Libya

Libya is the fourth largest country in Africa and the 17th largest in the world. Its area is 694,983 square miles (1 mile = 1.609344 kilometers), all but 10% of which is desert.

[Page 711]An overwhelming number of Libyans are Sunnī Muslims. Overall, 97% are Muslims of one type or the other. Other religions are represented, including Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism. Christians are present from many other countries, although the majority of are Coptic Christians from Egypt (about 60,000 people). About 40,000 Roman Catholics bring with them a European background. There is a small population of Buddhists in Libya. There are about 38,000 Jews left, a number greatly reduced from the pre-1945 numbers. From 1945 until 1948, there was a concentrated attempt to kill the Jews or drive them out. Thus, what was once a large, perhaps the largest, population of Jews in North Africa was greatly reduced.

Islam came to Libya in the seventh century and was firmly established in urban centers in the next century. It took another few hundred years for it to become established in the rural areas, largely through the efforts of Arab and Syrian Bedouins. There is no official policy of religious freedom, but the dictatorship generally does not harass people because of their religious beliefs. It is not tolerant, however, of any religious movement it deems to be a political threat, which means radical or fundamental Islam.

In 644, Uqba ibn Nafi conquered the territory that constitutes present-day Libya, and in 655, the region became part of the Ummayad Caliphate. In 750, it became part of the Abbasid area and was subsequently governed as part of the Ottoman Empire. As a result of its victory in a war against Turkey in the early 20th century, Italy ruled the three North African areas of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fezzan, uniting them in 1934 as Libya. Italian rule was harsh, and an estimated one third of indigenous Bedouins died in concentration camps. After World War II, the United Nations moved to free Libya and make it independent; a resolution was signed on November 21, 1949, that Libya should be independent before 1952. On Christmas Eve in 1951, Libya declared its independence. King Idris, who had led the resistance to Italian rule, became the sovereign.

The discovery in 1959 of enormous oil reserves in Libya changed its history; almost overnight, Libya transformed from one of the poorer nations into one of the richer ones. Despite his heroic status, Idris later lost favor with the people because of his failure to share oil revenues with them in a manner they deemed equitable. In 1969, Muammar Gaddafi, a Bedouin, led a military coup, which led to his assumption of power and a change in the Libyan government and in its official name to The Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, a name coined by Gaddafi in keeping with his claim to have combined socialism and Islam into a Third International Theory. After years of foreign rule and monarchy, Libya was declared a people's republic.

...