King Idris I of Libya
Idris was the only king Libya ever had, and he took the throne reluctantly and lost it while abroad. He was born in 1889, the grandson of the founder of the Senussi order, a Sufi brotherhood that had spread across the Sahara in the nineteenth century and functioned as a network of lodges, schools and caravan stations rather than as a state. He led the Senussi resistance to the Italian occupation from 1917, went into exile in Egypt in 1922 when Mussolini's forces began the pacification of Cyrenaica, and spent the Second World War organising a Libyan Arab Force alongside the British. Libya was created by the United Nations in 1951 out of three provinces — Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and the Fezzan — that had almost nothing in common, and Idris accepted a federal crown as the one figure acceptable in all three. The country was among the poorest in the world, exporting scrap metal from the desert battlefields, until oil was found in 1959. The revenues transformed the state's income and almost nothing else. Corruption was general, the monarchy remained a Cyrenaican and Senussi institution in a country whose population was mostly urban and Tripolitanian, and the British and American bases were increasingly resented after 1967. He was seventy-nine and had been trying to abdicate for years. Gaddafi's coup came in September 1969 while he was in Turkey taking a cure. He died in Cairo in 1983. The state he accepted has arguably not existed since. Libya was assembled out of three provinces by an international organisation, held together by a monarchy and then by a dictatorship, and has been fought over by rival governments in the east and west since 2011.
- Lived: 1889 CE – 1983 CE
- Nationality: Libyan
- Roles: King of Libya (1951-1969), Emir of Cyrenaica (1920-1951)
