When Italy pointed the noses of her transports Tripoliward she committed the incredible blunder of underestimating for a second time the resistance that she would encounter. She made just such a mistake some years ago in Abyssinia, and the plain of Adowa is still sprinkled with the bleaching bones of her annihilated army. The Italian agents in Tripolitania had assured their government that, as a result of Turkish oppression, corruption, and overtaxation, the Turks were heartily disliked by the Tripolitanians—all of which was perfectly true. But when they went on to say that the Tripolitanians would welcome the expulsion of the Turks and the substitution of an Italian régime, they overshot the mark. In other words, the Tripolitanians much preferred to be ill-treated by the Turks, who are their coreligionists, than to be well-treated by the Italians, who are despised unbelievers. The Italians, having had no previous experience with Moslem peoples, landed at Tripoli with every expectation of being welcomed as saviours by the native population. It is quite true that the natives gave the Italians an exceedingly warm reception—with rifles and machine guns. Here, then, were some sixty thousand Italian soldiers, who had anticipated about as much trouble in taking Tripolitania as we should in taking Hayti, instead of being permitted to play the jaunty and picturesque rôles of deliverers from oppression, being forced to battle desperately for their lives against the very people whom they had come to save and civilise. It was a graphic instance of the workings of Mohammedanism. How Kitchener and Cromer, those two grim men who have had more experience than any other Europeans in fighting and governing Mohammedans, must have smiled to themselves when they read the Italian statements that the taking of Tripolitania meant only a campaign of a fortnight.
To comprehend thoroughly the peculiar situation in which Italy finds herself, you should understand that the portly, sleepy-eyed, good-natured old gentleman who theoretically rules Turkey under the title of Mohammed V is, politically speaking, as much a dual personality as Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde. As Sultan of Turkey, or, to give him his proper title, Emperor of the Ottomans, he is the nominal ruler of some twenty-four millions of divided, discontented, and disgruntled Turkish subjects—Osmanlis, Arabs, Syrians, Armenians, Circassians, Bulgars, Greeks, Jews—and in that capacity plays no great part in ordering the affairs of the world. But Mohammed V is more than Sultan of Turkey: he is likewise Successor of the Prophet, Commander of the Faithful, and Caliph of all Islam, and as such is the spiritual and temporal leader of the two hundred and twenty millions who compose the Moslem world. Nor is there any way of disassociating the two offices. In making war on the Sultan of Turkey, therefore, Italy automatically made war on the chief of all Mohammedans, thus shaking her fist in the face not alone of a nation but of a religion—and the most militant and fanatical of all religions at that. There is not a wearer of turban or tarboosh between the Gold Coast and the China coast, be he Hausa, Tuareg, Berber, Moor, Algerian, Tunisian, Tripolitanian, Egyptian, Sudanese, Somali, Arab, Kurd, Turk, Circassian, Persian, Turkoman, Afghan, Sikh, Indian, Malay, or Moro, who does not regard Italy's aggression in Tripolitania as an affront to himself and to his faith.
Among all Moslems there is growing an ominous unrest, a fierce consciousness that the lands which they have for centuries regarded as their own are gradually slipping from them, and a decision that they must fight or disappear. On the Barbary coast, the Nile, the Congo, the Niger, and the Zambezi they see the turbans and the tarbooshes retreating before the white helmets' implacable advance, and now they see even the Ottoman throne, to them a great throne, shaking under the pressure. Hence there is not a Moslem in the world to-day who will remain indifferent to any action which hints at the dismemberment of Turkey, for he knows full well that the fate of the Ottoman Empire and the political fortunes of Islam are inextricably interwoven.
That Italy can hold the Tripolitanian coast towns as long as her ammunition, her patience, and her public purse hold out, no one acquainted with the conditions of modern warfare will attempt to deny. Unless, however, the militant section of Islam, of which this region is the very focus, can be induced to acquiesce in an Italian occupation, the life of an Italian soldier who ventures out of range of his war-ships' guns will not be worth an hour's purchase. Hordes of fanatical, desert-bred Arabs, inured to hardship, deadly sun, scanty food, and dearth of water, mounted on swift camels and as familiar with the trackless desert as the woodsman is with the forest in which he works, ablaze with a religion which assures them that the one sure way to paradise is to die in battle with the unbelievers, can harass the Italian army of occupation for years to come by a guerilla warfare. Even though Turkey agrees to surrender Tripolitania and to withdraw her garrisons from that province, Italy will still have far from smooth sailing, for the simple reason that she is not fighting Turks alone, but Moslems, and, as a result of her ill-advised slaughter of the Arabs, she has made the Moslem population of Tripolitania permanently hostile. Most significant of all, the Arab resistance to an Italian advance into the interior of the country will be directed, controlled, and financed by that sinister and mysterious power known as the Brotherhood of the Senussiyeh.
To American ears the word “Senussiyeh” doubtless conveys but little meaning, but to the French administrateurs in Algeria and Tunisia, and to the officers of the Military Intelligence Department in Egypt and the Sudan, it is a word of ominous import. Though the Brotherhood of the Senussiyeh is, without much doubt, the most powerful organisation of its kind in the world, so complete is the veil of secrecy behind which it works that comparatively little is definitely known as to its designs, ramifications, and resources. Briefly, it is a secret Moslem society, organised about a century ago by an Algerian dervish, Mohammed ben Ali ben Es Senussi, from whom it takes its name; its object is the restoration of the Mohammedan religion to its original purity, austerity, and political power, the first step toward which is the expulsion of the Christian from Moslem lands; its initiated members, scattered throughout the Mohammedan world, have been variously estimated at from five to fifteen millions; the present grand master of the order, Senussi Ahmed-el-Sherif, the third of the succession, is admittedly a man of exceptional intelligence, resource, and sagacity; his monastic court at Jof, in the oasis of Kufra, five hundred miles, as the camel goes, south of Benghazi and about the same distance from the Nile, is the capital of a power whose boundaries are the boundaries of Islam.
It is no secret that the growing power of the Senussiyeh is causing considerable concern to the military and political officials of those European nations that have possessions in North Africa, for, in addition to the three-hundred-odd zawias, or monasteries, scattered along the African littoral from Egypt to Morocco, the long arm of the order reaches down to the mysterious oases which dot the Great Sahara, it embraces the strange tribes of the Tibesti highlands, it controls the robber Tuaregs and the warlike natives who occupy the regions adjacent to Lake Tchad, and is, as the French and British have discovered, a power to be reckoned with in the protected states of Kanem, Sokoto, Bagirmi, Bornu, and Wadai.
The organisation of the order is both strong and simple. The khuan, or brothers, whose names are carefully recorded in the books of the mother lodge at Jof, owe unquestioning obedience to the mokaddem, or prefect, in charge of the district to which they belong. Each mokaddem has under his orders a corps of secret agents, known as wekils, whose duty is to keep him constantly in touch with all that is going on in his district and to communicate his instructions to the brothers. On Grand Bairam—the Mohammedan Easter—the mokaddems meet in conclave at Jof, on which occasion the spiritual and political condition of the order is discussed and its course of action decided on for the ensuing year. Above the mokaddems, and acting as an intermediary between them and the veiled and sacred person of the Senussi himself, is a cabinet of viziers, who, by means of a remarkable system of camel couriers, are enabled to keep constantly in touch with all the districts of the order.
At Jof, from which no European investigator has ever returned, are centred all the threads of this vast organism. There is kept the war-chest of the order, constantly increased by large and small contributions from true believers all over the world, for every member of the Senussiyeh who has a total income of more than twenty dollars a year must contribute two and one half per cent of it to the order annually; there the Senussi has established depots of stores and war material and factories for the manufacture, or rather the assembling, of modern fire-arms; thither come to him from the obscure harbours of the Tripolitanian coast cargoes of arms and ammunition; thither flock pilgrims from North and West Africa, from the Niger and from the Nile, to receive his orders and to seek his blessing; there is centred one of the most remarkable secret-service systems in the world, its agents not alone in every corner of the Mohammedan world, but likewise keeping their fingers ever on the political pulse of Europe.
A place better fitted for its purpose than Jof it would be hard to imagine. Here, surrounded by inhospitable desert, with wells a long day's camel-ride apart, and the route known only to experienced and loyal guides, the Senussi has been free to educate, drill, and arm his disciples, to accumulate great stores of arms and ammunition, and to push forward his propaganda of a regenerated and reinvigorated Islam, without any possibility of interference from the Christian nations. There seems to be but little doubt that factories have been erected at Jof for the assembling of weapons of precision, the materials for which have been systematically smuggled across the Mediterranean from Greece and Turkey for years past. Strange as it may sound, these factories are under the direction of skilled engineers and mechanics, for so well laid are the plans of the order that it annually sends a number of Moslem youths to be educated in the best technical schools of Europe. Upon completing their courses of instruction they return to Jof, or other centres of Senussiyeh activity, to place their trained services at the disposal of the order, others being sent Europeward to be educated in their turn. The Senussiyeh's military affairs are equally well organised, the Arabs, than whom there is admittedly no finer fighting material in the world, being instructed along European lines, modified for desert warfare, by veteran drill-masters who have learned their trade in the native armies of England and France. The nucleus of this mobile and highly effective force is, so I am told by French officials in Africa, an admirably mounted and equipped camel corps of five thousand men which the Senussi keeps always on a war footing in the Kufra oases. These facts in themselves prove definitely that it would be no sporadic resistance, but a vast, organised movement, armed with improved weapons, trained by men who learned their business under European drill-masters, and directed by a high intelligence, with which Italy would have to reckon should she attempt the hazardous experiment of an advance in the real hinterland of Tripolitania.
Let me make it perfectly clear that the grand master of the Senussiyeh is a man of altogether exceptional ability. Under his direction the order has advanced with amazing strides, for he is a remarkable organiser and administrator, two qualities rarely found among the Arabs. The destruction of the Mahdi and of the Khalifa, and the more recent dethronement of Abdul-Hamid, resulted in bringing a large accession of force to his standard by the extinction of all religious authority in Africa except his own. Though the Sultan of Turkey is, as I have said, the titular head of the Moslem religion, and is venerated as such wherever praying-rugs are spread, the chief of this militant order is undoubtedly regarded by the average Mohammedan as the most actively powerful figure, if not as the saviour, of Islam. The first Senussi was powerful enough to excommunicate the Sultan Abdul-Medjid from the order because of his intimacy with the European powers; the father of the present Khedive of Egypt was accustomed to address the second Senussi in such terms as a disciple would use to a prophet, while Abbas Hilmi II, the reigning Khedive, a few years ago journeyed across the Libyan desert to pay his respects to the present head of the order.