xiv INTRODUCTION 



The first Senusi teacher was born at or near Mastagh- 

 anem on the coast of western Algeria towards the close 

 of the eighteenth century. He was styled — for short, as 

 he had a wearisome array of names — Muhammad bin All 

 bin as-Sanusi. [Because there is no e in the Arabic lan- 

 guage you will find a world-wide conspiracy to use that 

 vowel in the transliteration of Arab names. There is like- 

 wise no 0, so that o is thrust into or before Arab names 

 of persons, countries, and mountains in their European 

 rendering with an unaccountable vehemence of con- 

 trariety]. 



Like so many Arabs and Berbers in the history of 

 North Africa he was a religious enthusiast, and like all 

 such in every faith he was willing to die or to doom to 

 death in defence of his unprovable religious dogmas. He 

 resorted to Fez for his theological studies and worked at 

 the so-called university in that Moroccan city till he was 

 past his thirtieth year. He then felt inspired to preach 

 reform in Islam, and to that end set his face westward, 

 expounding his tenets first in Algeria (about to be dis- 

 tracted by the French entry) , then in southern Tunis and 

 Tripoli. At last he reached Egypt and enrolled himself 

 as a student at the great Muhammadan university of Al 

 Azhar in Cairo. But his tenets, when he expounded them, 

 were pronounced to be heretical, so he journeyed on to 

 Mecca, seeking further instruction. 

 ^^'^ At this religious capital of Islam he met among other 

 \ pilgrims and enquirers a remarkable personality, Mu- 

 \hammad ash-Sharif, a Negro prince from Wadai who in 

 \l838 became supreme monarch or Sultan of that remark- 

 jable country in the heart of Africa, j A great friendship 

 grew up between the white-skinned' Berber (for though 

 claiming to belong to an Arab tribe, the first of the Senusi 

 leaders was obviously of Berber stock) and the black 

 skinned Wadai prince, which affected for seventy years 



