Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The rebellious groups that Badoglio was pointing at were the members of the Sanusiya order of Sufis in Cyrenaica.[96] The problem was how to grab land from the Islamic order to settle Italian peasants. While in the western parts of the colony—Tripolitania—Italians had been able to take directly the lands under control of the previous Ottoman administration, in the east—Cyrenaica—the Sanusi pious endowments—the waqf—made up the largest portion of fertile lands. The Sanusiya order had attached its own history and authority to the landscape, with “shared spaces (from madrassas to date groves) marked by the enactment of rituals, the names of saints, and the complex customs that regulated mixed waqf property.”[97] This meant that any transfer of lands would also imply a break from Sanusiya religious practices and social order. Before the fascists came to power, Italians recognized the limits of their ability to control the territory and respected the spiritual nature of the waqf, with the colonial administration thus sharing actual sovereignty over the Bedouin population with the Sanusiya. But with the fascist regime and its grandiose settlement visions came also the need for a takeover of Sanusiya assets. Badoglio, when assuming the control of colonial government in 1929, set the tone:

Inhabitants of Cyrenaica listen, listen! If I am forced to wage war I will do it systematically and by powerful means, and it will be remembered. No rebel will have truce, neither him, nor his family, nor his animals, nor his descendants. I will destroy everything, men and things.[98]

And so he did. By 1932 all members of the Sanusi family were either dead, captives, or in exile, and the Bedouin population that supported them had been reduced almost by half, their entire stock destroyed. As in South West Africa, the emphasis was put on destroying nomadic life built around animals to be replaced by brave white settlers. The best lands of Cirenayca—70,000 hectares of waqf— were confiscated by colonial administration and delivered to the Ente di Colonizazzione della Cirenaica, a settlement agency created in 1932.[99] That didn’t deter Italians from claiming a special relation to Islam while asserting their respect for local costumes. Not only did the Duce, during his visit to Libya in 1937, invoke the “sword of Islam,” promising to be the protector of the religion; settlement plans also included villages for indigenous peoples in which the building of mosques proved Italian good intentions. But what at first sight may contribute to the image of Italy as a benign colonial power should be seen as a movement to limit religious practices to confined spaces, eliminating the spiritual dimensions that local populations attached to the Cyrenaican landscape.[100] Structures built as a mimesis of indigenous practices actually denied these by developing a domesticized version of Islam serving colonial relations. Perhaps the first denouncer of such reality was no other than the famous anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who was mobilized during World War II by the British Army to spur Sanusi resistance against Italians. Certainly not a neutral observer, Evans-Pritchard detailed how the Italian presence had been responsible for what later authors would call a genocide among the Sanusi, which added to the large-scale killings a total disruption of local life and related religious costumes through land seizure.