Umar al-Mukhtar and the Senussi Resistance

From 1923 the resistance of the people of Cyrenaica, the eastern region of what is now Libya, to the Italian colonial conquest was led by Umar al-Mukhtar (rahimahu Allah), an elderly Qur'an teacher and a shaykh of the Sanusiyya, the Sufi order whose network of lodges, the zawiyas, had long bound together the religious, educational and social life of the region. Operating from the Jabal Akhdar, the green coastal mountains, with small, fast bands of mounted fighters who knew every wadi and cave, he waged a guerrilla war that for years tied down and repeatedly bloodied a far larger and better-armed Italian army. The Italian response, especially after 1929, was of extreme brutality: they sealed the Egyptian frontier with wire, used aircraft and poison gas, executed prisoners, and herded the civilian population of the region into concentration camps in which tens of thousands died of hunger and disease. In September 1931, in his seventies, Umar al-Mukhtar was captured and publicly hanged before his people, and the organised resistance was crushed soon after. He became, and remains, a byword across the Muslim world for patient, principled steadfastness against colonial conquest, the teacher who took up arms and would not submit. This scene depicts the resistance around 1925 at its base, a Sanusi stone lodge in a wadi of the Jabal Akhdar with the fighters' horses and rifles and the books of the order, between the desert and the sea.