The sanūsiyya is one of the most remarkable "opposition movements" of the modern era (by the standards of early Islam), and has survived by undergoing significant changes in the course of its single century. Although we now possess a number of contemporary accounts, in earlier times it attracted regrettably little attention from researchers and in the more important publications (Ph. K. Hitti, Marshall G.S. Hodgson, I. Lapidus, A. Hourani and the historical work edited by U. Hermann, and even in the anonymous article in EI) it was only mentioned in passing. The reason for this is obviously that in former times present-day Libya consisted of three parts – Tripolitania, Cyrenaica (Arabic: Barqa) and Fazzān – which often, even politically, belonged elsewhere; their history was therefore generally not discussed as either that of the Maghrib or the Mashriq. One of the historical achievements of the sanūsiyya, if not the most important one, was that it was able to unite those territories and the tribes that lived there. At first, however – in contrast to the wahhābiyya – that was only as opportunity arose, and only came onto the agenda during its subsequent development, not least as a reaction to various external influences. The peculiar changes of shape of the sanūsiyya were as much the result of the features of the "environment" (the Arab-Berber ethnic and cultural differences, varieties of lifestyle, and the domination of tribal organisation) as of the initiative of the "Great Sanūsi" Muhammad ibn cAlī as-Sanūsí al-Khattábī (22 December 1787 – 7 September 1859) and his special connections (his descent lay through Hasan b. cAlī to the Prophet) and from the fact that initially – this was at least one of his motivations – he too wanted to return to the ways of early Islam, based on the Koran and the prophetic tradition.2 But although certain features were shared with wahhābiyya (e.g. the "opening of the gates" of ijtihād, and at one point his preaching of jihād) sanūsiyya followed an essentially different course, and from that it followed (on this see in more detail my essay "Sūfism and fundamentalism") that a determining part of his doctrine and organisational structure were most closely linked to his own brand of sūfism. As early as in his native Algeria (he lived there until 1805), and then in Fez (1805–20) he became a member of the Shādziliyya, Nāsiriyya, Darqāwiyya and Tīdjāniyya tarīqas; then in Mecca, as is well known, he became a favourite disciple of the Maroccan sūfī Ahmad ibn cAbd Allāh b. Idrīs al-Fāsī (c.1749-1837), and when his master moved to Yemen around 1827 he became his khalīfa in Mecca. He must have adopted several of his substantial later teachings (the rejection of taqlīd, blind imitation of earlier opinions, the free use of the four orthodox schools of religious law, and ijtihād, freedom to hold independent views on religious law) from his very influential master. It was essentially after the death of his master that he began to devise his own system and to put it into practice, the stages of which are familiar.3 The sanūsi zāwiya illustrates better than anything how flexibly the spiritual and institutional devices of sūfism met the extremely varied demands of the tribal environment, which at the same time had a most active reciprocal and formative effect. The "Great Sanūsi's" concept of sūfism is interesting. We have mentioned that even in his youth he had visited numerous tarīqas, and his master in Mecca, Ibn Idrīs, must have further strengthened this toleration in his disciples, as they founded a variety of tarīqas.4 Muhammad ibn cAlī as-Sanūsí worked in unequalled fashion to unify the various tarīqas in tune with the most profound spirituality of sūfism: he devoted one of his nine books (as-Salsabíl al-macīn fí’t-tarā’iq al-arbacīn = "The bountiful source to the forty tarīqas”5) to this question and tried to show that there are numerous (he listed forty) ways and roads to the discovery of the truth, but that each of them leads to the same, one and indivisible truth (although he was aware that the practice of several tarīqas was less than perfect, he did not censure them but spoke well of the good that there was in them) and furthermore he tried, in the spirit of al-Ghazālī, to bring about a reconciliation between the experts on religion and the sūfis; as we know, after the mild hostility of the neohanbalites to sūfism wahhābiyya rejected it instantly. That, of course, did not come about, and the negative attitude of the former to sanūsiyya was further deepened because the latter revived ijtihād in contrast to taklīd, and used the four orthodox schools of religious law freely and arbitrarily.