The Martyrdom of the Lion

In the preceding article we followed the capture of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in an Italian ambush near Slonta on 11 September 1931, his transfer to Benghazi, where the coming trial would take place, and the preparation by the Italian leadership of a legal process that in its outcome would furnish the coming execution of the captured Cyrenaican leader with an international justification. This final article of the cycle follows the Italian trial on 15 September 1931, the pronouncement of the death sentence, and finally the execution of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in a public hanging on the following morning on the hills of Solluq, an event that was received throughout the Muslim world as an event of shared spiritual significance and that in the following decades would give the name of the Lion of the Desert a lasting place in the collective memory of the Muslim world.

The trial

On 15 September 1931, the Italian trial against Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ took place in a military court in Benghazi, a formal legal proceeding that from opening to verdict took only a few hours in its entirety. The trial was conducted under the presidency of General Guido Malacarne, with a panel of three Italian military judges in the composition that was customary in a colonial court-martial proceeding, and with several Italian officers as witnesses for the prosecution. On the side of the defence stood an appointed Italian lawyer, Captain Roberto Lontano, who, according to the custom of colonial legal administration, carried out the task assigned to him formally and with restraint.

The indictment against Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ comprised in its formal wording the general category of “armed resistance against the sovereign Italian state”, supplemented by several specific charges concerning the battles that had been fought in the preceding years, concerning executions of local Muslim collaborators by his troops, and concerning the armed activities that had been undertaken against Italian military posts. In its outward form the trial proceeded according to the rules of Italian legal procedure, in which the accused was formally offered the ordinary procedural rights, but the general outcome of the trial had already been determined by the Italian leadership before it began.

Umar al-Mukhtar’s ﵀ statement

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

In the Cyrenaican tradition it is further reported that in a final statement before the outcome of the trial he is said to have declared: “We will not cease, our duty is longer than our life.” Whether these specific words were actually spoken during the trial or were only attributed to him in a later tradition is not unambiguously confirmed in the Italian court records of the time, but the statement has been permanently preserved in the general Cyrenaican Muslim tradition as the expression of his spiritual position at the moment of his approaching death. The statement was afterwards cited throughout the Muslim world as a spiritual exhortation, as the shared expression of the conviction that a just struggle spiritually transcends its outward outcome.

The death sentence

At the end of the trial, after several hours of formal proceedings, the Italian court jointly pronounced the death sentence upon Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀. The sentence was pronounced according to the fixed forms of the Italian colonial conventions, with the formal justification on the grounds of the charged categories of armed resistance against the Italian state, and with as its sole outcome the public hanging to take place on the following morning. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ received the sentence with personal dignity, without outward display of emotion, and he delivered a final statement in which he spiritually accepted the outcome as the general divine decree that had come upon him.

The final night

In the hours between the end of the trial in the afternoon of 15 September and the coming execution in the early morning of 16 September, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ remained in his military prison cell in Benghazi, where he spent the remaining hours in personal spiritual preparation for his approaching death. In these final hours he received several visits, including a formal visit from some Italian colonial officials who, according to the bureaucratic course of affairs, had to settle some final administrative matters, and a specific visit from a local Italian Roman Catholic priest who, according to the ordinary colonial convention, came to make the offer of a last sacrament.

Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ declined the offer of the Catholic priest with personal courtesy, and he declared that in his approaching death he would remain a Muslim and that his spiritual devotion would be conducted solely in his own personal prayer to Allah ﷻ. He devoted the principal hours of the night to the performance of the tahajjud prayer and to the Senussi dhikr that he had maintained in his lifelong discipline, a spiritual preparation that would give the death awaiting him its spiritual meaning.

The final prayer

From a prisoner in the last night before his approaching execution one might ordinarily expect fear and spiritual unrest, but in the testimonies of his Italian guards, insofar as these have been preserved in later colonial reports, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ displayed in these final hours a calm that was remarkable even to his enemies. He performed the ordinary five daily prayers, he recited passages from the Quran to himself, and in the intervening hours he slept in a repose that spoke of his spiritual preparation and of his personal acceptance of the approaching death.

The execution

On the early morning of 16 September 1931, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was transferred by an extensive Italian military escort from his prison cell to the place of the coming execution. The Italian leadership had chosen the place Solluq for the execution, a location in the Cyrenaican sand plains south of Benghazi, and that choice carried a specific intention in its geography. Solluq had in the preceding years been one of the largest concentration camps in which great numbers of Cyrenaican Bedouin had been brought together in forced displacement, and the Italian leadership wished to carry out the execution of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ as a colonial demonstration in the direct vicinity of the concentration camp, in order thereby to confirm the spiritual subjugation of the general Cyrenaican population.

The spectators of the execution comprised approximately twenty thousand forcibly present Cyrenaican Bedouin from the neighbouring concentration camp, with additional Italian military officials and with some invited Italian press representatives. The forced presence of the Cyrenaican population was a deliberate Italian strategic choice, by which the general moral and spiritual subjugation was to be brought to a culmination. For the ordinary Cyrenaican Bedouin who were forcibly present, what was to come was a spiritual trial, and this event would receive an indelible place in their collective memory.

The moment of death

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

According to the testimonies of the Cyrenaican spectators present, which have been collectively preserved in later tradition, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in his final moments pronounced the Shahada, the testimony of the Muslim of the acceptance of the one God, Allah ﷻ, and of the prophethood of Muhammad ﷺ. His last words were, according to the prevailing reading of the tradition, a Quran citation: “Inna lillāhi wa innā ilayhi rājiʿūn”, the ordinary Muslim utterance that expresses the acceptance of the general divine decree in its fullness: “We belong to Allah ﷻ and to Him we return.”

He was then hanged on the gallows according to the Italian execution convention, and he died in the following moments with a personal dignity that was received among the Cyrenaican Bedouin present as a shared spiritual experience. His death, carried out before the eyes of the forcibly present Cyrenaican spectators, formed in its outcome not an Italian demonstration of colonial authority but a collectively received Muslim testimony that brought the community present to a renewed spiritual steadfastness.

The Italian press response

In the Italian press of the years 1931 and 1932, an extensive propagandistic campaign unfolded in which the execution of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was presented as an Italian colonial victory. The Italian Fascist press, under the general direction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and of the Fascist propaganda apparatus, ran in these years a series of extensive articles in which Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was placed in a negative light, as a brigand, as an intolerant fanatic, and as a threat to the civilizing mission of the Italian colonial project. For the general Italian public opinion, this propaganda formed in its outcome the bedding in which the Italian colonial conduct in Libya as a whole was presented to the Italian population.

In the wider international press, a more mixed reception unfolded. In the British, the French and the German press of the time, varied commentaries appeared in which the human consequences of the Italian colonial subjugation of Cyrenaica were discussed, although the general international attention for the Cyrenaican cause remained limited as a whole. In the Arab and Muslim press, by contrast, an extensive reaction unfolded in which the tragic end of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was presented as the end of a general Muslim martyr, and his name was held up to the wider Muslim Ummah as an example of general anti-colonial steadfastness.

The aftermath

In the hours and days after the execution, a spiritual reaction unfolded throughout Cyrenaica and in the wider Muslim world in which the martyrdom of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was received in its full spiritual significance. In the local Cyrenaican zawiyas, communal janazah prayers in absentia were performed for the fallen leader, with several thousand Muslims who by their presence expressed their participation in this shared spiritual mourning. In Cairo, in Mecca, in Tunis, in Algiers and in many other Muslim cities, comparable ceremonies gradually took place, in which the general Muslim population received the martyrdom as a spiritual confirmation of the Senussi cause.

For the Cyrenaican resistance, the outcome meant that the armed struggle would gradually come to a standstill. The spiritual influence of the resistance, by contrast, endured, and in the following decades it would shape the Cyrenaican Muslim tradition in its full breadth. The name Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, as the Lion of the Desert, became a shared symbol of Muslim resistance against colonial oppression, and in the following decades it would remain recognizable throughout the Muslim world as a spiritual exhortation.

The spiritual outcome

For the Cyrenaican Muslim community, the martyrdom brought about a spiritual renewal, and precisely in this the outcome crossed the ordinary Italian colonial objectives. The Italian leadership, which had hoped that the execution of the general leader of the resistance would break the Cyrenaican opposition, encountered instead a spiritual renewal of the resistance that would retain its strength in the coming decades. The general Cyrenaican Muslim consciousness, as it developed after the martyrdom, eroded the general Italian colonial legitimacy ever further, and it would come to fruition in the coming Second World War and in the subsequent Libyan independence in 1951.

The family after the execution

For the family of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, a time of human trial began after his execution, one that touched both the spiritual and the practical life of the household. His wife Fatima and his children found themselves in a spiritual and practical crisis, in which the loss of the central figure of the family coincided with the practical challenges of the coming life under Italian colonial rule. The Italian colonial authorities maintained an extensive surveillance of the family, out of fear that the descendants of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ might in a coming time once again bring forth a resistance against the colonial regime.

Some of his children undertook in the following years the emigration to Egypt, where they found their place within the Cyrenaican exile community established there. His family line spread in the coming decades in a combination of scattered settlements across Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim communities. For the Senussi brotherhood, the descendants of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ formed a lasting connection with the Cyrenaican resistance.

The legacy

The legacy of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ acquired in the following decades an influence that would permanently mark the general Muslim tradition of anti-colonial resistance and that would give him a lasting place within it. In Libya, under the Senussi sovereignty after 1951, with the establishment of the Senussi kingdom under Sayyid Muhammad Idris al-Sanusi ﵀ as King Idris I of Libya, his name was maintained with state care, with the establishment of local memorials and with the naming of public institutions after the fallen leader. Under the Gaddafi regime after 1969, his name was reused in the revolutionary propaganda, in an application that placed his historical figure in a specific political reading, including the financing of the Hollywood film Lion of the Desert (1981) directed by Moustapha Akkad, in which the Mexican-American actor Anthony Quinn played the role of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in an international distribution.

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

What the desert does not conceal

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

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

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

Sources

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