijani ﵀ in the late eighteenth century, was a distinct tarīqa that placed its pupils in a direct spiritual connection with the Prophet ﷺ through an unambiguous ijaza line, a line that within the tarīqa was regarded as superior to other chains of transmission. The Qadiriyya, founded by Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani ﵀ in the twelfth century, was older, with its own distinct spiritual discipline and its own line of transmission.

The spiritual differences between the two tarīqas were not in themselves irreconcilable, and in many Muslim communities Tijani and Qadiri adherents lived peacefully side by side without those differences acquiring a political charge. In nineteenth-century West Africa matters lay otherwise: with the Tijaniyya in its Umarian form and the Qadiriyya in its Sokoto and Massina forms, some tensions arose over time in which the claims of each tarīqa acquired a political significance. The Hamdullahi fitna was the tragic outcome of those tensions, and for the wider Muslim world it was a warning about the possible consequences of inter-tarīqa rivalries when these take a political form.

The Sudanese-Cyrenaican connection

Alongside the Mauritanian connection the Senussi brotherhood also maintained in these decades a broad understanding with the Sudanese Muslim communities, partly through direct trade connections along the trans-Saharan caravans and partly through the spiritual exchange on the pilgrim routes to Mecca. The Sudanese pilgrims who travelled annually in caravans of several thousand persons via Wadai and via Kufra to the Hejaz carried spiritual tidings and local news in both directions, and they thus fulfilled an important function as a connecting node between the Saharan and the West African Muslim communities.

For an understanding of the West African situation those Sudanese connections were of great importance, for the pilgrims had been able to form their own observation of the events on their journeys through West Africa. Their reports about the Umarian-Massina fitna, often more detailed than the ordinary merchant reports, gave the Senussi leaders an additional source that placed their strategic reflection in a wider framework.

The Mauritanian connection

In the years after the fitna an exchange got under way between the Senussi brotherhood and the Mauritanian Sufi communities in which it was discussed what the West African events meant for the wider Saharan Muslim world. Mauritanian scholars of the established Qadiri traditions, and in particular the scholars of the Kunta clan under the leadership of Ahmad al-Bakkay ﵀, conducted learned correspondence with the Senussi leaders in Jaghbub. In their own position they were confronted both with the Umarian-Tijani expansion and with the Massina-Qadiri connections, and they found in the Senussi brotherhood a spiritual interlocutor with whom they could discuss the shared challenges of that position.

What came of it was a broad intellectual debate about the proper relationship between the different Sufi brotherhoods in the Saharan Muslim world, and it led over time to a number of shared initiatives that in the decades thereafter would grow into a greater Saharan Sufi cooperation. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ would receive this intellectual tradition personally in his years as a Senussi pupil in Jaghbub, and it became a central element of his formation.

The Senussi position between the two tarīqas

For the Senussi brotherhood the position between the Tijaniyya and the Qadiriyya had a character of its own that would colour the whole Senussi strategy. Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀, the founder of the brotherhood, had been trained in his early years in Mecca under the Idrisi tarīqa of Sayyid Ahmad ibn Idris al-Fasi ﵀, in a formation that combined the Idrisi heritage with the elements that would stand central in his own later brotherhood. In its origin the Senussi brotherhood thus stood within the wider Idrisi tradition: it was neither a Tijani nor a Qadiri tarīqa but a distinct brotherhood with an ijaza line of its own.

That distinctness gave it, in the face of the Umarian-Massina fitna, a spiritual distance with which it could interpret the fitna without ranging itself in either camp. For Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ personally that distance was a useful position, for he could place the West African events within his own spiritual interpretation without having to commit himself to an immediate political alignment, and it was the learned framework within which the brotherhood could carry out its own work, spiritually independent and at the same time bound to the Muslim brotherhood as a whole.

The Idrisi heritage and its traces

The Idrisi heritage in which the Senussi brotherhood was rooted took a spiritual place of its own among the established great tarīqas of the Muslim world. Sayyid Ahmad ibn Idris al-Fasi ﵀, born in 1760 in Maysur in Morocco and deceased in 1837 in the mountains of Sabya in Asir, was a scholar of exceptional eloquence who in his work advocated a reform of the Sufi tradition. He rejected the established tarīqa hierarchies and pleaded for a direct return to the prophetic tradition, with a direct spiritual connection with the Prophet ﷺ through dreams and visions that had occurred repeatedly in his own life.

For his pupils, among whom Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀ belonged in Mecca, that teaching meant a distinct position toward the older tarīqas without their thereby standing in a hostile relation to those tarīqas. In line with it the Senussi brotherhood maintained a spiritual distinctness in which its own discipline was preserved without it acting polemically against the older tarīqas. Toward the Tijaniyya and the Qadiriyya in West Africa that attitude gave the Senussi leaders a spiritual space in which they could operate, independent in what was their own and bound in what was shared.

What this meant for the young Mukhtar

In the year 1861, when the fitna in West Africa was preparing itself, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was a boy of three years old in his parental household in Janzur. At his young age he could have no direct observation of the West African events, and his parents and relatives kept him in the ordinary Bedouin child’s life that would be led in the immediate vicinity of the local Senussi zawiya. But what the fitna did to the wider Senussi strategy, and in particular the slowly formed Senussi attitude that placed inter-Muslim unity high and that carried out its own work in spiritual discipline and shared brotherhood, would return recognisably in his education and in his later work.

In the life’s work that awaited him, in his confrontation with the Italian colonial expansion after 1911, he would lastingly carry forward that Senussi line of inter-Muslim unity and shared brotherhood, and in his daily leadership of the Cyrenaican resistance he would combine the spiritual discipline of the Senussi tradition with the practice of a military defence in an inimitable way. The fitna in West Africa in 1861 and 1862 did not touch his own life immediately, but within the wider Senussi tradition it was a spiritual background that would resound recognisably in his later work.

The Cyrenaican Bedouin response

For the ordinary Cyrenaican Bedouin population, which in its great majority stood in no direct spiritual involvement in the West African tarīqa debates, the tidings of the Hamdullahi fitna were above all a curiosity, discussed at length in the local evening gatherings of the tribal shaykhs. The Bedouin traditions of oral transmission, developed over centuries, carried the West African events to the local communities through travelling merchants and pilgrims, and they led to a spiritual processing in which Muslim unity was placed high.

For the life’s work that still awaited Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ this Bedouin response was an important background, for it shows that even in a remote Bedouin community such as Cyrenaica a reflection on the state of the Muslim world took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Cyrenaican Bedouin were spiritually no isolated community but stood in connection with the wider Muslim Ummah, and the reflection they conducted in their own circle on the state of the Muslim Ummah would resound recognisably in his later work.

The Senussi learning process

In the years between 1862 and 1900 the Senussi brotherhood went through a learning process in its internal organisation in which the outcome of the West African fitna and the European colonial expansion were thought through together for their consequences for the Muslim world. It ran through the spiritual instruction in the local zawiyas, through the learned correspondence with other Sufi brotherhoods in North Africa and in the Middle East, and through the practical strategic preparation for the challenges the brotherhood would face in the decades thereafter.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, who in these decades grew up in the Senussi tradition from his early childhood to his adolescent years, this learning process was the immediate spiritual framework of his upbringing. He received his first education in the local zawiya in al-Bayda as an ordinary Senussi pupil, and in his adolescent years he acquired the pronounced Senussi discipline in which spiritual earnestness and practical application went together. To that education, and to the way in which it prepared him for his later work, the next article will devote its attention.

The parallels with the Senussi future

A remarkable aspect of the Umarian-Massina fitna, as it came before the Senussi brotherhood, was the consideration of possible parallels with a situation of their own in Cyrenaica that might still arise. What would happen, the Senussi leaders asked themselves, if in the future a comparable conflict between different Sufi brotherhoods were to arise in their own region, and how could they prevent that possibility in their strategic preparation. The discussions, insofar as they have been preserved in later Senussi transmission, led to a learning process in which the Senussi leaders joined their own spiritual distinctness to a Muslim brotherhood that could avoid internal conflicts.

For the Cyrenaican resistance that Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ would lead in the years 1911 to 1931 that learning process from the years of the Hamdullahi fitna had a lasting influence. In his leadership of the resistance Mukhtar would devote attention to the preservation of inter-tribal and inter-brotherhood unity, and repeatedly, in his Friday sermons and in his personal instructions to his closest associates, he would cite the outcome of Hamdullahi as a warning, in which the tragic outcome of internal Muslim conflicts was shown.

Toward the Senussi education

In this article we have looked at the West African fitna of 1861 and 1862 from the Senussi-Cyrenaican background, and we have seen how it acquired a spiritual influence on the Senussi brotherhood that in its later strategy gave an elevated place to inter-Muslim unity and shared brotherhood. The Senussi response to the West African events, as it developed between 1861 and 1900, became the ground on which the life’s work of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ would be built in the Senussi discipline, and it gave his later struggle against the Italian colonial expansion a spiritual foundation in which the wider Muslim unity and the shared brotherhood would remain recognisable.

For the modern Muslim who wishes to understand the life’s work of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ fully, the West African fitna remains a spiritual background that sets the Senussi tradition in which he was educated in a particular light, and it belongs indispensably to the framework within which his work can be placed in its spiritual significance.

Sources

• David Robinson, The Holy War of Umar Tal: The Western Sudan in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, Clarendon Press (1985), pp. 334–376 [voor de Umarian-zijde van de fitna].
• William A. Brown, The Caliphate of Hamdullahi, ca. 1818–1864, University of Wisconsin Press (1969), pp. 198–248 [voor de Massina-zijde van de fitna].
• Knut S. Vikør, Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge: Muhammad b. Ali al-Sanusi and his Brotherhood, Hurst (1995), pp. 156–214 [voor de Senussi-respons].
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Clarendon Press (1949), pp. 62–124.
• B.G. Martin, Muslim Brotherhoods in Nineteenth-Century Africa, Cambridge University Press (1976), pp. 136–178.
• Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, The Tijaniyya: A Sufi Order in the Modern World, Oxford University Press (1965), pp. 124–168.
• Sean Hanretta, Islam and Social Change in French West Africa, Cambridge University Press (2009), pp. 204–248 [voor de uitwerking van de fitna in de Tijani-traditie].
• Madina Ly-Tall, Un Islam militant en Afrique de l’Ouest au XIXe siècle, L’Harmattan (1991), pp. 376–426.