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 exhaust the Italian colonial power in the desert, Libya was already entangled in a long and laborious history in which the Mediterranean world, the Saharan trade routes and the Ottoman Sublime Porte each asserted their own claims upon the coast and upon the interior. Whoever wishes to understand the life of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ must begin not with his birth but with the wider history of Cyrenaica, with the Senussi brotherhood that developed its spiritual and political role in the interior, and with the Italian colonial aspiration that wished to turn the Mediterranean north coast of Africa into the so-called Fourth Shore of Italy, and whose tragic consequences would show themselves in full 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 distinct regions that differed from one another geographically and culturally. Tripolitania in the west, with the capital Tripoli and with its extensive agricultural lands along the Mediterranean coast, was the most urbanised and the administratively most integrated region of Ottoman Libya. Cyrenaica in the east, with the port cities of Benghazi and Derna, was predominantly Bedouin and much more loosely bound to Ottoman suzerainty. And Fezzan in the south, an extensive Saharan oasis zone with the capital Murzuq, formed a third region with a cultural and political character of its own, in which the trans-Saharan trade routes formed the core of the economy.

For the life’s work that awaited Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, Cyrenaica would be of central importance, for the Senussi brotherhood chose the Cyrenaican Bedouin tribes as its primary community in its strategy of dissemination, and the resistance against the Italian colonial expansion in the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties would take place chiefly in the Cyrenaican Jebel Akhdar, in a manner that reflected the specific geographical and social relations of Cyrenaica.

Cyrenaica, in Arabic Barqa, is the eastern part of present-day Libya, an area that stretches from the Gulf of Sirte in the west to the Egyptian border in the east, and that geographically consists of three distinct zones. Along the Mediterranean north coast a narrow strip of relatively fertile agricultural land with the ports of Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk. Directly to the south of it the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountains, a low plateau some hundreds of metres in height with densely wooded slopes on its northern side and with extensive pasture lands in its higher parts. And further southward the vast Saharan desert that stretches into Chad and Sudan and that is interrupted by scattered oasis towns which have retained 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, with nine large tribal confederations that were designated under their common name as the Saʿadi tribes and that were distributed over the area in a complex whole of alliances and rivalries. Among the Saʿadi tribes were, among others, the Awaqir, the Magharba, the Bara’asa, the Hasa, the Abid and the Aulad Ali, and in their own pasture lands they exercised a local autonomy that was formally recognised by the Ottoman suzerainty but that in practice knew little direct Ottoman administrative presence.

The Ottoman presence

The Ottoman Sublime Porte had incorporated Libya into its Empire in 1551 after the capture of Tripoli by Sinan Pasha, and in the following three centuries it conducted an indirect rule in which the local ruling families carried out the daily administration in a position of vassalage under a nominal Ottoman suzerainty. In the nineteenth century, and in particular from 1835 onward when the Ottoman authorities wished to establish direct rule over Libya in a renewed effort, a gradual shift took place toward a more direct Ottoman administration, with the installation of a wali in Tripoli and with a subsidiary administration in Benghazi for the eastern Cyrenaican territory.

The Ottoman authorities in Benghazi maintained in the course of the nineteenth century an administrative presence that had some effect in the port cities but that in the interior, and in particular in the Bedouin pasture lands of the Jebel Akhdar and the neighbouring Saharan zone, remained largely symbolic. The local Bedouin tribes formally acknowledged the Ottoman suzerainty through the annual payment of a modest tax and through the supply of a few hundreds of horsemen in the event of an Ottoman call to military service, but they retained their internal autonomy in all practical matters and they conducted their own administration of justice according to a mixture of local customs and the Maliki fiqh that was tolerated by the Ottoman authorities.

The Saʿadi tribes and their character

The nine Saʿadi tribes that populated the interior of Cyrenaica derived their collective name from the Banu Saʿadi tradition in which they traced their common descent from the Banu Hilal Arabs who had moved from the Egyptian territory to North Africa in a great migration movement in the eleventh century. The nine tribes were bound to one another in a complex whole of alliances and marriage ties, and over the course of the centuries they had developed an internal order in which each tribe possessed its own pasture land, its own seasonal migration routes, and its own internal organisation.

Alongside the Saʿadi tribes there also existed in Cyrenaica some non-Saʿadi tribes, locally called the Maradi tribes, which were bound in a subordinate position to the Saʿadi tribal confederations and which led their existence in the Bedouin economy in a pronounced clientelism. Cyrenaican Bedouin society was thus layered, in a combination of free Saʿadi tribes and dependent Maradi tribes, a layering that was visible in ordinary daily interaction and that worked through in distinct ways in the legal adjudication of the local shaykhs.

The Senussi brotherhood

Within this political landscape a spiritual development unfolded from 1843 onward that would place Cyrenaica in a new form in the following decades. Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀, an Algerian scholar born in 1787 near Mostaganem who had acquired a thorough erudition in his years of training in Fez and in Mecca, founded in 1843 in the Cyrenaican territory the first zawiya of what in the following years would grow into the Senussi brotherhood, a Sufi tarīqa that in its combination of spiritual discipline, economic independence and political role would undergo a distinct development.

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 developed a direction that combined the general Idrisi heritage with specific emphasis on a few elements that would stand central in his later brotherhood. The Senussi teaching emphasised firstly the direct return to the Quran and the hadith without the intermediation of scholastic commentaries, secondly the spiritual discipline of an extensive dhikr practice that was performed communally, and thirdly the organisation of self-sufficient zawiya communities that could sustain their own existence in a combination of religious devotion and economic production.

The expansion of the network

In the following decades, under the leadership of Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi ﵀ himself until his death in 1859 and under his son Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi ﵀ from 1859 onward, the Senussi brotherhood expanded into a network of several hundreds of zawiyas that were 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 vast southeastern Sahara on the present Libyan-Egyptian border, a choice that placed the brotherhood at a greater distance from the Ottoman authorities and that offered it the possibility of developing its own organisation undisturbed.

For the Bedouin tribes of Cyrenaica the Senussi brotherhood became, in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, a central spiritual and social institution. The local zawiyas, represented in every larger tribal confederation, functioned as Quran schools for the children, as legal courts for the disputes between the tribes, as economic storehouses for the communal supplies, and as spiritual centres for the communal dhikr gatherings. The Senussi brotherhood in effect completed the administrative organisation of Cyrenaica, in a form that formally maintained the Ottoman suzerainty but that in its practical operation built up an independent Bedouin-Senussi administration.

The Senussi zawiya as organisational unit

The Senussi zawiya in its ordinary form was not merely a spiritual centre but an extensive administrative and economic unit in which the local community organised its collective affairs. An ordinary zawiya comprised a central prayer hall that also functioned as a meeting place for the local jamaat, a Quran school for the children of the neighbouring Bedouin families, a guesthouse for travellers passing through the area, an extensive storehouse for the communal grain supplies in the event of drought or crisis, its own small mosque for the ordinary prayers, and a special hall for the communal dhikr gatherings in which the specific Senussi discipline was celebrated.

The zawiya was led by an ikhwan, a local brotherhood leader who had been appointed by the Senussi headquarters in Jaghbub and who administered the affairs of the community in a shared responsibility with the local tribal shaykhs. The ikhwan received a training in the Senussi headquarters before he obtained his appointment, and in his work he carried out a combination of spiritual instruction, legal adjudication in local disputes according to the Maliki fiqh, and economic administration of the communal supplies. For the local Bedouin population the ikhwan was a familiar figure in daily life who served the community in a combination of spiritual authority and practical administrative competence.

The Italian colonial aspiration

At the same time, within the Italian state of the second half of the nineteenth century, a gradual development of the Italian colonial ambitions unfolded that would find its outcome in 1911 in the Italo-Turkish war. Italy, which had achieved its national unity in 1861 under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel II and Camillo Cavour, gradually accepted the European colonial rivalry in the following decades, with a first experiment in Eritrea and Somalia in the eighteen-eighties and nineties and with the catastrophic defeat of Adwa against Ethiopia in 1896, which temporarily made the Italian colonial aspirations more cautious.

In the first years of the twentieth century, and in particular from 1908 onward when Italy under the leadership of prime minister Giovanni Giolitti began to develop a more ambitious colonial agenda, the Italian aspirations toward Libya gradually took shape in a combination of economic penetration, diplomatic preparation and military planning. The Banco di Roma established trading offices in Tripoli and Benghazi in these years, Italian missionaries opened schools in the port cities, and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs conducted extensive negotiations with the European powers about a future Italian colonial presence in Libya.

The propaganda of the Fourth Shore

In the Italian national propaganda of these years Libya was presented as the future Fourth Shore of Italy, following a usage of words that extended the three historic shores of the Italian peninsula with a fourth shore on the far side of the Mediterranean Sea. The propaganda rested on a combination of 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 the future Italian agricultural colonisation in the Libyan mountains and coastal zones. It was a combination of national-romantic and economic-pragmatic arguments that gradually prepared Italian public opinion for a coming colonial undertaking.

For the Bedouin-Senussi population of Libya this Italian propaganda was in 1858 still in a distant phase, and of a direct Italian colonial threat there was in that year as yet no question. But the general pattern of the European colonial expansion in North Africa was already visible in these years, with the French presence in Algeria since 1830, with the gradual French penetration into Tunisia that would be fixed in a protectorate in 1881, and with the British presence in Egypt that would be formalised in 1882 in an unspoken occupation. The coming Italian colonial undertaking in Libya took place within a general European colonial expansion in North Africa in which no Muslim community could continue to exist in its original autonomy.

Italian public opinion

In Italian public opinion in the years between 1900 and 1911 a gradual mental preparation for the coming colonial undertaking in Libya unfolded, which was elaborated in the press, in the literature and in the public gatherings of the time. Italian writers such as Giovanni Pascoli, in his famous speech La grande proletaria si è mossa of 1911, which was delivered on the evening of the Italian declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire, formulated the coming colonial undertaking in a combination of national-religious and social-economic arguments. Italy was, in his reading, the great proletarian nation that in its colonial expansion would not undertake the ordinary plunder of the older European colonial powers, but a truly civilisation-bringing enterprise in which the poor Italian peasants could find their future existence 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 central element of Italian national-political life in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and it formed the bedding upon which the coming Italo-Turkish war and the subsequent expansion of the Italian colonial dominance in Libya could take place with general Italian approval. For the resistance that awaited Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ this meant that in his years-long struggle he would be operating not merely against a military power but against an Italian public opinion that regarded its colonial undertaking as a just cause.

The birth into a changed world

In the year 1858, when Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ came into the world in the Cyrenaican village of Janzur, three forces were thus working upon the world that awaited him. The Ottoman suzerainty, which still formally maintained Libyan sovereignty but which in reality was in a state of gradual weakening. The Senussi brotherhood, which in its network of zawiyas and in its gradual organisational expansion was building up the bedding upon which his own later life and struggle would rest. And the European colonial expansion, and in particular the Italian aspirations toward Libya, which would place his life’s work in its tragic course.

For the ordinary Bedouin family in Janzur in 1858, and for the Mukhtar clan within the Manifa sub-tribe of the Hasa people from which the newborn child came, these three forces were not yet present in daily life. Life proceeded in the ordinary Bedouin manner of animal husbandry, of seasonal migrations between the higher pastures of the Jebel Akhdar in the summer and the lower pastures of the Saharan zone in the winter, of communal meals of barley porridge and camel milk, and of the ordinary spiritual ties with the local Senussi zawiya that provided its spiritual guidance in the immediate vicinity of the Mukhtar clan. But the wider forces within which the world of the newborn child would be placed in the coming decades were already present, and they formed the bedding upon which the course of his life would unfold in its own inimitable way.

The geographical setting of Janzur

Janzur, originally a small Bedouin settlement in the vast sand plains to the southwest of Tobruk, lay in an area where the Cyrenaican Jebel Akhdar gradually gave way to the dry Saharan plains of the southeastern Libyan desert. The settlement consisted in 1858 of a few dozens of Bedouin tents of the Mukhtar clan and of a number of related families of the Manifa sub-tribe, grouped around a communal well and surrounded by the vast pasture lands upon which the local herds carried out their seasonal migrations. It was a settlement of modest size that fitted into the general pattern of Cyrenaican Bedouin society.

The presence of a Senussi zawiya in the immediate vicinity of Janzur, in the neighbouring al-Bayda area that in these years had grown into a gradually expanding Senussi centre, gave the settlement a spiritual connectedness that was recognisable in ordinary daily life. The Mukhtar family maintained an understanding with the local ikhwan, and the newborn son would in his early childhood be initiated into the Senussi tradition through this understanding, an initiation that would come to occupy a central place in the course of his life to come.

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 in the neighbouring Saharan zone. The Hasa were a Bedouin tribe of average size with some thousands of families, with an extensive livestock of camels, sheep and goats, and with a traditional internal organisation under a council of tribal shaykhs who jointly administered local affairs. The Hasa stood in general on friendly terms with the Senussi brotherhood, and the local zawiya in their pasture land was a spiritual centre to which many Hasa families sent their children for their first education.

For the Mukhtar clan, and in particular for the family of the newborn child, the Senussi connection already occupied a central place in family life in 1858. The father of the child, Mukhtar ibn Umar al-Manifi ﵀, was himself a respected tribal shaykh in the Manifa sub-tribe and maintained a good understanding with the local Senussi zawiya. He had enjoyed a short education in this zawiya in his younger years and in his daily life he was a devout Muslim in the Senussi discipline, with regular performance of the five prayers and with participation in the communal dhikr gatherings on Friday evening.

The working through of the three forces

In the half century between 1858 and 1911 the three forces that we have discussed in this article gradually worked themselves out in a manner that would fundamentally change Cyrenaica. The Ottoman authorities undertook repeated attempts in these decades to strengthen their direct rule, with the installation of a more extensive administration in Benghazi, with the development of the local port facilities, and with the expansion of Ottoman education, set up by Constantinople as modernisation. But these attempts were hindered by the increasing internal difficulties of the Ottoman Empire, by the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, and by the subsequent gradual geopolitical weakening of the Sublime Porte in its Mediterranean position.

The Senussi brotherhood expanded its zawiya network further in these decades, with the founding of 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 Senussi organisation attained its greatest expansion and its deepest organisational form. The headquarters was moved further southward in 1895 from Jaghbub to Kufra, a choice that placed the brotherhood at an even greater distance from the coming European colonial presence, and it thus formed the bedding upon which the coming resistance under Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ could be led.

The Egyptian and Sudanese influence

For the Senussi brotherhood in its expansion, important connections also arose in these decades with the spiritual and political developments in Egypt and Sudan, which influenced the wider developments to come in Cyrenaica. The Mahdiyya movement in Sudan under Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi ﵀ from 1881 to 1885, and thereafter under his successor ʿAbd Allah ibn Muhammad ﵀ until 1898, was a great anti-colonial movement that was followed with attention in Senussi-Cyrenaican circles. The Senussi leaders kept their distance from the Mahdiyya in their public statements, for they regarded the Mahdi claims of Muhammad Ahmad ﵀ as legally untenable according to ordinary Sunni doctrine, but in practice they supported the general cause of the Sudanese resistance against the British and Egyptian colonial expansion.

For the coming Cyrenaican resistance against Italy the Mahdiyya experience offered a learning process in which both the possibilities and the limitations of a Sufi-led anti-colonial resistance could be seen. The fall of the Mahdiyya regime in 1898 under the British-Egyptian troops of Kitchener in the Battle of Omdurman, and the subsequent British-Egyptian colonial rule over Sudan, delivered to the Senussi brotherhood a warning about the coming Italian colonial threat, and in the years between 1898 and 1911 it provided a gradual spiritual preparation for the coming confrontation that would take its tragic course in the life’s work that awaited Mukhtar ﵀.

The Italian expansion up to 1911

The Italian colonial expansion unfolded gradually in these decades and would find its ultimate outcome in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912. In the years between 1880 and 1900 Italy carried out chiefly a diplomatic and economic preparation, with the extensive negotiations with France and Great Britain about a future Italian colonial presence in Libya and with the gradual economic penetration through the Banco di Roma and other Italian trading enterprises. From 1900 onward a more assertive phase unfolded, with the Italian public opinion campaign for the Fourth Shore and with the military preparation for the coming war.

For the Cyrenaican Bedouin-Senussi population this gradual Italian expansion meant that the coming colonial undertaking was sensed in advance in the local spiritual and political circles long before the actual war 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 brotherhood prepared itself in the years between 1902 and 1911 for the coming confrontation, with the strengthening of its internal organisation and with the gradual purchase of weapons from various international deliveries through Egyptian and Turkish intermediaries.

Toward the birth itself

To Umar al-Mukhtar’s ﵀ birth in 1858, to his early childhood in Janzur, and to his upbringing in the Senussi tradition that would make him in his adolescent years a formed pupil of the brotherhood, the next article devotes its attention. In this article we have explored the wider historical background in which the course of his life to come would be placed, with the Ottoman suzerainty in its gradual weakening, with the Senussi brotherhood in its gradual expansion, and with the European colonial aspiration that in its Italian form would provide the ultimate framework within which his work would receive its tragic outcome.

The Fourth Shore, as the Italians called Libya in their national propaganda, would in the coming half century after 1858 become the bedding for a spiritual and political struggle in which the name Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ would ultimately 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, the course of his life to come was still entirely 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, be brought to a martyr’s death in an Italian internment camp that would let his name resound lastingly through the Muslim world into the twenty-first century.

What the birth meant for the Ummah

When in 1858, in a small Bedouin village on the outer fringe of the Cyrenaican Saharan zone, a child was born into a family of modest standing and into a community that in its daily life was scarcely touched by the wider geopolitical forces of its time, no one could suspect that the name of this child would grow in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries into a spiritual force that would be recognised throughout the whole of the Muslim world as a symbol of the just resistance against colonial oppression. The birth itself was for the Mukhtar family an event of personal joy, combined with the ordinary course of a Bedouin birth in its time, and it was celebrated in the immediate community according to the local customs of its time.

For the wider history of the Muslim world in the coming half century, however, it was, seen in retrospect, an event that would give a lasting spiritual form to the anti-colonial resistance in the first half of the twentieth century. Alongside Imam Shamil ﵀ in the Caucasus, alongside al-Hajj Umar Tall ﵀ in Senegambia, alongside Abd al-Qadir al-Jazaʾiri ﵀ in Algeria, and alongside numerous other spiritual leaders who had fought against the European colonial expansion in their own regions and in their own times, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ would occupy a distinct place of his own in his life’s work, in which Senussi discipline, Bedouin military craftsmanship and spiritual steadfastness would be united 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.