Idrīs’ Libya and the Role of Islam: International Confrontation and Social Transformation

The formation of the Libyan state had an atypical chronology and history. It was not until the 1940s that the construction of the state and the formation of the Libyan nation took place, during the death throes of Italian colonial rule. The arrival of Idrīs on the throne was a compromise: although on the one hand it was the return to a pre-colonial and pre-modern political leadership, on the other this leadership lay within a modern institutional framework, derived from European constitutionalism. In the process of renewal of the tradition linked to the figure of Idrīs, the leader of the al-Sanūsiyyah, the Islam has been inestimably important. At the point of independence, the task was to transform Libya from an artifice of colonialism into a shared political and cultural reality; it was Islam, much more than Arabism, that was identified as the lowest common denominator. The twenty years of rule by Idrīs, from his appointment as Amīr of an autonomous Cyrenaica on 1 July 1949 to the revolution of 1 September 1969, can be summarized as a continual attempt at the opening-up and controlled reform of a strongly conservative political system, which, in view of a rapidly changing society, sought to move from a fragmented political perspective to a truly national one, without any conclusive success. Internal instability became increasingly related to external interference, not just by former colonial countries or the superpowers but also by other Arab countries such as Egypt, who were the purveyors of a project of militant nationalism: Libya became a zone of political and ideological conflict between the West and the Third World.