Oasis saints of Eastern Libya in North African context

Abstract

The saints of Augila Oasis2 in the east Libyan Sahara Desert play a significant part in this community where a harsh physical environment and the tenacious faith of Islam are dominant themes. Augila's saints are in some ways unlike the most well-known holy men of North Africa, whose sanctity is usually pre-ordained by membership in a holy lineage or through a teacher-disciple relationship (Gellner 1968). Rather, the Oasis holy men, who neither belong to a formal religious lineage or fraternity nor receive special training in the formal religion, are ordinary men who are only sanctified on the termination of their earthly existence.3 One major, ostensible reason for the boost to sainthood of the religiously untutored man4 is his enactment of a miracle judged by his kinsmen particularly and the community generally to be divinely inspired. Such godly-inspired acts are usually considered to be wholly altruistic and therefore tied to the welfare of the community. Another reason for sainthood is the need for the Oasis inhabitants to rally around a set of moral and ethical precepts which periodically reaffirm their beliefs in God, in individual immortality and in their traditional lifeway which has been linked in almost spartan fashion to a harsh habitat of limited resources. This paper describes and defines saints and places them in North African context, with the purpose first of demonstrating their continuity and discontinuity with North African saints generally and secondly of describing the conditions under which the local saints have arisen and are perpetuated. In the first section of the paper there is a presentation of some of the saints I encountered in my fieldwork. Then, a comparison of Oasis holy men with a small sample of North African saints is made.5 The basic distinctions between them are dealt with analytically. In order to highlight the differences, saints from the Oasis are compared with the mountain holy men of Morocco and a Cairo saint. Finally, the rather significant variability among these three types of saints, particularly in the kind and degree of their politicization, is explained by variable ecological, socio-economic, and political forces at work on the societies of their origin.