Italy's invasion of Libya in 1911 produced no consensus on how the subsequent task of ruling ‘Libyans’ should be done in practice. The conquest was imbued with rhetoric which proclaimed that the local Arabs were gratefully waiting to be liberated from their hated Turkish overlords or, more often, which simply ignored them in the excitement that Italy was about to come into possession of an unlimited bounty of appetising and empty land. However, the indigenous population did not greet the invader with open arms and most emphatically failed to disappear at Italy's earliest convenience. It also became evident that the country's military was not up to the task of actually imposing Italian rule beyond the coastal cities. Italy was forced to the negotiating table in an attempt to win some kind of accommodation with indigenous organisations and power brokers who remained very much in control of the vast hinterlands of the Italian ‘Fourth Shore’. In the face of these conditions and their own lack of preparedness, Italian Libya's would-be rulers had to climb a steep learning curve. Demonstrating an astonishing command of its complex subject matter, Eileen Ryan's excellent book investigates that learning curve and endeavours to shed light on what she calls the ‘negotiation of authority’.

Ryan subjects both sides in the ‘negotiation’ to her considerable analytical powers. We find on one side of the table a succession of Italian ministers, governors, soldiers, and experts who, apart from responding to changing local conditions, were swayed by the dramatic political vicissitudes taking place in Italy itself – the First World War, the democratic turn in its wake, the rise of Fascism, and the establishment of Mussolini's dictatorship. Their interlocutor on the other side, or at least the one that Ryan concentrates on, was the Sanusiyya order, the Muslim brotherhood whose reach spread well beyond the territory of the Italian colony. The Sanusiyya, Ryan shows, also changed over time in response to transformations in the Arab world and the Middle East brought about by the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the First World War, and the intensification of anti-colonial struggles. The great strength of the book is Ryan's unflinching refusal to see the coloniser and the colonised as monolithic in their essence or as unchanging over time. Italian policy never settled before the 1930s and it approached the Sanusiyya in bewildering, sometimes overlapping, permutations, ranging from deadly enemy to potential partner. From the Sanusi point of view the Italians too were never just infidel invaders to be resisted to the last drop of blood. Nor at any given moment did Italy or the Muslim order speak with one voice. On both sides there were always those advocating for a hard line and others for accommodation; there were people ‘on the spot’, others in faraway Rome or Cairo. Personal rivalries, such as that between Ahmad al-Sharif and Idris al-Sanusi added to the cacophony.

Further entangling this already complex and contradictory positioning which both Italy and the Sanusiyya sought to present in relation to each other, Ryan emphasises religion. This is not so unexpected when it comes to analysing the Sanusiyya's stances – we and Italians of that era simply presume that for the brotherhood, government and religion were natural partners – but Ryan seeks to view Italy in the same terms. In ‘challenging assumptions of a neat division between a secular Europe and a religious North Africa’ (p. 8), Ryan argues that for Italy the potential choice of positioning itself as an impartial secular arbiter came up against the ever more pronounced Catholic identity assumed by Italy, and Fascist Italy in particular. According to Ryan, the centrality of Libya as a place where Church and state came together in an experiment for the kind of italianità that Fascism was increasingly fostering in Italy spelled the end of the Sanusiyya as an Italian interlocutor. As the cathedral of Tripoli was completed in 1928, Italy decided to crush rather than talk with the Muslim brotherhood. Ryan's study therefore argues that we must regard the brutal ‘reconquest’ of the following years not so much as ‘Fascist’, but rather as guided by a new italianità in which Fascism and Catholicism came together in a murderous partnership.

It is an exciting and penetrating argument. But because, apart from a few flashforwards, we are given only a very summary perspective on the 1930s, it is difficult to see in what ways this partnership was cemented over time. Were there tensions and differing views between Catholics and Fascists as to what was going on? How involved was the Church in the slaughter and deportations of 1930–1931? Did it ever raise its voice in protest? The Sanusiyya, as Ryan concludes, was no longer in the picture for Italy, but there remained Muslims in Libya, albeit in Cyrenaica much reduced in number. Some kind of negotiation with them presumably took place. Did Catholicism, Fascism, or both foster mass conversion, absolute apartheid, or simply the eventual extinction of Libyan Islam?

Ryan ends her stimulating study with a reference to that evergreen issue of crucifixes in Italian public buildings, considering a campaign in the early 2000s by an Italian Muslim who sought to have them removed from his sons’ classroom walls. For Ryan the outcry this provoked among ‘public figures’ across the nation ‘testified to the fact that the link between Catholicism and italianità had been naturalised to the extent that an effort to accommodate a broader understanding of who counts as Italian seemed to many to be a fundamental attack on the nation’ (p. 172). If that is the case, how much it has to do with Italy's experience of colonialism in Libya awaits the sequel to Ryan's exceptionally significant and brilliantly told story. Hopefully she will oblige.