Between 2011 and roughly 2016, dozens of Sufi shrines, tombs, mosques and libraries in Libya were bulldozed, dynamited or burned by Salafi armed groups, in a campaign against the veneration of saints that the fragmented Libyan state was unable or unwilling to stop.
The doctrinal argument behind it is old and specific. Building over a grave, praying at a tomb and seeking the intercession of a dead saint are held by a strict reading to constitute shirk, the association of others with God, and the demolition of such structures is presented as a religious duty. The same reasoning has produced demolitions in other countries. What made Libya distinctive was the absence of any authority capable of preventing it in daylight, in cities, with heavy machinery.
The losses include the zawiya and tomb of Abd al Salam al Asmar at Zliten, one of the principal Sufi centres of North Africa, whose attached library of manuscripts was burned; the shrine within the al Shaab mosque in central Tripoli, removed over two days while security forces stood by; the Sidi Ahmed Zarruq complex in Misrata; and the Karamanli mosque's associated graves. UNESCO condemned the destruction repeatedly.
The manuscript losses may be the least recoverable part. Libyan zawaya held working collections of Maliki law, Sufi texts, local histories and endowment records, uncatalogued in many cases, and a burned library leaves no inventory of what it contained.
Sufi practice in Libya has not ended. Some shrines have been rebuilt and the orders continue, but the campaign changed what can be done publicly, and the destruction of a saint's tomb is designed to be irreversible in exactly that way.