Idris (Libya)

Idris I, King of Libya (1965)

Idrīs , full name Sidi Mohammed Idris el-Mahdi el-Senussi ( Arabic محمد إدريس السنوسي, DMG Muḥammad Idrīs as-Sanūsī ; * March 12, 1890 in Al-Baida ; † May 25, 1983 in Cairo ) was King of Libya from 1951 to 1969 . He was the grandson of Sayyid Muhammad bin 'Ali as-Senussi , the founder of the Senussi order .

Life

Early years

Idrīs was born as the son of Sayyid Muhammad al-Mahdi bin Sayyid Muhammad al-Senussi and his fifth wife Aisha bint Ahmad al-Syrte and received religious education in the Zāwiya of al-Jaghbub . While Idrīs was still young, his father died. His father's cousin Ahmad al-Sharif then took care of him.

In 1913 Idrīs traveled to Egypt with the aim of performing the Hajj , where he met the Egyptian government in Alexandria . From Alexandria he traveled by sea to Haifa and Jerusalem and then went to Medina and Mecca . After completing the pilgrimage, he traveled to Taif , where the Ottoman government had assigned him a comfortable residence where he spent some time.

From Taif Idrīs returned to Egypt, where he met Lord Kitchener , then Commander in Chief of the British Armed Forces in Egypt. Then he returned to Cyrenaica .

As head of the Sanussiya and Emir of Cyrenaica

In 1916, as the successor to his cousin Ahmad al-Sharif, Idris became head of the Sanussiya order, a Sufi , Islamic brotherhood ( Tariqa ) that had a large following in the eastern part of Libya. Politically, Idris pursued with the Senussi in the first years of his rule the driving back of the colonial powers from North Africa. The alliance between the Senussi and the Central Powers in World War I , entered into for this purpose , was unsuccessful and resulted in a military defeat. Idris changed sides and allied himself with the British against his cousin and was recognized by the British as an emir, but not supported by the British against the Italians after the end of the war. Idris made peace with the Italians and the British and was recognized in 1921 as secular ruler ( emir ) over the parts of Cyrenaica that were not occupied by Italy.

Exile in Egypt

Idrīs traveled to the Kingdom of Egypt in 1923 under the pretext of wanting to undergo medical treatment . The real reason, however, was the Italian colonial policy under Mussolini . In 1926 he demanded that the oasis al-Jaghbūb, which was of great strategic importance for the supply of the resistance movement in the area of al-Jabal al-Achdar, remain under the rule of Egypt. However, the Egyptian government under Adli Yakan Pasha and King Fu'ad I resigned and Italian troops occupied the oasis, which aroused great indignation among the Libyan emigrants in Egypt and their Egyptian sympathizers. The anti-colonial resistance of the Senussi Brotherhood was now mainly organized by Umar Mukhtar . In 1931 he married Fatima el-Sharif , with whom he had a son, who died the day after his birth.

The brotherhood's tough resistance struggle could not be broken until 1932 by the Italian colonial troops. Less than a decade later, in World War II , Idris and his brotherhood resumed the fight against the Axis powers in North Africa, but he himself only returned to Libya after the Italian defeat.

As the King of Libya

The King's Standard

King Idris in 1967 with Egypt's President Nasser

After the war, Italy lost its colonies and Idris, as the most important local ally of the victorious allies, gained significant influence. After the inhabitants of the populous Tripolitania as well as the UN had rejected the British-Italian Bevin-Sforza partition plan , which Idris had agreed as Emir of Cyrenaica, however, he became king of the independent Kingdom of Libya in 1951 . A central problem in the early years was the merging of the historically autonomous parts of the country Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fessan . The federal constitution, according to which all three regions sent the same number of members to the federal parliament, disadvantaged Tripolitania, where 80% of the population lived, compared to Idris' home region of Kyrenaica and Fessan, where only 10% lived each, but which together had more seats in the federal parliament . As early as 1952, only one year after the founding of the state, Idris I had all parties and trade unions banned. The mismanagement in public administration and a failed assassination attempt prompted him to personally take over the government. In the following years he succeeded in strengthening the central government through the dissolution of the historical great provinces of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fessan as well as an administrative unification of the parts of the country. The change from a federal to a central state was completed by the constitutional amendment of 1963. Formally, Tripolitania was given greater consideration by means of a proportional regulation, but a year earlier Idris had already finally destroyed all party work in 1962 with a show trial of the Arab Socialist Baʿth Party, which was active in the underground for national unity, the withdrawal of foreign troops and social reforms .

The income flowing after the oil was found since 1962 was invested in the expansion of the infrastructure and the education system. Since many students were sent abroad and numerous Egyptian teachers were brought into the country due to the lack of teachers, new ideas such as pan-Arabism and Nasserism came to the country. After the Six Day War in 1967, in which the King did not assist Egypt, violent pan-Arab protests broke out, which led to renewed pogroms against the Jewish minority. The few Jews who remained in the country - 10% compared to 1949 - then left the country.

1969 coup

Idris was born on September 1, 1969 during a spa stay in Turkish Bursa of Muammar Gaddafi overthrown. At first he wanted to persuade Great Britain to intervene in Libya, but refrained from doing so when Crown Prince al-Hasan Rida al-Mahdi assured the coup plotters of his loyalty. Idris first lived in Rome and from 1974 until his death in exile in Cairo . In response to Gaddafi's protest, he was granted Egyptian citizenship.

Idris I was buried in the Jannat al-Baqi cemetery in Medina , Saudi Arabia .

literature

• EAV de Candole: The life and times of King Idris of Libya . Ben Ghalbon, Manchester, 1990.
• Idris I. , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 38/1983 of September 12, 1983, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Web links

Commons : Idris  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• The Senussi Islamic Order , libyen.com
• Newspaper article about Idris in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

swell

1. ↑ Martin Gehlen: The young power in Libya. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . February 25, 2011, accessed February 28, 2011 . 
2. ↑ Cf. Muṣṭafā Ḥāmid Raḥūma: at-Taḍāmun al-ʿarabī al-islāmī maʿa l-muqāwama al-lībīya ḍidda l-ġazw al-īṭālī: 1911-1931m . Markaz Ǧihād al-Lībīyīn li-d-Dirāsāt at-Tārīḫīya, Tarābulus, 2006. (Dissertation Mohammed V University 1996), p. 217.
3. ↑ Cf. Raḥūma: at-Taḍāmun al-ʿarabī . 2006, p. 587.
4. ^ Frank Nordhausen, Thomas Schmid: The Arab Revolution: Democratic Awakening from Tunisia to the Gulf, p. 105
5. ^ Lothar Rathmann : History of the Arabs, Volume 6, Pages 174-180. Berlin 1983
6. ^ The Final Exodus of the Libyan Jews in 1967