The island of Djerba in southern Tunisia is about a two-hour drive from the Libyan border crossing at Ras Ajdir. In the summer months, a wave of Libyan families crosses that border for a beach vacation in Djerba. Cars with white Libyan license plates appear throughout the island, especially in and around the capital city of Houmt Souk. Outside those peak tourism months, the stream of travelers continues, with Libyans coming to the island for medical treatment or to visit extended family.
This flow of people dates back centuries, long before the modern states of Libya or Tunisia existed and before the Ottomans, the French, or the Italians invented a border to divide them.Footnote 1 Yet the links between Djerba and the neighboring mountainous region of the Jebel Nafusa in Libya are stronger than those bound by geographic proximity alone. The two regions have for well over a millennium been home to Ibadis, a small Muslim community whose adherents have lived since the medieval centuries in geographic pockets throughout northern Africa.Footnote 2 Although many Ibadi communities in the Maghrib have since disappeared, those in Djerba and the Jebel Nafusa (along with the Mzab valley in Algeria) have persisted into the present. Much of that long-term vitality is related to the movement of Ibadis among these different places, whether for commerce or study. Alongside religious ties, Djerba and the Jebel Nafusa share a linguistic heritage, because both are home to Amazigh communities whose dialects are mutually comprehensible (Figs. 1 and 2).
Map of Jebel Nafusa (bottom), showing the distance to Djerba (top left). Map by Eric Ross.
Djerba. Map by Eric Ross.
These historical links have frequently led the inhabitants of the Jebel Nafusa to seek refuge in Djerba during periods of political or economic instability. Most recently, this occurred in 2011–12, when over a period of several months dozens of families relocated to Djerba and other parts of southern Tunisia as they fled the violence of the revolution in Libya that overthrew Muammar el Qaddafi (r. 1969–2011). As in other parts of southern Tunisia, residents in Djerba supported Libyan families, and the local newspaper, al-Jazira (The Island), featured stories on local associations that had offered help to these families, providing them with housing and other forms of assistance.Footnote 3 One century earlier, in 1911, Ibadis from the Jebel Nafusa had begun seeking refuge in Djerba following the Italian invasion of the Ottoman province of Trablus al-Gharb. The subsequent three decades of colonialism in what the Italians would from 1934 onward call “Libia” contributed to the crossing of tens of thousands of migrants westward into the neighboring French protectorate of Tunisia.
Migration from the Jebel Nafusa to Djerba offers a vantage point for understanding historical patterns and the dynamics of migration among the peoples of the Maghrib in the first half of the 20th century. That colonialism brought about ruptures with the past is so evident that it can be difficult to see elements of continuity from the 18th or 19th century into the 20th. One approach envisions an alternative chronology of North Africa, divided not into precolonial and colonial, but instead one that “Examin[es] the colonial period through the prism of the modern period.” This approach “forefront[s] … legacies and continuities, or conversely, their rupture [and] leads firstly to reevaluating the domains of action by colonial subjects and their relative autonomy, which reveals the persistence of local practices and customs.”Footnote 4 Such an approach serves two purposes with respect to the history of migration. First, it suggests that the modern history of North African migration amounts to more than a reaction to European intervention in the region, without downplaying or denying the impact of colonialism. Second, the approach views the region through the local, demonstrating both the value and the limits of broader themes and patterns when studying Maghribi history.
Following this lead, I approach the history of Nafusi migration to Djerba in the 20th century as both a continuation of a much longer tradition linking the two regions and part of a larger history of migration in the Maghrib. In doing so, I make three main claims. The first is that Nafusi migration was as much the result of local historical circumstances as it was a response to colonialism. Second, the historical experience of migration of Nafusis differed according to social class; namely, the categories of migrants whose lives I follow here differ from those who traveled to pursue religious studies or to take up temporary work on the Tunisian mainland.Footnote 5 Third, much scholarship on the migration of Tripolitanians into Tunisia from the 18th to the 20th century has suggested that those migrants integrated and assimilated with relative ease, thanks to shared religious traditions or tribal connections. I argue that although this is to some extent accurate, attention to local histories of migration like that of Nafusis to Djerba reveals a more complex picture in which the dynamics of migrant integration in the Maghrib were shaped by local circumstances.
In making these three claims, I show how the history of Nafusi migration to Djerba both conforms to and diverges from the larger history of late Ottoman and colonial-era migration in Tunisia. As in other parts of North Africa, Nafusi migration after colonial conquest continued the patterns that preceded the Italian invasion, and its specificities relating to shared histories, languages, and religious traditions in Djerba distinguish it from migration elsewhere. By shifting the focus away from the colonial moment in the Jebel Nafusa and in Djerba, I make the case for foregrounding longer-term regional connections and migrations that linked different spaces across the Maghrib, and also attend to local histories and what they offer in the way of caveats and exceptions.
In what follows, I focus my attention on two distinct categories of migrants who sought refuge in Djerba during these decades: those who made a living as manual laborers and those who supported themselves as Qur’an teachers (m’addibs). I begin by discussing the principal sources used for the study and then situate Nafusi migration to Djerba within the broader framework of migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Maghrib. I then sketch an outline of how, once in Djerba, these Nafusi migrants made a living and attempted to integrate into Djerban society. I show that the timeline of migration, reasons for migration, and resulting attempts at social integration by Nafusis reveal the importance of attention to local circumstances and contexts when examining the regional history of the early 20th-century Maghrib, including how colonialism need not be the only prism through which events are seen and explained.
Sources and Fieldwork
Sources used here for tracing Nafusi migration to Tunisia in general, and to Djerba in particular, include three main types of material. The first are French colonial archival documents, which are (as expected) mostly concerned with the regulation of movement or surveillance.Footnote 6 In most cases, determining the precise origins of an individual in these documents is difficult, because the French referred to all migrants from Trablus al-Gharb as “Tripolitaine,” and it is only if their city of origin is mentioned in an archival document that they can be identified as Nafusi.Footnote 7 Even in those cases when an individual or group can be identified as Nafusi, this does not necessarily mean that they are Ibadi, because the region was also home to Arabic-speaking and Tamazight-speaking Sunnis.
Oral historical accounts constitute a second source. During my fieldwork in Djerba in summer 2023, I conducted interviews with families tied to Nafusi migrants to Djerba in the years following the Italian invasion in 1911. All participants’ first names have been changed to protect their privacy, but surnames of the migrant families have not been changed. By the 1960s, most Nafusi families in Djerba who had migrated during the Italian colonial period had returned to (by then independent) Libya. As a result, my interviews were with Djerbans who had links to the Nafusis through extended family or lived in the same neighborhood as Nafusis during their time in Djerba. In most cases, this meant that I was researching the contemporary memory of Nafusis rather than (only) their historical experience.
The material remains of these communities in Djerba together represent a third type of source. In some cases, this means manuscripts from private libraries in Nafusa and Djerba, which on both the individual item and collection levels can offer evidence of connections between the two places. In others, material traces include graveyards, mosques, or other structures connected to Nafusis in Djerba.
Regional Context of Nafusi Migrants into Tunisia
The migration of people from Trablus al-Gharb into Tunisia was part of a much larger movement of peoples across northern Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. Other historians have pointed to how migration both predates and postdates the colonial moment in the region’s history, including how the movement of people was tied to long-standing connections established through Mediterranean trade, the transregional lives of Ottoman subjects, and more local histories of migration.Footnote 8
As these previous studies have emphasized, to say that migration predated colonialism is not to suggest that colonialism had no effect on the movement of people in the region. Instead, the aim is to situate the colonial moment within a larger history of migration in which it retains its significance without becoming the event by which the entire region’s history is defined.Footnote 9 The movement of migrants into Tunisia from the west was, for instance, no doubt influenced by the French invasion of Algiers in 1830 and the subsequent establishment of the colony of Algeria. Yet waves of migrants moved east into Husaynid Tunisia both before and after 1830, driven by a variety of motivations beyond seeking only to avoid living under foreign rule.Footnote 10 For example, many migrants sought temporary employment or study at the Zaytuna Mosque in Tunis. Algerian students and scholars would remain an important presence at Tunis well into the 20th century, including Mzabi Ibadis, who during the 1920s would send delegations of young men to Tunis to receive a nonreligious education at the Khalduniyya and Sadiqiyya schools. Their time there, as Amal Ghazal has shown, contributed to their participation in nascent Tunisian nationalist politics that would have far-reaching consequences.Footnote 11 As ʿAbd al-Karim Majri has emphasized, options and motivations for migration across North Africa were shaped as much by socioeconomic class as political or religious factors.Footnote 12 Long before the 20th century and well into it, Ibadi Muslim students and scholars had been moving across the Maghrib and beyond in pursuit of knowledge.Footnote 13 This form of migration was in many ways distinct from the type I study here. That said, elite scholars and students were not the only Ibadi migrants from Algeria living in Tunis–the city’s bathhouses in the early 20th century also were known to be run by Mzabi Ibadis. Migrant workers, whether seeking urban or rural settings, also came to Tunisia from Alawi territory much farther to the west both before and after 1830.Footnote 14 These examples remind us that the movement of peoples eastward across northern Africa and into Tunisia preceded and postdated invasions of Ottoman or Alawi territories by Europeans.
Maghribi migrants into Tunisia from the west had their eastern counterparts in migrants from Trablus al-Gharb. These migrant laborers, like those from the west, spread out across Tunisia, working in agriculture, mining, trade, fishing, and any other form of manual labor they could find.Footnote 15 In many cases, this led to the long-term settlement of these families across Tunisia and their integration into the political, economic, and religious fabric of their new home.Footnote 16 As was the case for migrants from the west, this process had not begun suddenly in 1911 with the Italian invasion of Ottoman Tripoli.
The migrants from Trablus al-Gharb during the 20th century had been preceded in both the 18th and the 19th centuries by large numbers of Tripolitanian workers who came to the then-Ottoman province (vilayet) of Tunis. In the 18th century, migration westward resulted from “a string of natural calamities of drought, famine, and disease” in Tripolitania.Footnote 17 In the 19th century, migrants replaced the large numbers of the bey’s subjects who had died in the plague and following the disorder that resulted from an uprising against the government known as the Mejba Revolt in 1864–65.Footnote 18 Epidemics, especially large outbreaks of cholera, likewise took the lives of many in the 1860s and 1870s, which combined with the political unrest of the period to deplete the agricultural workforce of the Tunisian interior.Footnote 19 Ottoman subjects from neighboring Trablus al-Gharb helped meet the labor demand. Famine, political unrest, and overtaxation in the first half of the 19th century in Trablus al-Gharb also had contributed to people migrating into Tunisia, and these factors only increased in intensity later in the century.Footnote 20 From 1881 onward, the French would encourage this migration from Tripolitania, because they needed more laborers for agriculture, mining, and the construction of railways and roads.Footnote 21 From the estimated 6,000 or so adult males from Trablus al-Gharb in Tunisia in 1861, the number had risen to 13,000 by the 1890s.Footnote 22
Fatma Ben Slimane has noted that the border separating the Ottoman vilayets of Tunis and Trablus al-Gharb were already established by the 18th century, as the two provincial governments competed for control of territory. This process would be renewed after the French invasion of Algiers in 1830, when the Ottomans reasserted direct control over Tripoli. Until the 20th century, however,
In the Maghreb … [t]he conception of borders as barriers, and as instruments of spatial enclosure and distinction between people, was absent from the collective imagination, both among the men in power and the local populations. That fronts should be open was considered self-evident by both the authorities and their subjects.Footnote 23
People were still moving with relative freedom between Tunisia and Trablus al-Gharb well into the first decade of the 20th century, meaning that by May 1914 when the border was fixed by a French-Italian agreement meant to determine who was a subject of which government, many of the same families and tribes already existed on both sides of it.Footnote 24
Just as the French invasion of Algiers in 1830 had led to new waves of migration eastward, the Italian invasion of Tripoli’s coastline in 1911 and the subsequent three decades of violence and instability would lead thousands more Ottomans from Trablus al-Gharb westward into Tunisia. Estimates of the number of migrants who left Libya over the entirety of the colonial era range widely between 20,000 and 200,000; suffice it to say that tens of thousands left.Footnote 25 In her study of Tripolitanian migrants in the 20th century, Anna Baldinetti notes that “the experience of exile … did not follow a linear trajectory but was characterized by the moving from one country to another and also by intermittent returns to the homeland.”Footnote 26 This was certainly true of Nafusi migrants, who were driven by various factors and would sometimes return home depending on the circumstances there. Baldinetti also notes that the scale of these migrations to and from Tripolitania and Tunisia was in the tens of thousands, and
The evident exodus trends reveal that the process [of migration] involved all social classes. People left their homeland for various reasons, some moved to escape, others for a better life. This movement lasted for the entire colonial period, reflecting different phases of the colonial policy… . Interestingly, it emerges that the selection of a place of exile was determined by an individual’s place of origin. A similar argument can also be put forward regarding the level of integration experience in the receiving country.Footnote 27
In addition to the personal background of migrants, as Majri has noted, the colonial experience on each side of the border likewise exerted both push and pull forces on migrants, who were either fleeing dire circumstances or seeking better ones.Footnote 28
In the initial years of the Italian occupation, thousands of refugees fled across the border temporarily, including around four hundred men, women, and children from the Nafusi town of Nalut in 1912–13 alone.Footnote 29 Others, however, were migrants seeking work just as they had in previous centuries. In the early 20th century, both before and after 1911, these migrants sought work in mineral mines (manājim), on the railroad, or in agriculture.Footnote 30 The need for labor in Tunisia coincided with the dire economic circumstances of Tripolitania at the beginning of the 20th century, following a decline in both the regional economy and the long-distance caravan trades that passed through Jebel Nafusa.Footnote 31 The Italian invasion no doubt exacerbated those circumstances, but it was not the sole cause for migration.
Migrants seeking work in southern Tunisia included at least some Nafusis. In February 1919, for example, a French report filed in the southern town of Bir Ali notes that a group of five Nafusi “vagabonds” was stopped while “seeking to enter Tunisia to work there.”Footnote 32 One of them, Khalifa Ben Ameur Ben Said, was from Nalut and had worked previously in Tunisia in the mines around Jebel Rassas (southeast of Tunis). He for years also worked as a baker in Tunis. Khalifa Ben Mohamed Ben Mahrough from Ruhaybat also had previously worked south of Tunis on a farm as well as in the mines near Bizerte in the north. The other three had never entered Tunisia before but had the intention of finding work in the country’s mines.Footnote 33 These workers, ranging from miners to farmhands and bakers, demonstrate how Nafusis also could conform to patterns of migrant workers into French Tunisia in the early 20th century.
Archival documents from the French outposts in southern Tunisia further suggest that the historical movement of Nafusis across what was now a border separating Tunisia from Italian-controlled territories to the east continued unabated throughout the period of Italian colonization. Although some of this crossing was clandestine, many moved across the border legally, carrying permits and passports. For example, Ayoub Ben Yahia from the Nafusi town of Kabaw was stopped in Medenine as he headed to Tunis in February 1920 carrying a permit to work at a bakery. He also was carrying a travel permit issued by the local official back in Kabaw.Footnote 34 Similarly, in October of the following year, officers in Ben Gardane at the border stopped a Nafusi man named ʿAli El Azeb from Yefren. About ten months earlier, he had crossed into Tunisia carrying “a passport issued by the Italian authorities and which he had since lost.”Footnote 35 He arrived in Sfax by sea and continued on foot to Tunis, where he began working at a bakery. He was now planning his return to Yefren. Even well into the era of Libyan independence after 1951, Nafusis like Ali and Ayoub would be crossing the border to work odd jobs, conduct business, or visit relatives in Tunisia before returning home.
Local Context of Nafusi Migration in Djerba (1911–23)
Nafusis would come to Djerba over the course of the period of Italian colonization (1911–43) in different stages and for a variety of reasons. They were attracted to Djerba due to shared historical connections with the region and its people, a shared religious tradition, a mutually comprehensible language, and the sheer proximity of the place. Their backgrounds were diverse, and so their activities once in Djerba varied widely, from construction and agriculture to Qur’an instruction. Religion and language set them apart from other migrants to Djerba, who were neither Tamazight speakers nor Ibadis. Even though they would share these elements of their identities with Djerban Ibadis, they remained distinct from their coreligionists on the island. Finally, unlike many of those who came to mainland Tunisia from Ottoman Trablus al-Gharb, most Nafusis who came to Djerba in the colonial era would return in the years after Libyan independence.
Migration to Djerba resulted from local circumstances in the Jebel Nafusa, rather than only as by-product of the Italian invasion. Some three thousand of the mujahidin who unsuccessfully opposed the Italians in their initial push into the region in 1913 had to flee across the border into Tunisia.Footnote 36 The number of migrants to Djerba was small, however, compared to other parts of Tunisia. Certainly, some migrants fleeing the impact of the invasion in Trablus al-Gharb traveled to Djerba in 1911 and the immediate years following. Statistics compiled by officials in Djerba in the 1930s suggest that only two dozen or so migrant families living in Djerba had been there since 1912, with most having arrived later. Based on surnames of adult men who arrived before 1912, only the al-Ṭumzini family came from the Jebel Nafusa.Footnote 37 Local records from the municipality make no mention of an influx of migrants in 1911–12, but instead highlight the skyrocketing prices of local produce and poultry as goods were directed across the border into Trablus al-Gharb.Footnote 38 In the same document from 1914 that accounts for hundreds of people from Nalut in other parts of the mainland, those in Djerba were just under two dozen in the same year.Footnote 39 However the French authorities exercised little direct control in Djerba beyond the urban centers, so the number of Nafusi migrants may have been higher. Local conditions in the island’s interior were instead managed by a shaykh, an Ottoman-era system inherited by the French.Footnote 40 Most documented migrants in those first years were instead Djerbans who were fleeing the war and returning home after years in Trablus al-Gharb.Footnote 41
Events over the course of the decade or so following the initial invasion would set the stage for Nafusi migration to Djerba. The Italians established control in the Jebel Nafusa only after facing fierce resistance in 1912–13 under the command of local leaders. The Ibadi leaders Sulayman al-Baruni (d. 1940) from Yefren and Khalifa Bin ʿAskar (d. 1925) from Nalut emerged alongside other regional leaders in late 1912 and rallied Nafusis in fighting the Italians following the withdrawal of Ottomans officers and troops. Local leaders were divided on which course of action to take with respect to the Italians, with some arguing for negotiation and others for continued armed resistance. When the Italians sent multiple columns of soldiers up into the mountains, they soon gained the upper hand, and thousands of Nafusis fled across the border and surrendered their weapons to the French, who placed them in camps.Footnote 42
The Italian military victories in the Jebel were short-lived, however. By 1914 the region had joined the Fezzan in an armed uprising. Ibadis and other Nafusis rallied under the leadership of Khalifa Bin ʿAskar, forcing the Italians to leave the region as quickly as they had entered it.Footnote 43 The uprising even spread into French-controlled territory in southern Tunisia, where hundreds of Nafusi families were still living in camps. Tunisians themselves joined the fight and crossed the border into Tripolitania.Footnote 44 The Italians retreated from the Jebel Nafusa and their control of Trablus al-Gharb contracted to include Tripoli and its environs. The revolt was followed shortly afterward by the outbreak of World War I, which would ensure that Italy did not have the resources to attempt to reestablish control.Footnote 45
Between 1914 and 1921, different local governing bodies in the Jebel Nafusa operated largely independent of one another in the region, in part supported by Ottoman and German military aid via submarine or smuggled overland through Tunisia. When the Ottoman government surrendered in 1918, Sulayman al-Baruni and his non-Ibadi allies from across the region attempted to put their differences aside and laid out a plan for independence. This plan became a brief political reality with the establishment of the Tripolitanian Republic (al-Jumhuriyya al-Trabulusiyya).Footnote 46 The experiment did not last, however, as the fragile alliances fell apart and the Jebel collapsed into civil war in 1920–21.
The outbreak of a civil war in the Jebel was one of two events that contributed to increased emigration of Nafusis to Djerba and southern Tunisia in the 1920s and 1930s. Alliances shifted constantly over this period, with Arabic-speaking tribes at times allied with and at other times fighting against the Tamazight-speaking and primarily Ibadi townspeople. The Italians played a role in this conflict, supporting different tribes with weapons or alliances. Although in hindsight the civil war would contribute to enabling the Italians to reestablish control in the region in the mid-1920s, it is important to emphasize that the conflict itself was as much an internal one as one driven by colonialism.Footnote 47 As Ali Ahmida has written, for many leaders in the region “the Italian army was not the main enemy; many chiefs regarded rival chiefs as more urgent threats to their status and power… . Colonialism was, for these chiefs and notables, a pragmatic way to preserve their interests and positions.”Footnote 48
Before 1921, the Italians were in no position to exercise direct influence over the region, and the internal divisions that divided the peoples of Nafusa drew on much older alliances or antagonisms as well as personal rivalries among notables.Footnote 49 For Ibadi Nafusis, the result of the civil war was a large-scale migration of families fleeing the violence. This was especially true of the towns of Yefren, Jadu, and Nalut and the villages that surrounded them. Some fled across the border into French-controlled Tunisia or Algeria, whereas others fled north to Zuwara, a town on the Mediterranean coast with an Ibadi Tamazight-speaking community.Footnote 50 Conducting his fieldwork in Jebel Nafusa in 1933, roughly a decade after the civil war ended, Jean Despois made occasional references to the physical devastation of the conflict on the region and its demographic repercussions when he noted that “the troubles from 1915 to 1922 considerably depopulated the Djebel.”Footnote 51 Describing the effects on the built and physical landscapes, he wrote that “These troubles devastated the Djebel. When one goes from valley to valley, village to village, to different areas one still sees everywhere the traces of this disastrous period, and this despite the work of the last years.”Footnote 52
A second event to spur migration was the rise to power of the National Fascist Party (PNF) in Italy in 1922, the reverberations of which were felt in Tripolitania through a renewed enthusiasm for the colonial project. A military push into Tripolitania that had already begun in 1921 aimed at expanding Italian control in the Jebel Nafusa and the Fezzan received full government support.Footnote 53 The fascist governors of Libya abandoned the policy of collaboration with local leaders, adopting in its place a “scorched-earth policy” that proved effective in conquering the divided Jebel by 1923.Footnote 54 Once control was established in the region, the fascist government in the 1930s instituted a policy of agricultural colonialism, infrastructure development, and even a tourism industry in Tripolitainia that further encouraged emigration.Footnote 55 Together these two factors, the civil war in the Jebel and the renewed colonial project following the arrival of the fascist government to power in Italy, would lead many Nafusi individuals and families to move between the Jebel Nafusa and Djerba in the 1920s and 1930s. Meanwhile, whole villages had been depopulated in the Jebel as settlement patterns shifted.Footnote 56 Migration would continue into the early 1940s, as Nafusis joined other Libyans fleeing westward following the outbreak of World War II.
Migrants to Djerba: Demographics and Distribution
Events in the Jebel translated to those Nafusis who arrived in Djerba in the 1920s and 1930s usually being Ibadis and Tamazight speakers. Their choice of where to settle on the island reflected both their religious and linguistic profiles. Most chose to settle in the southern regions of the island near the mainland, especially in and around the towns of Adjim, Guellala, and Sedouikch. These areas were then, as today, home to most speakers of the island’s Tamazight language, locally called jerbi or shilha. This had the attraction of being mutually intelligible with the dialects spoken in the Jebel. Smaller numbers settled farther to the north near the capital of Houmt Souk, including in Fatou, Oualegh, Ghizen, Mezraya, and Hachchane. René Stablo, civil controller in Djerba from 1936 to 1941, noted thay over time they moved to other parts of the island:
The Berber immigrants of Libya were first fixed in the zones closest to the continent and only gradually spread to the northern region of the island. The presence [by 1941] of an important agricultural colony of [Libyans] in the two shaykhats of Cedghiane and Ouallagh prove that the Berbers sought to improve their precarious condition of existence by working the fertile lands of the North.Footnote 57
The location in Djerba in which Nafusis settled stemmed as much from necessity as it did choice. In some cases, families were able to draw on the centuries-old connections linking Djerba to Nafusa by identifying families of Nafusi descent and seeking help from them. In the areas around Adjim and Guellala, for example, there were (and still are) several well-known families of Nafusi origin who offered support. These included families whose surnames were “al-Nafusi” or “al-Jbali,” both direct references to their Nafusi origins. In other cases, a family’s surname or a toponym associated with them pointed to their origin in a particular village in the Nafusa such as al-Naluti, al-Fursatʾi, or al-Ṭumzini.Footnote 58 In the 19th century, Nafusis had been so numerous that the Husaynid Ottoman government had designated a shaykh to represent their community (jamāʿa), as well as representatives for each of the districts (akhmās) throughout the island.Footnote 59 Whether due to family ties, religious affiliation, or simply the generosity of the island’s Ibadi communities, the patterns of Nafusi settlement were consistent across the island.
Nafusis were not the only immigrants to Djerba in the early 20th century. Jewish migrants arrived from Tripolitania, some of whom like the Nafusis had family connections in Tunisia.Footnote 60 This was likewise a boom period for Arabic-speaking immigrants from southern Tunisia. Some of these migrants were seasonal, coming to Djerba to work in agriculture and living in tents until they returned home. In other cases, these migrants gradually became clients of Djerban families, on whose estates they built huts.Footnote 61 These families remained distinct from Ibadi Djerbans, and their geographic distribution depended on varying socioeconomic factors. Ibadi Nafusi migrants followed similar patterns of social integration, but their religious and linguistic affiliations set them apart from other migrants.
Many of the newly arrived Nafusi migrants during the 1920s and 1930s lived in the mosques and madrasas of the Djerba.Footnote 62 Some mosques already had annexes to house students or imams, and the Nafusi families were able to take shelter in those spaces.Footnote 63 In some cases, Nafusis would remain there for years, whereas others acquired land or made agreements with Djerban landowners to settle and build on the latter’s property. These were not prime pieces of real estate. Nafusis lived in difficult circumstances for years. Salim (b. 1950), whose Djerban family is of Nafusi descent, recalls how his family’s distant relatives who came after the Italian invasion
arrived in a deplorable state. They were extremely poor… . And, I mean, we also helped them. We gave them homes. Not real houses but at least somewhere for them to live… . In our case, those who came were our “cousins” (abnāʾ ʿammnā), as we called them. They lived next to [us] and we gave them whatever we had extra. Whoever had a spare small home gave it to them. Before, we even used to have what we call duwāmis, which were underground areas, and there were people who lived in those. After that, they slowly began to work and to build. And we helped them and helped each other.Footnote 64
The land on which Nafusis settled was often distant from town centers and homes and entirely untended. Nafusi migrants would spend years plowing those fields and transforming huts and shacks into homes for their families.
ʿIsa, who recalled how his family still employed a Nafusi man named Saʿid Burghush in the early 1950s, later visited members of the family in Tripoli in 1968. The Burghush family had lived near ʿIsa’s family farm while in Djerba, and in recalling their time there one of the sons was especially frank about their experience, saying to ʿIsa, “When we came [to Djerba], we lived in misery (waqtillī jīnā, tamazzīrnā).” Nafusis, ʿIsa explained, were paid a fraction of what their Djerban counterparts were paid, making do with what jobs they could find. He said that if a Djerban had been paid 500 millimes, his Nafusi counterpart might be paid 100.Footnote 65 Nafusis made a living by working a variety of jobs in Djerba. They might work in the fishing industry, construction, or other forms of manual labor. In some cases, there were genuine acts of kindness. One family in Hachchane, for example, supported an elderly Nafusi man who lived alone on their family estate (menzil) until his death in the 1950s.Footnote 66
Above all in Djerba, however, Nafusis from the 1920s onward were known for their role as Qur’an teachers. The Jebel had been known for centuries as a source of religious knowledge for Ibadis, but there may have been more recent factors at play as well. For example, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were changes to the traditional educational landscape of Djerba. Djerba gradually adopted French colonial–style schooling, which may have meant that fewer local Qur’an teachers were available.Footnote 67 Towns across the island today share the memory of the Nafusi mʾaddib at their local Qur’anic school, usually located in the neighborhood’s mosque. By the 1930s, when many Nafusis had settled with their families in Djerba, their reputation as Qur’an teachers was well established. The former civil controller wrote that, in the late 1930s, even Nafusis themselves were attracted to the island to study the Qur’an.Footnote 68 Conducting fieldwork in the late 1970s, Reiss wrote that even then “during the summers Kharijite [i.e., Ibadi] teachers from the Djebel Nefousa give lessons at Kharijite mosques on Djerba.”Footnote 69 Elsewhere he noted that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ibadi immigrants “from the Djebel Nefousa and Zouara [came] to [Djerba] to improve their economic position or to serve as religious teachers in the island’s Ibadi mosques. Being both Ibadi and Berber-speaking, these immigrants from western Libya were absorbed into Djerba society relatively quickly.”Footnote 70
Reiss does not mention the context of the Italian invasion as a driving factor for this migration. It is significant that Nafusi mʾaddibs had been coming to Djerba before 1911 and continued to do so in the period that followed it. Nafusis had been coming to Djerba for centuries as both teachers and students, as part of a long-standing exchange of books and people that dated to the medieval centuries.Footnote 71 In the early decades of the 20th century, however, many had come with their families due to the political instability back home.
Family Life and Social Integration
The Nafusi mʾaddib, often accompanied by his family, lived either permanently or temporarily in the mosque itself. Such was the case with ʿUmar al-Tandinmirti, the imam and mʾaddib of the Tajdit Mosque in Fatou. He lived there in the annex of the mosque with his wife and children, who grew up alongside the other children in the town and studied with them. Riyad (b. 1950) recalled his father sending food over to the mʾaddib on holidays and receiving the imam as a guest at their home regularly.Footnote 72
The Nafusi mʾaddib at the Bumasʿud mosque in Adjim (Fig. 3) remained in Djerba for decades, living in the area with his family and eventually acquiring property. Known to and remembered by his former students as Muhammad Ifghi (i.e., al-Faqih) or Muhammad al-Jbali, he had come to Djerba with his family as a young man. He worked as a mʾaddib, and his brother Sulayman worked as a day laborer in construction. Their stay lasted into the 1960s, when he returned to the Jebel Nafusa.Footnote 73
Bumasʿud mosque, 2023. Muhammad al-Jbali gave his lessons just outside the mosque in the courtyard. Photograph by the author.
Families like Muhammad’s came in groups or in waves. In some cases, families relocated together with three generations arriving all at once. In others, one or two members arrived first and were later joined by others. The first members of the al-Gallal family in Adjim, for example, arrived following the Italian occupation of the Jebel Nafusa, likely sometime in the 1920s. They would then be joined by other members of the family over the next few years.Footnote 74 The decades-long presence of these families in Djerba eventually led to intermarriage between them and the neighboring Djerban families. Reiss noted that this distinguished them from other immigrants from mainland Tunisia, writing that
There are cases in which Nefousa migrants married Djerban women and even took on the name of the Djerban family. There is no evidence that the Arabs from the Tunisian south could be brought into Djerban society quite so quickly. People from the Djebel Nefousa also did not come to Djerba primarily as agricultural workers. They then were occupationally specialized as merchants or builders. Unlike the Arabs they did not necessarily stand as clients to Djerban patrons.Footnote 75
Intermarriage was no doubt facilitated by shared linguistic and religious identity, but it is not quite accurate that the distinction of Nafusis in Djerba did “not … carry with it the implication of inferior social or economic status.”Footnote 76 When it came to marriage, a line separated “Jbali” (that is, Nafusi) families and other Djerbans. Salim, one of the students of Muhammad al-Jbali, suggested that
At one point, in order that [Nafusis] would not assimilate too much into [Djerban] society… . [m]arriage between families from the two [places] was difficult … between Djerban families and Nafusi families. They marry among themselves and we [i.e., people of Nafusi descent] marry among ourselves.
As a result, intermarriage between the recent Nafusi families and Djerbans was usually between the recent migrant families and those Djerbans of more distant Nafusi descent, often within the same extended family. Muhammad al-Jbali’s family, for example, was part of the extended Sifaw and Qutrusi families in Adjim.Footnote 77 All these families shared Nafusi origins, with different members choosing different surnames over the past two centuries.Footnote 78
This line separating Djerbans and Nafusis may have been less clearly demarcated in areas with smaller populations of Nafusis. In Mezraya, for example, members of the Nafusi family known as “al-Trablusi” intermarried with Djerbans, and this was no doubt true elsewhere.Footnote 79 Intermarriages across the island quite naturally led to a line of communication between Djerba and the Jebel Nafusa that extended in time well beyond the return of Nafusis to their homes in the 1950s and 1960s after Libyan independence. The same Muhammad al-Jbali above, for example, regularly returned to visit his sister and daughter, who both had married Djerban men and remained on the island.Footnote 80 Djerban women who married the children of Nafusi migrants also kept this line of communication open when they returned to Djerba for family celebrations and holidays.
Another important factor linking families was land ownership. Nafusi migrants who left in the early part of the 20th century for Djerba did not legally abandon their properties and were often able to reclaim them upon return. This occurred first during the 1930s, when the Italians made promises of amnesty and return of property to entice migrants to return to Libya.Footnote 81 Similarly, many migrant families sought to reclaim land after returning to newly independent Libya in the 1950s, with others returning following seizure of power by Muammar el Qaddafi in 1969, “when the opportunity opened to return to their properties.”Footnote 82 During the decades some families spent in Djerba, some also had acquired property on the island.Footnote 83 Even up to the present, extended families in either location lay claim to inheritance of properties. Ibrahim noted, for example, that his uncle’s own recent attempts to establish contact with extended family in the Jebel Nafusa were obstructed by a suspicion that the reason for contacting them might be to lay claim to land.Footnote 84
Agriculture was another of the domains in which Nafusis worked in Djerba, and it served to help integrate them into Djerban society. In exchange for the use of land or a small home, they often worked part-time for the Djerban family who owned the land. In Mezraya, the same Saʿid Burghush mentioned above worked on the land of the family there and developed a close relationship with them. Muhammad, who was a boy when Saʿid lived on the family’s land, recalled that, during periods when his father was absent doing business in the north, Saʿid took care of the farm and maintained its date palms, olive trees, and other crops. It was he who would rouse the family early in the morning to come outside to work.Footnote 85 Saʿid’s three older sons worked on different farms so that together they could make enough money to live. Meanwhile, his youngest son studied at the government school in Mezraya with one of the sons of the Djerban family for whom he worked. Saʿid would remain in Djerba until around 1957, when he returned to Jebel Nafusa, and his children would travel to Tripoli. He returned often, however, because his sister married into the al-Jrijni family (also of Nafusi origin) in Djerba.Footnote 86
In the neighboring village of Oualegh, longtime resident Khalifa (b. 1933) recalled three Nafusi families who lived and worked on land owned by Djerban families there. The first family, al-Trablusi, worked the land owned by the Bin ʿAli family. The Nafusi family received a small house (dawīra) to live in, and the son of the family, Salah, worked the land. The second was the Bin ʿAmir family, who lived nearby in Fatou, but whose children walked daily to Oualegh because there were no schools in their neighborhood. The third Nafusi family was the Dawud family, who arrived sometime around 1940.Footnote 87 They settled in Oualegh on the land owned by the Bin Marzug family. The father had died before they arrived, so they were a mother and her son and daughter. The boy, Dawud Yahya Dawud, remained in Djerba through secondary school, into the 1960s, before going to Tripoli where he lives today. Like other Nafusis who remained in Djerba after Tunisian independence in 1956, the family became eligible for citizenship.Footnote 88 Noticing that Dawud was a talented student, the director of the school in Oualegh helped his family file citizenship paperwork so the boy could enroll in school. That education proved invaluable when he returned to Libya as one of the rare people his age with a secondary-level education. His post-independence connections with Djerba extended beyond citizenship. Dawud’s sister married a Djerban man, and his classmates from Oualegh went to visit him many years later in Tripoli.Footnote 89
Nafusi migrants returned to their homeland at different times and for different motives; a few key reasons leading migrants to leave Djerba stand out. First was that migration was often punctuated by periods of return home, whether to visit family or to carry out business, and this was not tied to any particular period. In other words, for some the migration was intentionally temporary from the start.Footnote 90 Second, many Nafusis appear to have chosen to return home in the early years following independence (1951) under the Libyan monarchy of King Idriss in the 1950s and early 1960s. Finally, many would have sought to reacquire lands or other properties they had owned before the Italian invasion and attempt to resume their prewar lives.
One final element of Nafusi migration deserves mention. Although most Nafusi families had returned home by the 1960s, some migrants ended their lives in Djerba. Burial of the dead on the island was traditionally in cemeteries associated with families. Death created an unusual problem for those Nafusis who did not have relatives from extended families on the island. In those cases, the departed could be buried in a mosque cemetery. Until quite recently, Ibadi graves in Djerba were not marked with headstones, and so identifying the precise location of someone’s burial must rely on local accounts. The story of ʿAli al-Qadqad (d. 1955) is instructive. A scholar from Nafusa, al-Qadqad relocated his family to Djerba in 1915 to teach the Qur’an. He remained for eleven years before returning to Libya in 1925 when the civil war had come to an end. But he returned to Djerba in 1947, after the end of Italian occupation.Footnote 91 When he died in Djerba in 1955, he was buried in the Mallaq Mosque cemetery (Fig. 4), although he likely did not live in Oualegh where the mosque is located. He probably lived in a neighboring area, but because he had no family connections he had to be buried in the closest communal graveyard.Footnote 92 His burial location is remembered by locals because an expansion of the mosque required constructing an extension on top of the graves (including al-Qadqad’s), which caused quite a controversy in the town.Footnote 93 ʿAli had not died alone in Djerba. He had lived there with his wife and his son Yunis, who was born in Djerba in 1919 and grew up there.Footnote 94 Having spent many years in Djerba, the family still did not have a designated place for burial.
Cemetery of the Mallaq Mosque in Oualegh, Djerba, 2023. Photograph by the author.
This was not always the case, however. Also buried in a mosque cemetery in neighboring Fatou, members of the al-Tandimirti family who lived in the Tajdit Mosque were allotted their own burial area (rawḍā) by residents (Fig. 5).Footnote 95 The Nafusi man who had lived alone with a family in Hachchane was buried in that family’s cemetery. Meanwhile, those Nafusis with family relations in other parts of the island could be buried in the cemeteries of their extended families.
The Tajdit Mosque, where the al-Tandinmirti family lived in the first half of the 20th century, 2023. The small burial area (rawḍā) in the foreground was built so they would have somewhere to bury their dead. Photograph by the author.
Conclusion
Migrants from the Jebel Nafusa came to Tunisia in the early 20th century for many of the same reasons as others from Trablus al-Gharb. Their principal motivations included seeking work or, after 1911, fleeing violence at home following the Italian invasion of Ottoman Tripoli and its environs. In these ways, they conformed to broader patterns of Maghribi migration across the region in the early 20th century. Nafusi migrants stand out among the larger group, however, for several reasons.
First, most Nafusis do not seem to have come to Djerba in the initial years of the Italian occupation but were instead driven to migrate there during and following the period of the civil war in Nafusa (1920–21), with new arrivals coming in spurts over the next two decades during the period of Italian fascist rule. Second, although some Nafusis also migrated to different parts of Tunisia to work in mining and agriculture in the countryside or baking in the capital city of Tunis, others chose instead to seek refuge on the island of Djerba. They did this for a variety of reasons, including centuries-old family connections between the island and their mountainous homeland, a shared identity as Ibadi Muslims, and a mutually comprehensible Tamazight language.
Although previous scholarship has highlighted the ease with which Tripolitanian migrants integrated into Tunisian society, closer examination of the situation in Djerba suggests a more complex picture. When they arrived in Djerba, they certainly found integrating with society there easier than did Arabic-speaking migrants from the mainland, but they still faced challenges. Their shared religious and linguistic affiliations did not mean immediate integration into Djerban society. They remained distinct from most other Djerbans (including Ibadis), mainly integrating into areas in which Djerbans of Nafusi descent already lived. First and foremost, they faced economic difficulties. Nafusis had in many cases to rebuild from nothing. Some took years to build new lives for themselves, working as day laborers in construction or agriculture. Their tenacity and persistence allowed many to acquire land and eventually to marry into Djerban families of Nafusi descent, creating still stronger links between Djerba and Nafusa. Not all Nafusis were laborers, however. Many arrived in Djerba with a valued knowledge of the Qur’an, which allowed them to provide for their families and establish a venerated reputation on the island. Both images of the Nafusi migrant–laborer and m’addib–survive into the present, as Djerbans remember these members of the community, most of whom returned to the Jebel following Libyan independence.
This trajectory of Nafusi migration to Djerba ties them to the larger history of migration from Ottoman Trablus al-Gharb into Tunisia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. At the same time, it distinguishes them from other migrant communities because of the choice of Djerba, their religious and linguistic identities, and their almost unanimous decision to return home following independence. In recounting the stories of Nafusi migrants, I have likewise suggested that there is good reason to avoid making the events of colonialism the centerpiece of the region’s history. The Italian invasion was no doubt an important factor in the migration trajectory of Nafusis. Yet their example demonstrates how Maghribis in this period were moving for many reasons other than those connected to European imperialism. Tribal or familial ties across regions, pilgrimage, the pursuit of religious education, the search for work, and fleeing outbreaks of violence, plague, drought, or famine had all kept people on the move for hundreds of years before the advent of colonialism. Attention to local histories like this offers an opportunity to move beyond colonialism as the primary explanatory framework or the key chronological marker in Maghribi history.
Acknowledgments
Funding for the research and fieldwork on which this article is based was provided by a grant from the Programme Directeurs d’Etudes Associés, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris (2022) and a short-term grant from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (2023) in Djerba. The author wishes to thank friends and colleagues in Djerba for support in acquiring materials and setting up interviews, including Gacem Ben Yahyaten, Ali Boujdidi, Mahfoudh Dahman, Said El Barouni, and Zouhair Tighlet. So many thanks to my interview participants in Djerba, who generously shared their family stories. A special thanks to Nadia Mandouj at the Baladiyya of Houmt Souk in Djerba for access to the local archives. Thanks to Hiba Belhadj and Walid for help acquiring materials from the AUC Libraries in Cairo. In Tunis, thanks to Mohamed Bennani at the Beit el Bennani Library, Laryssa Chomiak, Lena Krause, and Luke Scalone at CEMAT, and the wonderful teams of the Archives nationales de Tunisie and the Bibliothèque Nationale de Tunisie. Unending thanks to Soufien Mestaoui and Slimane Tounsi at the Ibadica centre d’études et de recherche sur l’ibadisme in Paris for facilitating access to the rich collection of materials there. Thanks to Sean Hyland, Sahar Khamoosh, and Soufien Mestaoui for reading earlier drafts of the paper. The article also benefited from the materials collected during the Libraries of Nafusa project, supported by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung Patrimonies Funding Initiative project grant from 2021–23. Special thanks to Ali Mazawi, that project’s coordinator, and our entire team. At Al Akhawayn University, thank you to Imane Badda and Sean Hyland for reading materials with me about Libya and migration. So many thanks to my fellow SSAH Writing Group members for work-shopping an early version of this piece: Fouad Boulaid, Krishna Gajjar, Muneeb Gattoo, Naziha Houki, Djallil Lounnas, Fatima Matousse, Massimo Ramaioli, and Jeong-Ha Yim. Thank you (again) to Eric Ross for the maps used in the article. Finally, thanks to the IJMES editorial team and the anonymous reviewers, whose comments and questions pushed me to refine and strengthen many elements of the piece. All errors and shortcomings are entirely my own.
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