Byline: Ghulam Shams-ur-Rehman, Ghulam Fatima and Yousif bin Naji

Abstract:

This paper aims to evaluate the role of the Sanusiyah Order, one of the most influential North African Sf orders, in the socio-political and religious spheres from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It also examines the impact of the Order's reforms and how its thinkers systematically invoked the national spirit among the Bedouins, rooted in the tribal system. Significantly the movement's zawiyahs (S]fi lodges) initiated a sense of unity and nationalism among the nomadic tribes of Cyrenaica and the Sahara. This paper also endeavours to explain how San]sis defined the boundaries of their homeland and then launched a successful campaign to defend and liberate their lands from the foreign invaders. Integration of these conflicting tribes under the umbrella of San]sis generated national spirit which gave primarily an impetus to the anti-colonial resistance movement against France and Italy and ultimately laid the foundation of the national identity of modern Libya.

The present study helps to understand the socio-regional and religious background of modern Libya.

Keywords: The Sanusiyah, Jihadi activism of Sufi, colonialism, Bedouin tribes of Libya

I- Introduction

Many scholars have evaluated the Sanusiyah and their socio-political movement. Ahmida observed that the struggle of the Sanusiyah from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the period of anti-colonial resistance was basically a phenomenon of anti-colonialist behaviour, in which the Sanusiyah made skilful use of tribal power to defend their lands from invasion by dominant European powers. The political and cultural legacy of the resistance was also powerful in strengthening Libyan nationalism and leading to the revival of a strong attachment to Islam and the clan. Memories of this period have not yet faded, and an appreciation of this background is essential in understanding present-day Libya (Ahmida, 1994, p. 33). Similarly, Barber analysed the role of the Sanusiyah in resisting colonialism on their native soil, noting that the resistance movement against the Italian forces from 1911 to 1920 basically depended on Sanusiyah jihadi activism, predominately in Burqah (Barbar, 1980, p. 10).

Evans-Pritchard, on the other hand, emphasized a political-historical view, interpreting the political movement of the Sanusiyah against its historical background and examining the order's origins up to the period of Italian colonization more closely than its socio-cultural development (Evans-Pritchard, 1949, pp. 1-26). Another important writer on the San]si movement was Nicola Ziadeh, who studied it as a revivalist movement. According to his analysis Sanusiyah was a conservative fraternity which endeavoured to establish its fundamental tradition according to the Qur`an and Sunnah. Their jihadi struggles and their contribution to anti-colonialization were examined only briefly and from a revivalist perspective (Ziadeh,1958, pp. 68-72). Knut S. Vikor, unlike other scholars, concluded that the political movement was not the central aspect of the Sanusiyah Order but represented a practical, later development.

The history of the Sanusiyah was thus also the history of a S]fi brotherhood that welded the ethnic identity of the Saharan Bedouin and neighbouring peoples into an entity...