Encyclopedia of Islam

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Libya (Official name: Great Socialist
People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya [Peoples’
Republic])
Libya is a North African country with an area of
nearly 1.8 million square miles, comparable in
size to the state of Alaska. It is bounded by the
Mediterranean Sea to the north; egypt to the east;
Niger, Chad, and sUdan to the south; and tUnisia
and algeria to the west. Most of the population
(about 6 million, 2008 estimate) lives in a narrow
belt near the coastline. About 97 percent are Ber-
bers and Arabs, the rest being Europeans, Turks,
and South Asians. Libyans, with the exception of
a small number of Ibadi Muslims, are Sunnis (97
percent) who follow the maliki legal school
like other North African Muslims. The northeast-
ern part of the country is known as Cyrenaica,
after the ancient Greek city of Cyrene. In Late
Antiquity this region had a Jewish and Christian
population. In 1948 there were about 38,000 Jews
left in the country, almost all of whom have since
migrated to israel. The modern capital is Tripoli,
a city on the Mediterranean littoral.
Once part of the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine
empires, the coastal region of Libya was incor-
porated into the Islamicate empire by Muslim
armies that came from Egypt and Arabia during
the reign of the third caliph, Uthman ibn aFFan
(r. 644–656). It obtained provincial status in vari-
ous empires during the ensuing centuries, while
the expanses of the Sahara and its oases were in
the hands of arab and berber tribes and tribal
confederacies. Libyan ports served as havens for
pirates who raided Mediterranean shipping when
governmental control was weak. Tripoli became
part of the Ottoman Empire in 1551 and remained
under intermittent Ottoman control until the Ital-
ian invasion of 1911.
The Italians emulated France and other Euro-
pean powers by creating a colonial base in North
Africa. They wanted Libya to be their Fourth
Shore, part of a modern Roman Empire. Their
ability to control land beyond the coast, how-
ever, met with strong resistance from tribal con-


federations led by the Sanusi Sufi Order. This
order had been founded in Mecca in 1837 by an
Algerian shaykh, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi
(1787–1859), who claimed descent from the
prophet mUhammad through his daughter Fatima.
Because the order followed a simple form of
sUFism that lacked ecstatic rituals and promoted a
strong work ethic, it won a wide following among
bedoUins and Berbers. Centered in Cyrenaica,
the order established a network of lodges for
religious, educational, and social gatherings that
stretched across the oases of the Sahara and into
some of the northern cities. Although the Sanusi
Sufis preferred to live a life of piety and study, they
called for a jihad against foreign invaders, fighting
the French in Chad, then the Italians in Libya.
The French were able to defeat them, and later the
Italians, but only after a guerrilla war that lasted
for nearly 22 years. While the Sanusi leadership
resided in exile in Egypt, the anticolonial war was
fought by Bedouin led by tribal leaders such as
Umar al-Mukhtar (1862–1931), a village Quran
teacher. The Libyan resistance was quelled only
when Italian forces, with the approval of Italian
dictator Benito Mussolini, isolated the guerril-
las in the mountains and blocked their access to
civilian supporters. The conflict was a costly one
for the Libyans—100,000 were placed in concen-
tration camps and thousands died or were killed.
In 1934 the Italians officially named their prize
colony “Libya” after an ancient Greek name for
the region of North Africa (based on the ancient
Egyptian word LBW or RBW). During the 1930s
the number of Italian colonials exceeded 100,000.
Their control of Libya ended, however, in World
War II as a result of Allied military victories in
North Africa.
Britain, France, the United States, and the
Soviet Union each had different ideas about what
to do with Libya after World War II. In 1951,
however, the United Nations General Assembly
approved a resolution to grant Libya its indepen-
dence as a kingdom under the rule of the Grand
Sanusi, Sayyid Muhammad Idris (d. 1983). The

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