The Sanusiyya is a revivalist Sufi order of the nineteenth century whose distinctive feature is that it grew into the organising framework of a country.
Devotion joined to reform
The order was founded near Mecca in 1837 by the Algerian-born scholar Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi, who sought to unite Sufi devotion with a strict adherence to scripture and law, reforming what he saw as the laxity and superstition of much popular Sufism. The Sanusiyya established a network of fortified lodges, the zawiyas, across the Sahara and the interior of Libya, which served at once as centres of teaching and prayer, as trading posts, and as points of order in a stateless region, so the order took on a governing and economic role alongside its religious one.
From order to monarchy
Because its lodges provided the only effective organisation across much of Libya and the desert, the Sanusiyya became the framework of resistance to Italian colonial conquest in the early twentieth century, and its leaders emerged as national figures. After the Second World War the head of the order, Idris al-Sanusi, became king of the independent state of Libya, so that a Sufi reform order supplied the monarchy of a modern country, an outcome unique among the orders. The monarchy was overthrown in 1969 and the order suppressed under the regime that followed, but the Sanusiyya remains the clearest case of a Sufi order that became the political spine of a nation.