Baruni Al-, Suleiman Basha

   He was a prominent Ibadithe Libyan Berber and a former member of the Ottoman parliament who proclaimed an independent but short-lived Berber state in the Gharyan region. Al-Baruni was from Fesatto in Jabal Nafusa and was a historian of North Africa and Islam. In 1908, on the eve of Italian colonial adventures into Libya, he was elected to represent Tripolitania in the Ottoman parliament. Suspected of harboring designs for an independent Ibadithe region in the western mountains, he was imprisoned for his subversive activism during the rule of Abdulhamid. When war broke out between Italy and the Ottomans, al-Baruni took the side of the latter. In 1916, he was rewarded with the governorship of Tripolitania, Tunisia, and Algeria. He was a member of the ruling Council of Four of the 1918 Tripoli Republic, and he allied himself with the Italians after the promulgation of the Legge Fondamantale and visited Rome to celebrate its announcement. The Italians, suspicious of his motives and desires for a separate Ibadithe province, considered his endorsement of the Tripoli Republic as merely tactical.

   The Italian policy of dividing the Berbers of Jabal Nefusa from their Arab countrymen resulted in a civil war in the early months of 1921. By the end of the summer of 1921, most of the Berber population had taken refuge in coastal areas under Italian control. Blamed by Berbers for the unrest and its consequences, al-Baruni's career as a nationalist and politician came to an end. In November 1921, he left Libya and traveled to France, Egypt, Turkey, and Mecca before settling down in Oman, where he was appointed finance minister. He died in 1940 in Muscat, Oman. He was the author of an important manuscript on one of the major Ibadithe Imam titled al azhar al riyadhiyyah fi a'imma wa muluk al `ibadhiyya.

   See also Kharijism.