Eileen Ryan
“Imperial Identity and Religious Resistance: Italian Encounters with the Sanusiyya”
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Abstract
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When the Italians invaded Libya in 1911, they encountered resistance under the leadership of the Sanusiya, a Sufi order that fulfilled a variety of roles in Cyrenaica as a religious, economic, and political organization. As they struggled to assert their control over the region in the 1910s and 1920s, Italian perceptions of the Sanusiya shifted in ways that often complemented their political and military objectives while it shaped their identity as an imperial power in an Islamic society. As part of a larger network of European colonial knowledge, the Italians inherited a body of literature that tried to define the Sanusi organization and the threat it posed to European colonial rule. Italian administrators and ethnographers rejected earlier French characterizations of the Sufi order as a group of religious fanatics, emphasizing instead their economic interests as a means of using them as intermediaries. Conversely, the Sanusiya also adopted certain roles in response to Italian policies. Regional concerns and relations with the Ottomans and other European powers also played a vital role in the Sanusiya’s organizational development just as intra-European rivalries, a network of colonial knowledge, and domestic politics influenced Italian colonial policies. My project examines the process of negotiation by which both Italy’s identity as an imperial power and the Sanusiya’s identity as a form of Islamic resistance developed in a regional and international context.
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