A disaster foretold: Leone Caetani, Italy’s invasion of Libya and the Afghan crisis
Leone Caetani circa 1915 (Alamy)
The withdrawal from Afghanistan has evoked comparisons with the American airlift out of Saigon in 1975 or the British retreat from Kabul in 1842. A more instructive precedent might be Italy ’ s invasion of Libya in 1911.
Not only did the Italian invasion presage the progress of Nato ’ s occupation of Afghanistan, it also prompted the Italian orientalist, Leone Caetani, to write an essay in 1912 that merits rereading today.
Italian Libya
Italy was a latecomer to European encroachments on the empire of the Ottomans.
If Britain had acquired Cyprus and France prised away Tunisia, then surely, the Italian government thought, Italy was entitled to claim an Ottoman province situated across so narrow strait of the Mediterranean. Against a backdrop of patriotic fervour, an Italian expeditionary corps set out in September 1911.
Detractors of this venture were few. The most prominent, Leone Caetani, was a member of parliament, where he cast a vote against the government. So stung was the Italian Prime Minister of the day that he issued a public rebuke.
Italian troops descended on Libya and prevailed over the Ottoman forces through deployment of high-tech assets, such as aircraft. Indeed, the Libyan campaign was the first instance of aerial bombing used to break enemy morale. By October 1912 the Italian high command was in a position to declare “mission accomplished”. The former Ottoman province was renamed Italian Libya.
But from then on, things no longer went as planned.
Shock waves swept through Italy and beyond when news trickled out of Libya that insurgents had overrun and massacred a garrison in Sciara-Sciat . There were estimates of more than 500 casualties. Italy retaliated against the insurgency and increased its military presence over successive decades, escalating troop numbers from 20,000 to 100,000. But increases in deployment showed weakness rather than strength and Italian power never extended beyond the perimeter of their heavily garrisoned colonies.
Skirmishes and reprisals took a heavy toll on the country. Half a million Italians settled in the Libyan colonies, mainly in Tripoli and Benghazi, but most left in 1947. When Libya gained full independence in 1951, it still had approximately the same population as in 1911: just over 1 million. Today, despite poverty, misrule and civil war, it is 6.7 million.
Leone Caetani ’ s objections to the Libyan campaign had riled the Italian government on two counts. Caetani (1869-1935) came from a family prominent in Italian politics, and he and his brother were deputies in parliament and sons of a former foreign secretary. But Caetani ’ s authority rested also on his distinction in another area, for he was one of the world ’ s most distinguished scholars of Islamic history.
His 1912 essay La fonction d’Islam dans l’évolution de la civilisation appeared at a moment when Italy ’ s Libyan disaster could no longer be concealed.
Caetani explained that Europe’s relationship with Islam was dysfunctional and rooted in the deepest layers of European culture. Europeans from their earliest history gloried in having imposed their hegemony over Asians.
The European sense of selfhood, he wrote, was shaped by memories of the sack of Troy, Alexander the Great’s destruction of Persia, and the Roman conquest of the Middle East. Western conceitedness was a contributing factor, for Caetani, in the lightning speed with which Islam routed the Byzantine Empire. As Caetani pointed out, in Asia and Africa Islam never encountered significant insurrections.
Welcomed by the peoples of the Near East and Northern Africa, who longed to throw off the yoke of Western hegemony, Islam was a “social revolution on a global scale”.
Europeans ignored the lessons of history at their peril and had still to learn the lessons of the crusades. They seemed oblivious that the panoply of material goods exported to Islamic societies – “railroads, hotels, shipping routes, telephone and telegraph lines, schools, roads, agricultural technology” – that all these felt like crusaders in disguise. “Every day,” wrote Caetani of the West, “it offends the feelings of people who see their most cherished characteristics immersed in the dissolving acid of our culture and they resent, through instinctive intuition, the threat of being reduced to a uniform, human mass, adapted to produce wealth for the more powerful nations beyond the sea.”’
Caetani’s essay merits rereading because of the contrast between his frame of reference and that of many comments on the current retreat from Kabul. Over the past century there has been a vast expansion of resources dedicated to studying Islamic societies and to calibrating and re-calibrating trajectories of social progress. But it seems that over that period the focus of Western historical memory has narrowed rather than widened. Otherwise it is hard to explain the omission of ignoring the warning Leone Caetani wrote in 1912:
“In the West, one can scarcely appreciate how much ancient traditional religions have lost their hold over souls; in the East, however, Islam has not only maintained, but extended its sway and gathers secret awesome reserves of anti-European passion that one day, once the time is right, will emerge, take shape, and perhaps come forward as collective action of resistance and preservation.”
Caetani ’ s essay drew attention in Italy and abroad, and soon there appeared a version in French. That it still awaits publication in English seems telling.
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