Muhammad ibn Ali as-Senussi

Who was Muhammad ibn Ali as-Senussi?

Sayyid Muhammad ibn Ali as-Senussi was the founder of the Senussi order. The order was founded in 1837.

Al-Senussi was born in al-Wasita near Mostaganem, Algeria, and was named al-Senussi after a venerated Muslim teacher. He was a member of the Walad Sidi Abdalla tribe, and was a sharif tracing his descent from Fatimah, the daughter of Mohammed. He took his last name from one of his teachers, who hailed from the Beni Snous Berbers of the Tlemcen region. He studied at a madrassa in Fez, then traveled in the Sahara preaching a purifying reform of the faith in Tunisia and Tripoli, gaining many adherents, and thence moved to Cairo to study at Al-Azhar University. Unable to cross Algeria because of the French occupation, the beginning, the centre of Imam Mohammed Ali El Senussi’s call was Jebel Akhdar and he built a mosque in Bayda of Cyrenaica and named it after himself, then he moved to Jaghbub in Cyrenaica from where the mosques spread to the remaining cities of Barqa and Tripoli. He built a great mosque and a university which came to rival Al-Azhar, but which was shut down on the orders of Muammar al-Gaddafi in 1984; at the same time, the graves and remains of the Senussi family were desecrated. After the death of Muhammad as-Sanussi his son Sayyid Muhammad al-Mahdi bin Sayyid Muhammad as-Senussi became the new leader of the Senussi order, and moved it south from Jaghbub to Kufra. His grandson through Muhammad became King Idris, the only King of Libya.