Britain’s involvement in the creation of the modern state of Libya is one of the lesser known episodes of its imperial history. Since the peculiarities of the Gaddafi era have tended to overshadow all else, it is hard to imagine today that Libya was formerly one of Britain’s closest allies in the Arab world. In Libya itself, before February 2011, there were few signs that Muammar Gaddafi had not successfully eradicated all collective memory of a Libyan past before the arrival of his Big Brother-like regime on September 1st, 1969. Images of the ‘Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution’ and the green flag of the Libyan Jamahiriya were ubiquitous. For most people, not least Gaddafi himself, the eccentric colonel embodied the past, the present and the future of the large North African state; Gaddafi was Libya and Libya was Gaddafi.

But appearances were deceptive. Suppressed national memories began making their way back into public discourse during the unexpected events of the Arab Spring. Demonstrations that began in earnest on February 15th, 2011 soon revealed cracks in Gaddafi’s propagandist dam through which older nationalist narratives of Libyan history began to flow. As the resistance movement gathered momentum rebels in the eastern part of the country could be seen brandishing portraits of the long since deposed King Idris and waving the old red, black and green flag of Idris’s Libya. Echoes of the past could also be heard in the voices of notable Libyan exiles supporting the nascent revolution. In his Ramadan message to the people of Libya on August 16th, 2011 Mohammed al-Sanusi, the man whom many regard as the legitimate heir to Mohammed Idris ibn al-Mahdi al-Sanusi (1889-1983), Libya’s first and only king, likened the present conflict to that of 1940 when ‘the people of Libya came together’ under his uncle Idris’s leadership to form ‘the Senussi army’ to fight the Italian ‘colonialist oppressor’. On August 22nd, as rebels advanced into the centre of Tripoli, an imam could even be heard at a neighbourhood mosque in the eastern portion of the city singing the pre-Gaddafi national anthem.

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Thus the time is ripe to revisit Britain’s role in the establishment of Libya as a ‘modern’ state in the wake of the Second World War. At the centre of the story is Britain’s relationship with the Sanusi (as they are referred to by most historians today), a Sufi Islamic order headed at the time by Idris, that had played an important if somewhat mysterious role in North African affairs for over a century. As one informed contemporary observed in the 1940s, there arose a very ‘close identification of Sanusi aspirations with British strategic policy’ that had significant implications for the region.

A crucial but rather unlikely agent in the consolidation of this Anglo-Sanusi alliance was J.N.D. Anderson (1908-94), a conservative evangelical missionary working in Egypt, whose outstanding Arabic propelled him into the position of chief intermediary between Idris and Britain throughout the Second World War. Historically, evangelicals have been among the most hostile of Christians towards Islam, but there have always been significant exceptions and Anderson is one of the most interesting. Anderson’s amicable relationship with Idris and the consequences that followed, not only for Britain and Libya but also for Christian-Muslim relations, are both fascinating and largely unknown.