Libya

A Modern History

John Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032322483
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000647310
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

First published in 1981, Libya: A Modern History traces the history of Libya from 1900 to 1980, showing how its first monarchic constitution was modelled by the UN Commission, and survived precariously until the military coup of 1969. The author traces both internal and foreign policy in detail, devoting over half the book to the rule of Colonel Gadafi, in one of the few independent accounts of the Jamahiriyah. He demonstrates the roots of Gadafi's ideology in ancient Libyan traditions while defining the unique elements of his regime with its militarism and unorthodox diplomacy. He analyses the roots of Jamahiriyah's strength in the oil of the desert and provides statistics on population and economy. It is a comprehensive treatment of a nation that is sui generis among the Arab countries. This is an important read for students and scholars of international relations, African studies, African history, and Geopolitics.

1 A BUFFER STATE OF SAND

Libya has been under at least nominal foreign rule for most of its known history.¹ Time and again, the area of modern Libya has formed provinces of empires ruled from Asia, Europe or other parts of Africa. But such rule was usually limited to the coastlands of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica; in the interior, the long-established Berber tribes remained largely independent, recognising only the authority of their own leaders. Remarkably few effects of foreign rule have endured: this is a country rich in the ruins of alien and discarded cultures, whether Greek, Roman or Byzantine, Ottoman Turkish or Fascist Italian. ‘In Libya you are made aware the whole time of the abandonment of things, the material leftovers of receding cultures.’²

The exception to this tradition of resistance to foreign domination and influence has been the slow but profound absorption of Muslim Arab invaders, as well as the Islamic religion and Arabic language they brought with them from Arabia in the seventh century AD, and again with greater effect in the eleventh. As a result of this assimilation, Libya is now wholly Islamised. Cyrenaica is probably the most thoroughly Arabised country outside the Arabian peninsula, while the Arabisation of the rest has been extensive, if not yet absolute.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the partly native Karamanli dynasty ruled Tripoli, and nominally Libya as a whole, in practical independence of the nominal overlords, the Turkish Sultans at Constantinople.³ But when in 1835 the Turks deposed the last of the Karamanli rulers and re-established the Sultan’s direct rule, they broke the traditions of foreign domination by trying to assert their authority over the hitherto largely independent peoples of the interior. In doing so, they undertook the first of three foreign campaigns of conquest — two of them lasting over 20 years each — that Libya was to endure in the course of the following 100 years.

The Turks, already alarmed by Egypt’s achievement of near-independence under Mohammad Ali, occupied Tripoli in 1835 largely to forestall further French expansion in North Africa after the seizure of nominally Turkish Algiers in 1830. Like the French in Algeria, the Turks in Tripoli chose a dynamic and interventionist policy, rather than a passive and defensive one. By the time the Turks had occupied Misurata in 1836, their attempts to tax the peoples of the interior were already meeting unexpected resistance. The great Awlad Slaiman tribe, under its remarkable leader Abd-al-Jalil Saif-al-Nassir, had occupied Fezzan in the closing years of the Karamanli regime, and had then united lesser tribes of the Sirtica and south-east Tripolitania in opposition to Turkish penetration. At the same time, other tribesmen led by Shaikh Jumah bin Khalifa were preparing to defend the formidable northern escarpment of the Gebel Nefusah against Turkish assault.

The conquest of western Libya, more or less contemporary with the French conquest of northern Algeria, lasted 24 years. Both the Turks and the French soon realised the difficulties of subduing mountain and desert peoples who had probably known no government but their own since Roman times. In 1842 the Turks defeated and dispersed the Awlad Slaiman; Fezzan was occupied and Shaikh Abd-al-Jalil was killed; in the Gebel, meanwhile, Shaikh Jumah was captured and imprisoned; and in 1843 the important trading oasis of Ghadames was occupied. Turkish military successes in the 1840s owed much to the leadership of General Ahmad Pasha; like his Italian successor Rodolfo Graziani who ‘pacified’ the country 80 years later, he earned himself the nickname ‘butcher’ during his time in Libya.

The effects of the defeat of the Awlad Slaiman are felt to this day. After the death of Shaikh Abd-al-Jalil (whose exploits are still recalled in tribal poetry and song), the tribesmen moved southwards under the leadership of Abd-al-Jalil’s son Mohammad to find new homes and livelihood beyond the control of the Turks. In 1854 the German explorer Heinrich Barth found members of the tribe in southern Fezzan and Kanem, north of Lake Chad.⁴ They still live there, maintaining links with their kinsmen in Libya.

While the Turks were conquering Tripolitania and Fezzan, Cyrenaica was becoming the centre of a religious revivalist movement that was to be the making of modern, independent Libya, and was to establish Libyan influence in much of Saharan and Sahelian Africa. Its founder, Sayyid Mohammad bin Ali al-Sanussi, was born in Mostaghanem in Algeria in the late 1780s. After long religious study at Fez in Morocco he drew his first disciples round him and travelled through North Africa and as far as the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, preaching a return to pristine Islam and greater Islamic unity. In the Hijaz he became established as the Head of the new Order of the Sanussi, an orthodox organisation of Sufis, or mystics; it was an ascetic fraternity, originally with a strong missionary purpose. At Mecca, Sidi Mohammad — or the Grand Sanussi as he was known to his followers — met his most powerful supporter, Amir Mohammad Sharif, who, as future Sultan of Wadai, was to be responsible for the spread of Sanussism into large parts of Black Africa.

About 1840, unable to return to Algeria because of the French conquest, the Grand Sanussi settled in Cyrenaica. About 1843 he established what was to become the Mother Lodge of the Sanussi Order, the Zawia al-Baida, the White Monastery, in the Gebel Akhdar. Cyrenaica at that time was a remote, forgotten country, almost without towns, thinly populated by a complex of seminomadic tribes of Arab bedouin. Although nominally Muslim, the people knew little of their religion, for when the Grand Sanussi arrived in Cyrenaica he is said to have found them fallen into heresies and to be in danger of rapid religious and moral degeneration.⁵ He accordingly took upon himself the mission, as he expressed it, of ‘reminding the negligent, teaching the ignorant, and guiding him who has gone astray’.⁶

The instruments of this policy were the brothers of the Order, the Ikhwan, whose missionary teaching carried the message of Sanussism across Saharan and Sahelian Africa, and the zawias, which were built at tribal centres, or at watering places on trade and pilgrim routes, and which served as monasteries, schools, hostels, sources of relief, advice and mediation and, in due course, as seats of administration. The Sanussi call for a return to pristine Islam was as acceptable to the bedouin of nineteenth-century Cyrenaica as the original message of Islam had been to those of seventh-century Arabia, and the initial proselytising role of Sanussism was inevitably political as well as religious. The Turks, who had neither the resources nor the will to govern the interior of the country adequately, interfered little in its affairs. They left the collection of taxes, the maintenance of law and order, the promotion of trade and the provision of rudimentary social services to the Sanussi, who thus became de facto rulers of the country under nominal Turkish sovereignty.

Sanussism had variable influence elsewhere. It became well established in Fezzan, but it never had the widespread following in Tripolitania that it had in Cyrenaica; in Wadai and other regions of what is now the Republic of Chad, as in the Western Desert of Egypt and other parts of Muslim Africa, it helped to foster a spirit of trust and respect that encouraged the development of trade and stability. But growing Sanussi influence inevitably aroused the suspicion of outside powers, and particularly of the French, who were slowly pushing into territories where the Order was active. The French blamed many of their set-backs in northern Africa on Sanussi hostility, and the Turks were glad to collaborate with an organisation which they saw as a useful agent against European expansion. Although Sanussism undoubtedly stiffened its followers’ resistance to European domination in many parts of northern Africa, it was in Cyrenaica that the Order fostered in the many rival tribes a political coherence — almost, it might be said, a national consciousness — when they faced the supreme challenge of invasion by Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century.

From its original headquarters in the Gebel Akhbar, the Order moved in 1856 to the uninhabited oasis of Giarabub, nearly 300 kilometres south of Tobruk. Although Giarabub had few resources, it stood on important trade and pilgrim routes and was at the centre of the growing Sanussi sphere of influence in and beyond the Sahara; it was also politically neutral, being at the time well beyond the reach of the Turks or other foreign powers.⁷ The Grand Sanussi was buried at Giarabub on his death in 1859. He was succeeded by his son, Mohammad al-Mahdi, under whose guidance the Order came to wield its widest influence.

In 1895 Al-Mahdi moved the seat of the Order to the Kufra group of oases which, despite their extreme remoteness, had well-established links with many parts of Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. This shift of the central power southwards reflected the growing importance of Sanussism in the lands on the southern fringes of the desert. Yet even as Sanussism was reaching its greatest power, its very existence was being challenged by the French penetration of the African continent.

For centuries Europeans had been confined to small trading enclaves on the coasts of West Africa by tropical diseases, hostile natives and poor communications with the interior. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century, following the development of the prophylactic use of quinine, breach-loading rifles and steam boats for the swift domination of the navigable reaches of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic, that European penetration, division and conquest of the continent got well underway. Earlier in the century the British had been the first to try opening up the African interior by the trans-Saharan route from Tripoli, the Mediterranean port nearest to the Great Desert. But British attention had later turned to the easier route to richer markets offered by the Nigerian river system, and the northern desert approach had been abandoned to the French or any other power that cared to make use of it. The French encroachment on lands under Sanussi influence built up over several decades from three directions: from the long-established French colony of Senegal, from southern Algeria, and up the Congo–Ubangui river system leading into the heart of the continent.

Throughout recorded history, North Africans had been preoccupied with Black Africa and its trade. The exchange of goods between Negroland and the Maghrib enriched the sedentary and nomad Saharan peoples and North Africa’s Mediterranean ports. According to the nineteenth-century French explorer Henri Duveyrier, the people of North Africa held that to become rich it was enough to travel to Sudan⁸ to trade the manufactured goods of North Africa, West Asia and Europe for the raw produce of Black Africa — ivory, feathers, gold and, above all, slaves — all commodities which could withstand the high costs of trans-Saharan travel.

The first effects of the European penetration of Africa on the Sahara and Sudan were commercial, as the traditional trade between North Africa and the countries beyond the desert was diverted westwards and southwards along the new, secure railways and river steamer routes to the ports on the Atlantic coast. The result was the rapid decline of the traditional Saharan trade routes, some of them in use since pre-Roman times, as the commerce of the continent was drawn away from the interior lines of communication towards the ocean — a disruption that still defies attempts by the independent states of Africa to re-establish their traditional trade links.

Trans-Saharan commerce was further undermined by European prohibition and gradual abolition of one of its most profitable activities, the slave trade. But the Sanussi gained some temporary advantage by fostering trade on a previously little-used trans-Saharan route from Benghazi, which was opened up in the early nineteenth century to provide the expanding Sultanate of Wadai with a better road to the north. It passed through some of the worst stretches of the Sahara, controlled by notoriously predatory tribes. But under the Sanussi the route was made safe, wells were dug and its importance and prosperity increased, partially because of the security it offered in contrast to the chaotic conditions further east when Egyptian Sudan was overrun by the followers of Mohammad Ahmad al-Mahdi in the 1880s and 1890s. The journey through Jalo, Kufra and Ennedi to the capital of Wadai at Abéché took some 70 days.⁹ Textiles were the most important trade goods carried southwards by Tripoli and Benghazi merchants. Northwards came ostrich feathers, ivory and negro slaves. In the mid-nineteenth century slaves made up about half the value of all northbound trade across the Sahara, and it is estimated that of the 10,000 who survived the horrors of the desert crossing every year up to about 1860, half came through Turkish Libya.¹⁰

As a result of diplomatic pressure brought by Britain and other European powers from about 1840 onwards, the trans-Saharan slave trade was gradually suppressed. But the Wadai road, far beyond the reach of diplomatic and moral pressure by European powers penetrating West, East and Central Africa, remained well into the twentieth century a route for the supply of slaves to Benghazi for onward shipment to other provinces of the Ottoman Empire.¹¹

For much of the nineteenth century Tripoli was one of the leading merchant towns of Africa; it was the Mediterranean port closest to the desert, and therefore to the large markets of Black Africa. Unlike Algiers and later Tunis, its traditional trade routes were not blighted by European invasion and conquest, although Turkish pacification did disrupt trade in the 1830s and 1840s. Three great and ancient trade routes led from Tripoli to Central Africa. The most direct went from Murzuk in Fezzan to Bornu, west of Lake Chad, in what is now northern Nigeria. The journey from Tripoli to the frontier of Bornu took 90 days.¹² Besides being fast, the route was also relatively safe up to about 1830, and it was the main desert crossing for slaves destined for sale in Fezzan and further nor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 A Buffer State of Sand
• 2 Fourth Shore
• 3 A Child of the United Nations
• 4 Towards Independence
• 5 The Kingdom of Libya
• 6 At a Single Blow
• 7 A Year of Revolution
• 8 Taking the World by Storm
• 9 The State of the Masses
• 10 Defence and Foreign Policy
• 11 The Oil Revolution
• 12 Economy and Society
• Postscript
• Bibliography: Main Sources Consulted
• Index