Libya

The organising institution of modern Libyan religious history is a Sufi order that became a state. The Sanusiyya was founded in the 1830s by Muhammad ibn Ali al Sanusi, and it did something unusual for a tariqa: it built a network of zawaya, lodges combining a mosque, a school, a hostel and a farm, sited on the caravan routes of the Saharan interior, and used them to mediate between tribes, teach, arbitrate disputes and trade. The order effectively administered a large part of the interior where no government reached.

That network became the framework of resistance to the Italian occupation from 1911, led in Cyrenaica by Omar al Mukhtar, a Sanusi teacher, who fought for two decades and was hanged in 1931. When Libya became independent in 1951 the head of the order became King Idris I, and the country was governed by a Sufi dynasty until 1969.

Muammar Gaddafi then curtailed the order, confiscated its endowments and closed its institutions, and advanced a religious position of his own. He rejected much of the hadith corpus in favour of the Quran alone as a legal source, an unusual stance for a head of state, and reset the calendar to date from the Prophet's death rather than from the hijra, which put Libya on a different year from the rest of the Muslim world.

The population is almost entirely Sunni and Maliki. There is a small Ibadi Berber minority in the Nafusa mountains and at Zuwara, sharing that tradition with the Algerian Mzab and with Oman, and a Jewish community, once substantial in Tripoli, that has gone entirely.

Between 2011 and roughly 2016, dozens of Sufi shrines, tombs, mosques and libraries in Libya were bulldozed, dynamited or burned by Salafi armed groups, in a campaign against the veneration of saints that the fragmented Libyan state was unable or unwilling to stop.

The doctrinal argument behind it is old and specific. Building over a grave, praying at a tomb and seeking the intercession of a dead saint are held by a strict reading to constitute shirk, the association of others with God, and the demolition of such structures is presented as a religious duty. The same reasoning has produced demolitions in other countries. What made Libya distinctive was the absence of any authority capable of preventing it in daylight, in cities, with heavy machinery.

The losses include the zawiya and tomb of Abd al Salam al Asmar at Zliten, one of the principal Sufi centres of North Africa, whose attached library of manuscripts was burned; the shrine within the al Shaab mosque in central Tripoli, removed over two days while security forces stood by; the Sidi Ahmed Zarruq complex in Misrata; and the Karamanli mosque's associated graves. UNESCO condemned the destruction repeatedly.

The manuscript losses may be the least recoverable part. Libyan zawaya held working collections of Maliki law, Sufi texts, local histories and endowment records, uncatalogued in many cases, and a burned library leaves no inventory of what it contained.

Sufi practice in Libya has not ended. Some shrines have been rebuilt and the orders continue, but the campaign changed what can be done publicly, and the destruction of a saint's tomb is designed to be irreversible in exactly that way.