The Order Whose Leader Became a King

Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi built his order from 1837 around a reformist programme that set it apart from most other nineteenth century Sufi movements, urging a strict return to Quran and Sunna and rejecting the ecstatic practices associated with orders such as the Rifaiyya, while still organising his followers along recognisably Sufi lines of initiation and lodge based community, chiefly across Cyrenaica in what is now eastern Libya.

The Sanusiyya became far more than a religious order in the following century, providing the organisational backbone for sustained armed resistance against Italian colonisation from 1911 into the 1930s, a struggle whose most celebrated leader, Omar Mukhtar, drew directly on Sanusi networks and loyalty in fighting a campaign that lasted two decades before Italian forces suppressed it. The order's standing culminated in an outcome almost unique among Sufi movements: its head, Idris al-Sanusi, became King Idris I of Libya when the country gained independence in 1951, turning a nineteenth century reformist Sufi order into the direct source of a twentieth century national monarchy, a transformation from religious brotherhood to ruling dynasty that no other order on this list underwent.