Reviewed by: Religion as Resistance: Negotiating authority in Italian Libya by Eileen Ryan Patrick Bernhard Religion as Resistance: Negotiating authority in Italian Libya By Eileen Ryan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Eileen Ryan has written a clever book on the Italian presence in Libya. What is new is that the analytical prism of the work is religion and the broader political significance it had for imperialism all'Italiana; in previous scholarship, Islam on the one hand and Catholicism on the other played a rather subordinate role; the focus was on more traditional questions of securing military and political dominance. As Ryan shows, the linkage of religion and politics in the Libyan case makes particular sense because when Italy conquered the country in 1911, it was dominated by a religious order, the Sanusi or Sanusiyya, which ultimately functioned as a state. The military and education, for instance, were in the hands of this Sufi religious movement. Against this background, it is not surprising that in Italy Libya was seen primarily through the prism of religion. Ryan focuses on the perception of Islam and how this influenced larger processes in Italy such as nation building. In that sense, her book should be understood as a contribution to the new intellectual history. On the one hand, she argues that the interpretation of Islam was strongly dependent on the behavior of the Arabs living there. Thus, the perception was very situational and contingent and also not exclusively predetermined by a longer intellectual engagement with the "Orient," which of course can also be observed in Italy. Thus, Rome initially believed that the Sanusi were a suitable intermediary force for gaining complete control of the country. Accordingly, strong parallels were drawn between an Islamic Libya and an equally religiously determined Catholic Italy. However, the hopes initially placed in the Sanusi for collaboration soon gave way to bitter disappointment and mistrust, finally culminating in downright hostility. Religion was increasingly equated with resistance, as the title of the book says. It is also this reading that would eventually legitimize the genocidal actions taken against the Indigenous population. Between 1922 and 1931, the fascist regime deported thousands to concentration camps in the desert. In total, up to 100,000 people may have died by the time the region was "pacified." On the other hand, Ryan examines the extent to which religion and imperialism intertwined in the Italian mainland. She asks, for example, how the changing ideas of Islam shaped the identity of a nation that had only existed for 50 years by then. But the topic could also be used in very concrete ways. For the Catholic Church, imperialism opened the possibility of gaining influence over a state with which it had been at cross-purposes until the Lateran Treaty of 1929. Conversely, the ruling liberal elite recognized the benefit that Catholic support offered to the national project of imperialism, as Ryan convincingly demonstrates. However, the book also has some weaknesses. First, Ryan touches only briefly on the period between the late 1930s and 1943, when Italy effectively lost its colony. This is a pity, since during World War II we see once again a major armed liberation movement in Libya, partly directed by Sanusi in exile in Egypt. To all appearances, this cemented previously ingrained narratives such as that of Arab betrayal. This means that this period ultimately also determined the way Italians looked at Libya and its people after 1945. Second, it is regrettable that Ryan did not pay much attention to the third major religion that played a role in Libya: Judaism. After all, 30,000 Jewish people lived in the country at the time. Researchers such as Ethan B. Katz have argued for the Algerian case that since the late nineteenth century, anti-Semitism developed in a complex interplay with Islamophobia. One wonders if the same occurred in Libya as well. After all, the fascist regime became ever more anti-Semitic over the course of the 1930s, culminating during the Second World War in the persecution of Jews who were also accused of having resisted and made common cause with the British colonial power. Thus it would have been better to analyze the phenomenon...
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May 8, 2023
Paolo Cavana 
Open Access
