Episode: 42 · Guest: Nader Al-Qadi · Full Episode #42
After the fall of the Gaddafi regime in 2011, armed groups in Libya launched a systematic campaign of destruction against Sufi shrines, mosques, and burial sites. The campaign was ideologically driven: Salafi and jihadist factions viewed Sufi practices — the veneration of saints, the visiting of tombs, the mystical traditions within Islam — as heretical innovations that contradicted their interpretation of monotheism.
Nader Al-Qadi documented the campaign as a photojournalist. His photographs recorded the physical destruction: centuries-old tombs dug up, mosques demolished, libraries burned, sites of worship reduced to rubble. The violence was not spontaneous. It was organised, targeted, and carried out with equipment — bulldozers, explosives — that indicated planning and resources.
The anti-Sufi campaign was one of the earliest signals that post-revolutionary Libya would not consolidate around a single political or ideological direction. The revolution had been broadly secular in its initial demands — dignity, freedom, the end of dictatorship. The destruction of Sufi heritage revealed that some of the armed groups who had participated in the revolution had a very different vision for what would replace the old regime.
Sufism has deep roots in Libyan culture. The Senussi order, which played a central role in Libyan resistance to Italian colonialism and from which King Idris emerged, was itself a Sufi brotherhood. The destruction of Sufi sites was therefore not only a religious act but an erasure of a strand of Libyan history that predated and would outlast the factions doing the destroying.
Nader's documentation of the campaign was an act of preservation through record. The sites could not be saved. But the photographs ensure that their destruction is documented and attributable.