24

The Sauūsī Chiefs and Rulers

1253–1389/1837–1969

Eastern Sudan and Libya

1253/1837

Sayyid Muḥammad b. ‘Alī, al-Idrīsi al-Sanūsī al-Kabīr, founder of the Sanūsiyya dervish order, d. 1275/1859

1276/1859

Sayyid Muḥammad al-Mahdī b. Muḥammad b. ‘Alī al-Sanūsī

1320/1902

Sayyid Aḥmad al-Sharīf b. Muḥammad al-Sharīf (in 1336/1918 gave up military and political leadership, but retained spiritual primacy until his death at Medina in 1351/1933)

⊘ 1336–89/1969

Sayyid Muḥammad Idrīs b. Muḥammad al-Mahdī (initially as military and political leader; 1371/1951 King of Libya), d. 1401/1982

1389/1969

Republican régime

Muḥammad b.‘Alī, known as the ‘Great Sanūsī’, was born in Algeria towards the end of the eighteenth century. While studying in Fez, he was much influenced by Moroccan Ṣūfism, especially that of the Tijāniyya order; and later, while further studying in Ḥijāz, he joined several dervish orders himself and became an adherent of the Moroccan Ṣūfī and Sharīf Aḥmad b. Idrīs. In addition to this inclination towards mysticism, he developed reformist and innovatory ideas, and, after Aḥmad b. Idrīs’s death in 1253/183 7, organised in Mecca his own tarīqa or order, the Sanusiyya. Finding his homeland Algeria in the process of being taken over by the French, he settled in Cyrenaica, where direct Ottoman Turkish rule had recently been imposed in place of the local line of Qaramānlī Pashas (see above, no. 23). Moving into the desert interior rather than the coastlands, several zāwiyasor religious, educational and social centres for the Sanūsiyya were now founded there, including in 1272/1856 that of Jaghbūb near the Egyptian border. This was to be the headquarters of the order until 1313/1895, when it was moved southwards to the less accessible oasis of Kufra and, soon afterwards, to what is now northern Chad. The Sanūsī message appealed to the desert-dwellers of North Africa and the eastern Sudan. Veneration for the person of the Great Sanūsī accorded with the maraboutism and saint-worship of those regions, but the firm organisation of the order gave these enthusiasms effect and purpose. Expectations of a coming Mahdī, who would restore Islam to its pristine simplicity, were also rife, as events in Dongola were to show in the Mahdiyya movement there of the late nineteenth century. The Sanūsīs hoped for a reunion and regeneration of all Islamic peoples, and the Ottoman sultan ‘Abd al-Hamlī II (see below, no. 130) hoped to recruit their support for his Pan-Islamic policies. The Sanūsiyya did, in fact, have a strong missionary zeal, and zāwiyaswere founded in Ḥijāz, Egypt, Fezzān and as far south as Wadai and Lake Chad, the faith in this case following the trans-Saharan caravan routes.

The Sanūsīs were in the forefront of opposition to the French advance into Chad and the central Sudan, and for some twenty years after 1911 provided the driving power behind local Libyan resistance to the Italian invaders, especially in Cyrenaica. Italy’s entry into the First World War on the Allied side in 1915 inevitably inclined the Sanūsiyya to the Turkish cause, and the head of the order, Sayyid Aḥmad, had to leave for Istanbul in 1918; thereafter, the military struggle in Cyrenaica was left largely to local Sanūsī leaders. During the Second World War, the British government recognised Muḥammad Idrīs, who had been in exile in Egypt for twenty years, not merely as a spiritual head but also as Amīr or political head of the Sanūsīs of Cyrenaica. In 1371/1951 he became ruler of the independent federated kingdom of Libya, comprising Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzān; in 1382/1963 it became a unitary state. So far, the process of the Sanūsī family’s development from being heads of a religious movement to the headship of a modern Arab state had been somewhat reminiscent of the development of the Su‘ūdī state in Arabia (see below, no. 55) out of the Wahhābiyya, but the Idrīsid monarchy of Libya was destined to have only a short life. The new state failed to develop a political system which could accommodate the aspirations of the new classes and a social one which could cope with the new stresses resulting from the unprecedented Libyan oil boom of 1955 onwards. In 1969, King Idrīs was deposed by an army coup, and Libya became a republic under Colonel Mu‘ammar Gaddafi (Qadhdhāfī).

Zambaur, 89; EI2 ‘al-Sanūsī, Muḥammad b. ‘Alī’, ‘Sanūsiyya’ (J.-C. Triaud).

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Oxford 1949, with a genealogical table at p. 20.

N. A. Ziadeh, Sanūsīyah: A Study of a Revivalist Movement in Islam, Leiden 1959.

J. Wright, Libya: A Modern History, London 1981.

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