Episode: 116 — "An Obsession with the Past Will Help You Understand the Present — Ali Ahmida" · Full Episode #116
Language: Arabic, with English academic terminology
Professor Ali Abdullatif Ahmida (د. علي عبداللطيف احميدة) is a Libyan-American historian and Professor of Political Science at the University of New England, where he founded the Department of Political Science. He is the author of Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History (Routledge, January 2021), the first English-language scholarly book to document the Italian colonial genocide in Libya from 1929 to 1934 as genocide. His earlier works include The Making of Modern Libya (1994, revised 2009), Forgotten Voices (2005), and Post-Orientalism (2009).
He was born in the small oasis town of Al-Houn in the Jufra region of central Libya and raised in Sabha, the southern capital. His grandfathers on both sides were Senussi resistance fighters who fought the Italian colonial army. The book he wrote in his sixties is, in part, the recovery of the world they were born into and the violence that erased it.
Ahmida emigrated to the United States to pursue graduate study and remained there to build his academic career. His professional life sits inside the American university, but his fieldwork sits in eastern and southern Libya. For more than a decade, he returned every summer to interview survivors, families of survivors, and oral historians in the regions where the Italian camps operated — Al-Agila, Sluq, Al-Magrun, Al-Abyar, Al-Marj. He conducted his fieldwork primarily in colloquial Libyan Arabic and in poetry — much of the population's memory of the camps was preserved in oral verse rather than written record. The English academy had not asked the questions. The Libyan poets had answered them anyway, for a century.
Ahmida opened with the central question of his career: why is the Italian-Libyan genocide of 1929 to 1934 — in which roughly 60,000 Libyans died in concentration camps in Cyrenaica — almost entirely absent from European and global history of the twentieth century? His answer combined several lines: the Italian state never went through a denazification process after the Second World War, and the colonial archives were not opened and litigated as the Nazi archives were; the Libyan state under King Idris and then Gaddafi did not produce the kind of scholarly historiography that could have entered the global conversation in English; the survivors were Bedouin, illiterate by Western criteria, and their testimony was preserved in oral poetry rather than the document forms Western historians count as sources.
See: Italian Colonial Genocide
He described the Al-Agila concentration camp in detail. It was one of more than a dozen camps the Italian colonial administration built in 1929 to break the Cyrenaican resistance led by Omar Al-Mukhtar. The civilian populations of the Jebel Akhdar were forcibly displaced into the desert camps. Conditions were calibrated for slow killing: minimal food and water, exposure, mass executions, public hangings used as deterrent. The 60,000 figure represents the lower-bound demographic estimate of those who died in the camps and during the forced marches that fed them, against a Cyrenaican population of roughly 225,000 — making it, in proportional terms, one of the most extreme demographic events of the colonial twentieth century.
See: Al-Agila
One of the book's most consequential findings is documentary: Nazi planners studied the Italian-Libyan camp system as a working model when designing their own concentration camp architecture in the 1930s. The Italian camps preceded the Nazi camps by roughly a decade. The flow of administrative knowledge ran from Rome to Berlin, not the other way around. Ahmida argued that the standard global narrative — in which the Nazis are the originators and Italian fascism is a comic-opera junior partner — gets the chronology and the influence backwards in this specific domain.
He described the practical shape of more than ten years of summer fieldwork. He travelled to the towns and villages where the camps had stood, sat with the elderly and the grandchildren of survivors, and recorded the oral poetry that had carried the memory through the generations. He cross-referenced the poetry with the partial Italian colonial archive that had been opened, with regional church records, and with the small body of testimony that had reached print in Libya in the 1970s and 80s. The poetry, treated as evidence rather than ornament, supplied the names, the dates, and the camp routines that the colonial archive had recorded in a sanitised administrative language.
Ahmida's grandfathers on both sides were Senussi resistance fighters — members of the Sufi order that organised the armed and political opposition to Italian colonisation under Omar Al-Mukhtar. He did not present this as the explanation for his choice of subject. He presented it as a fact about the household memory he was raised inside. The book belongs to a continuous line of resistance — armed in his grandfathers' generation, poetic in the survivors' generation, scholarly in his own.
The episode's Arabic title — "An obsession with the past will help you understand the present" — is Ahmida's own formulation. The argument is structural. Libya's twenty-first-century pathologies — the weakness of the state, the absence of a national archive, the brittle relationship between region and centre, the contested status of the Senussi inheritance — are not free-floating dysfunctions. They sit on a hundred-year-old structural fracture produced by colonial genocide and never repaired. Refusing to look at the fracture is, in his framing, the surest way to keep replicating its effects.
"An obsession with the past will help you understand the present." (EP 116, episode title)