ABSTRACT
Purvis, the unlucky Coast Guard officer who sent the panicked message above, was on duty when fighters from the Sanussiyya Sufi order crossed the Egyptian border in the Western Desert on 20 November 1915. He was an inadvertent witness to the opening of a new front in what scholars have now recognised was a truly global conflict.2 This new enemy that threatened the British protectorate in Egypt was one of the most influential Sufi orders in North Africa during this period. After its founder, Muhammad alSenussi, returned from Mecca in 1838, preaching a reformist version of Islam, the order
spread rapidly across the Sahara. French encroachment upon the Sanussiyya’s area of influence from the later 19th century caused the order to react to this development militarily, couched in traditional religious terms of the ‘lesser’ jihad. When the Italians invaded Libya in 1911, the order also undertook defensive activism against this brutal assault. Given this record of militancy, the British in Egypt were concerned to maintain cordial relations with the Sanussiyya once fighting in Europe began in August 1914. This policy had wider strategic applications; it was designed to secure Egypt’s western frontier to allow Britain fully to concentrate its resources on defending the Suez Canal, a vital artery for the British Empire, against Ottoman attack. In November 1915, when the Sanussiyya opened their offensive, this policy was in tatters.3 This, then, was the moment when the military threat posed by jihad as a result of war with the Ottoman Empire was first confronted by the British Empire. After the Sanussiyya moved across the Egyptian frontier and captured the coastal
town of Sollum in November 1915, the British responded in force. Their campaign deployed 35,000 troops from across the British Empire against 5,000 Sanussiyya and allied Bedouin fighters. In a series of engagements in the Western Desert, the order was repeatedly defeated throughout 1916. Consequently, the majority of fighters withdrew back across the border. This left the British free to reinforce further their troops, who ejected the remaining Sanussiyya from the oasis towns in the Western Desert of Egypt, an operation that was completed by March 1917.4 In military terms, both the Sanussiyya and Britain viewed this front as a sideshow.5 The Sanussiyya were far more concerned with prosecuting their defensive jihad against Italian and French imperial expansion in North Africa. For the British, their global military priorities were first the war against Germany on the Western Front, defending the Empire as a whole from internal and external security threats, and then, in the Eastern Mediterranean theatre, the Dardanelles campaign and defending the Suez Canal against the Ottomans. The Sanussiyya jihad against British Egypt has been cited in broader studies of the
order, Libyan history, and the relationship between Islam and European imperialism.6
Specific studies of the attack are, on the whole, military histories.7 This article considers the events in the Western Desert during 1915-17 from a fresh perspective, in order to supplement existing analyses by military historians, by examining British understandings about the Sanussiyya jihad that soldiers and officials fashioned as the conflict progressed. In doing so, the article seeks to demonstrate how incorporating aspects of imperial and Islamic history, especially through a focus on British perceptions of the Sanussiyya which have remained understudied, can contribute new insights into future studies of the war in the Middle East that move beyond the concerns of older military histories. Some Britons involved in this desert conflict believed that the Sanussiyya fighters
were motivated primarily by economic factors-the famine that resulted from the Anglo-Italian blockade of the Western Desert from November 1915 was seen as pushing many towards fighting in a desperate bid for survival. Simultaneously, British accounts believed that the order lacked support among the local population who lived under Sanussiyya occupation because of their economic policy of requisitioning, itself a response to the blockade. Others believed that Ottoman and German intrigues, framed by the Ottoman call to jihad in November 1914, and resultant pressure from the Ottomans on the Sanussiyya to implement this call, were chiefly responsible for the attack. This viewpoint gave little agency to the order itself. It is generally agreed that the
decision to attack Egypt by Ahmed al-Senussi, the order’s leader, was heavily influenced by efforts directed from Istanbul and Berlin, but this was only part of the picture.8 Finally, there were diverse British views around the broader threat of the Sanussiyya to British rule in Egypt and the wider war effort. These oscillated between those who thought that the order’s influence in the Egyptian Western Desert and oasis towns could pose a huge threat, and those who saw the order as weak, forming only a minor and temporary danger. What British observers and participants did not discern, however, were the deeper factors motivating the order’s jihad. Ahmed al-Senussi accepted the religious obligations of the 1914 Ottoman jihad proclamation within a specific context.9 This acceptance was connected to the nature of the Sanussiyya as an organised reformist Sufi order that formed part of a wider contemporary phenomenon of Islamic revival, reform and activism, one aspect of which was a struggle for survival and resistance to European encroachment on the Muslim world. It was these impulses that collided with the radically changed political and strategic landscape created in November 1914, when the conflict spread to the Middle East.
