Religion as Resistance: Negotiating authority in Italian Libya by Eileen Ryan (review)

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.