Libyan culture: what survivors kept when the archives were closed

Why the camp record survives as poetry

What Ahmida found in eastern Libya

Italy called Libya its "fourth shore", in Ahmida's account, and planned to settle between 500,000 and 1 million Italians there, mainly on the fertile Green Mountain in the east. The fascist government that took power in 1922 set about clearing that land. The civilian population that supported the resistance in eastern Libya, between 100,000 and 110,000 people, was moved with its herds to the deserts of Sirte. Ahmida puts the deaths at two-thirds of those moved; Fanack's history of the period counts at least 40,000. The conquest itself belongs to Libya's history.

Ahmida learned Italian and worked in archives in Italy, Libya and Egypt, and was turned out of them; some of the officials at the Italian archives, he found, had been colonial officers. So he went looking for survivors, interviewed some of them three times to check that their stories held, and photographed the camp sites and the mass graves. Most of the people he met had been semi-nomads, and he describes having to learn "a language within a language" to follow how they spoke. Much of what they told him was verse. "They composed poetry to express the agony, the trauma, the grieving," he said in a 2022 interview with the Middle East Research and Information Project, and his book Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History, published by Routledge in 2021, treats those poems as evidence.

The poems belong to a longer habit. The Arab literary revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Nahda, reached Libya later than other Arab lands, and the tradition Libya built over those decades was centred on oral poetry, much of it about the suffering of the Italian years. Writing was a narrow channel for Libyans under Italian rule, because the colonial system gave them almost no schooling past a restricted primary level.

How the state remembered the resistance

After independence the resistance became a national memory, and the state did most of the remembering. Umar al-Mukhtar, a Sanusi shaykh and Quran teacher, led the guerrilla war in Cyrenaica until the Italian army captured him at the age of 73 and hanged him on 16 September 1931 in a camp, in front of 20,000 prisoners. When the currency was redesigned after the coup of 1969, the new notes carried his portrait. Martyrs' Day, a public holiday on 16 September, remembers the Libyans killed or exiled under Italian rule together with those killed in the revolution of 2011. Ahmida says the monarchy and Gaddafi's state both broke the silence "in a really top-down way", and that the young men and women who protested in eastern Libya in 2011 "took the anti-colonial resistance heroes, Omar Mukhtar and others, away from the regime."

The account with Italy was kept the same way. The remaining Italians, about 20,000 people, were expelled in 1970, and the expulsion was marked each year as the Day of Revenge. At the signing of a treaty in Benghazi on 30 August 2008, under which Italy was to pay US$5 billion, the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi said that in the document "Italy apologizes for its killing, destruction and repression of the Libyan people during the period of colonial rule."

How one publishing house held Libyan writing

Against claims that Libya has little literature, the poet Khaled Mattawa notes that classicists can point to the Greek lyric poet Callimachus and the prose stylist Sinesius, both Libyan, and then to "a vast time gap" between them and the writers of today. Modern Libyan writing began to fill that gap in the late 1960s, with the prose of Sadeq al-Neihum, Khalifa al-Fakhri and Khamel al-Maghur and the poetry of Muhammad al-Shaltami and Ali al-Regeie.

Gaddafi came to power in the coup of 1969. A cultural revolution was declared in 1973, with people's committees placed in universities and the broadcast media among much else, and Law 75 of the same year made dissent illegal. In the mid-1970s the government set up a single publishing house and required authors to write in support of the authorities. Writers who refused went to prison or into exile, and some stopped writing. Censorship laws were loosened in the early 1990s without being repealed, and a literary renewal followed in which some dissent appeared in print, although books stayed censored and self-censored to a large degree. Émigrés wrote a share of the literature from outside, Ibrahim Al-Kouni and Ahmad Al-Faqih among them. Theatres and art galleries are few; for many years Libya had no public theatres at all.

The uprising of 2011 ended literary censorship. Article 14 of the Constitutional Declaration of 3 August 2011 guarantees freedom of "press, media, printing and editing", and by 2012 hundreds of television stations had begun broadcasting. The cartoonist Mohamed Zwawi, who had drawn lighthearted scenes of daily life for publications such as at-Tawra and Al Amal, died on 5 June 2011. The war brought a new generation of artists who took the present as their subject: Suhaib Tantoush's caricatures show long queues and blackouts, and a mural by Shefa Salem sets modern Libyan figures beside the country's Greek past.

Which languages Libyans speak besides Arabic

Article 1 of the 2011 Declaration makes Arabic the official language, and the same sentence guarantees "the linguistic and cultural rights of the Amazigh, the Tabous, the Touareg and the other components of the Libyan society". Libyan Arabic is spoken alongside Modern Standard Arabic. Both the Arabic dialects and the Berber languages keep words taken from Italian before and during the colonial period.

The Berber languages spoken in Libya include Tamasheq, Ghadamis, Nafusi, Suknah and Awjilah. Britannica places the Imazighen who were never absorbed into Arabic-speaking society on the Nafusah plateau and at Awjilah, Hun, Socra and Zuwarah, many of them bilingual in Nafusi and Arabic. Minority Rights Group, in a profile updated in June 2019, estimated the Imazighen at 236,000 to 590,000 people, 4 to 10% of the population, and the Tuareg, who speak Tamasheq and live mostly around the oases of Ghadames and Ghat, at about 17,000 in the same profile. Britannica also records a Dom community who speak Domari, an Indo-European language.

Gaddafi's government promoted an Arab nationalist ideology and issued a nationality code that defined citizenship as "Arab". By Minority Rights Group's account Tamazight could not be taught in schools, children could not be registered with names that were not Arabic, and books written in Tamazight were destroyed. The foreign languages that academic institutions had taught were banned as well, which left whole generations with little English. Minority activists in exile formed associations such as the World Amazigh Congress and the Tebu Front for the Salvation of Libya.

The revival came fast once the state fell. Amazigh protesters marched on the prime minister's office in Tripoli on 27 November 2011 to press for representation. Schools began to offer Tamazight lessons and Tamazight media opened. The Libyan Amazigh High Council declared Tamazight official in the towns and districts where Imazighen live, and the BTI's 2026 report describes it as taught de facto in the west and official at the municipal level. In the national text Arabic is still the one official language. The election of 2014 to the constitution-drafting assembly reserved two seats each for the Amazigh, Tebu and Tuareg; the Amazigh boycotted it, and their two seats were left unresolved, a process followed in Libya's politics.

What Libyans believe and where minorities worship

About 97% of Libyans are Muslim, most of them Sunni. The 2011 Declaration makes Islam the religion of the state and Islamic sharia the main source of legislation, and it guarantees non-Muslims the freedom to practise their rites. Beside the Sunni majority lives a small Ibadi community, the branch of Islam practised among the Imazighen. In 2024 Dar al-Ifta, the institution that issues fatwas in both the east and the west, ran a campaign against the Ibadi sect, according to the BTI's 2026 report, which also ties it to the Presidential Council decree of July 2024 that set up a morality police.

Before the 1930s the main Islamic movement in Libya was the Sanusiyyah, a Sunni Sufi revival adapted to desert life, whose lodges, the zawaya, stood in Tripolitania and the Fezzan and whose influence was strongest in Cyrenaica. Its missionaries converted the Tebu in the nineteenth century, and Mukhtar trained as a religious scholar at al-Jaghbub. Wikipedia's Libya article has the Italian invasion destroying the movement; Britannica, writing of Cyrenaica, calls its influence strong still. The sharifs, who came from the Fezzan and claim descent from the Prophet Muhammad, control large tracts of oasis land in western Libya.

Christians numbered more than 140,000 before independence, most of them of Italian or Maltese descent, and many left for Italy or Malta after it. Coptic Orthodox Christians, many of them Egyptian migrants, now have three churches, in Tripoli, Benghazi and Misurata. Proselytising is illegal, and in February 2015 a group affiliated with the Islamic State released a video of the killing of 21 Coptic Christians, most of them Egyptian nationals.

Libya's Jewish community dated back to at least 300 BC. In 1942 the Italian Fascist authorities set up forced labour camps for Jews south of Tripoli; about 3,000 were held at Giado, where some 500 died of hunger and disease. More than 140 Jews were murdered in pogroms in the three years after November 1945, and about 38,000 remained in 1948. The two accounts of the departure differ. Wikipedia dates the emigration of most of the community to independence in 1951, and Britannica dates it to the late 1960s, with many going to Italy.

What a Libyan meal is built on

How bazeen is made and shared

Four ingredients carry traditional Libyan food: olives and their oil, dates, grains and milk. Grain goes into bread, cakes, soups and bazeen, and dates are eaten dried, made into a syrup called rub, or lightly fried with bsisa and milk. Olive oil goes into nearly every meal. Pasta is one of Italy's lasting marks on the table, and the staple divides the country, pasta in the west and rice in the east. Lunch is the main meal, and shops close for a couple of hours in the afternoon so that families can eat together.

Bazeen is customarily eaten from one shared bowl, by hand, and it is commonly served at traditional weddings and festivities. It is made from barley flour with a little plain flour, boiled in salted water into a hard dough that women knead with a wooden ladle, sitting on the floor with the pan held between their legs, until it can be shaped into a smooth half-sphere and set in the middle of a large bowl. A sauce of onions fried with lamb, turmeric, cayenne, black pepper, fenugreek, sweet paprika and tomato paste is poured round it, and boiled eggs are arranged around the dome. It comes with amasyar, pickled carrots and cucumber with chilli. Asida, also called aish, is a sweet version made of white flour and eaten with honey, or with date syrup and olive oil; it is the dish for the birth of a baby and for the Mawlid, the Prophet's birthday.

The Ramadan fast is broken with a glass of milk and a couple of dates, then with a thick, heavily spiced soup known simply as Arabian soup, made with lamb or chicken, tomatoes, chickpeas, saffron and fresh herbs. Batata mubattana, pieces of fried potato filled with spiced minced meat and coated in egg and breadcrumbs, is a Libyan speciality. Pork is not eaten, meat must be halal, and alcohol is illegal. The recipes themselves belong to RECIPESpec, the sibling catalogue that records dishes.

Why Libyan tea is poured from a height

Libyan tea is brewed strong and thick, close to a syrup, then poured from one mug into another and back for a few minutes, and finally from a height into the glass so that a head of foam, the reghwa, forms on top. After a meal it comes in rounds. A second glass follows the first, and the third is served with roasted peanuts or almonds in the glass, as shay bi'l-luz. The two Wikipedia accounts used here disagree about the leaf, one calling the after-meal tea green and the other black.

What Libyans wear and play at a wedding

How Libyans dress for an occasion

Traditional dress is now kept mostly for occasions such as Friday prayers, the Eid and weddings, and men wear it more often than women. The men's outfit is much the same across the country. A long white shirt (the jalabiya or qamis) goes over long trousers (sirwal) under a vest, the sadriya, usually heavily knitted with black silk and buttoned down the front. The headdress is the shashiyah, which comes in red or black. Men in Tripolitania prefer black and men in Cyrenaica wear both, with a tight white knitted cap under it indoors. Over everything goes the jarid, a large cloak wrapped round the body like a Roman toga and tied at the right shoulder.

Women's dress varies more from one region to another. The usual outfit is a blouse with baggy sleeves embroidered with beads and silver or gold thread, baggy silk trousers, and brightly coloured cloth draped over them like a toga and held with brooches. The brooches were silver and are now usually gold, decorated with the Khamaisah, a hand-shaped charm against the evil eye. The groom gives the outfit and its gold to the bride at the wedding, and she wears it the day after.

Who makes the music at Libyan weddings

Libyan music is specific to a city or a region, and at weddings much of it is made by women. A zimzamat is a live band, usually of female musicians, and Tripoli's wedding halls often have two stages, one for the band and one for the bride and groom. Women's bands at weddings for women sing rhyming lines about Libyan custom and heritage. Among the Tuareg of the south the songs are in Tamasheq, accompanied by the tinde drum and the imzad, and women play both. Gaddafi's government patronised Tuareg culture through events such as the Ghadames Festival.

Other music had no such patron. Western music was outlawed under Gaddafi and non-Arabic instruments were burned in public places around the country. Radio and television played only Arabic music. After 2011 recordings in Tamazight spread among western Libyans through networks reaching into Tunisia and the wider Maghreb, and the singer Dania Ben Sassi drew attention in 2011 and 2013 with Amazigh music, sung in Tamazight, about her people's resistance.

What became of Libya's museums and heritage sites

The National Museum of Libya occupies the Red Castle, Assaraya al-Hamra, a complex of courtyards and houses covering about 13,000 square metres in which the Turks, the Karamanlis, the Spaniards, the Knights of Malta and the Italians all left work. The Italians first set up a museum there in 1919, the British enlarged it in 1948, and Gaddafi opened a new museum on the site in 1988. It closed in 2011. A restoration with design help from UNESCO began in 2023, and the museum reopened on 12 December 2025. The archaeologist Hafed Walda, a former Libyan ambassador to UNESCO, said the reopening embodied the will of Libyans "to protect their collective memory".

Libya ratified the World Heritage Convention on 13 October 1978, and its five properties on the list are all cultural. On 14 July 2016, meeting in Istanbul, the World Heritage Committee placed all five on the List of World Heritage in Danger because of damage from the conflict and the armed groups present on or around the sites. The Art Newspaper reported in December 2025 that the other four had stayed on that list since 2016 and that the status of Ghadamès had changed during the year.

The Tadrart Acacus holds thousands of paintings and carvings, some dated to 14,000 years ago, from times when the desert was habitable. Six more sites stand on the tentative list: Ghirza, Ptolemais and the Haua Fteah Cave since 2020, and Qasr al-Haj, the Ancient Mosque of Awjila and Sayeda Mariam Square since 2026. Libya ratified UNESCO's 2003 Convention on intangible heritage on 10 November 2023, and its one inscribed element is Arabic kohl, added to the Representative List in 2025.

Victoria Leitch, general secretary of the British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies, names trafficking in stolen artefacts, "linked to human trafficking and drugs", among the pressures on the sites. The Tourism Information and Documentation Centre of the Ministry of Tourism and Handicrafts recorded more than 121,000 visitors at cities and archaeological sites in the first quarter of 2026, and 974 international tourists of 54 nationalities over the same three months. By the ministry's count, tourist arrivals grew by more than 41% between the first quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026.