Selective heritage and the politicity of Libya’s history textbooks

Outside of The Libyan Center for Archives & Historical Studies ^[1] in Tripoli, a friendly masked worker notified me that the center was closed to patrons due to COVID-19 restrictions and that I should return when the cases drop. I took the opportunity to inquire about school textbooks and books on politics produced by the Green Book Center ^[2], and if they are housed inside the Center. The worker replied, “All Green Book Center books were moved in August [2011] to Sirte, Ouagadougou Hall ^[3]. All the books got burned because of the NATO bombings” (Elkorghli 2021). I decided to visit the other branch in Benghazi located on “Nasser” Street, only to find that the street name had been changed to “Independence” Street and the Jamal Abdel Nasser’s statue overlooking the street had been demolished, while the center was temporarily closed.

This illustrative interaction took place in 2021, upon my first return to Libya since 2015 (due to studies and travel restrictions on Libyans by the US). That return marked the completion of the first year of PhD where I initially intended to conduct my doctoral research on the history of Libya (1951-2021) told through its school textbooks. I sought to collect 70 years of textbooks from different school years and wanted to analyze their content, which was a daunting task, given the array of texts and the difficulty of finding textbooks from various eras. While I managed to collect some from the Libyan Arab Republic (1969-1977) and the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya era (1977-2011), the books were confiscated at the airport before my departure at the end of 2021 summer, due to an accusation by the airport security that I am propagating ‘outmoded’ and ‘dictatorial’ ideas.

Given the issues of scarcity, access to old texts, and red flags raised because of the politicity of such research, I refocused the research on how geopolitics are shaping Libya’s contemporary state ideology and consequently the politics of textbooks and what gets included in them, how historical events are articulated, and who influences such decisions (the state, the deep state, foreign actors, etc.). This interest stems from an oft-repeated, and more importantly, ill-conceived, understanding that the era of ideology is over – a mantra often repeated by liberals who promulgated regime changes in the region when they stood at the opposite side of the spectrum where they framed Pan-Arabism and leadership by popular ideology as no longer appealing, and that we are in a post-ideological moment (see Bayat 2017).

Anecdotally, this understanding of ideology does not fit what happened in Libya post-NATO-led regime change, when the non-/post-ideological groups took over the country. While I was in high school, 2010-2011, we had textbooks that explicitly espoused Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, and Third World Nationalism which promoted ideas of national liberation, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and anti-reactionism. In the year following the regime change, the National Transitional Council could not hurriedly rewrite the textbooks. As a less appealing option than using the same textbooks of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (LAJ), they resorted to merely folding the unwanted pages of LAJ history textbooks that lionized the aforementioned revolutionary ideals, especially the parts that were critical of the Libyan monarchy (1951-1969), while the other sections remained untouched because they do not contradict the post-LAJ politics.

In early 2012, the Minister of Education stated that “All historical eras will be presented objectively, without propaganda,” and promised that the textbooks would mention the LAJ era, where he added that “Our work at the ministry is to include everybody, whether they are against or for the [2011] revolution… We do not exclude or isolate people. They are all part of the new Libya” (Gillis 2012). However, that never happened. This indicates, contrary to those who frame their politics as non-ideological, that ideology is still apparent in the politics of textbooks, and that the act of standing against ideologically charged textbooks and replacing them with more diluted, less penchant terminology and lacking nuanced historical articulations is also ideological. Further, the act of folding pages from our history pages just because they do not fit the current narrative of political events and desired school children’s upbringing shows how history, ideology, and heritage are never constant. They are malleable to change and reconfiguration constantly, as long as there are people monopolizing who write “official knowledge” that ends up in school textbooks, especially in contexts with centralized education systems, like Libya.

There is an ongoing battle within Libya’s school textbooks as to how to revisit our history so that it fits the current conjuncture. At face value, if one examines the content of the current 2023-2024 textbooks and compares how the same events are articulated in the 2009-2010 textbooks, the colossal difference between the two can insinuate that these books are not produced in different states, but in completely different countries. For example:

There are two key distinctions between the two eras and their textbooks. One pertains to how similar events are articulated and the other how much historical coverage each undertakes as they relate to Libya’s history. The examples in the table indicate that there has been a drastic shift in how the respective Libyan states (pre-2011 and post-2011) have differing views on colonialism, neocolonialism, and regional politics, and how to analyze them. Whereas one espouses national sovereignty and anti-imperialist analysis of wars that broke out in the region and Ottoman presence, the latter glorifies Ottoman history in Libya, equating it with Islam, and their analysis of the same war of 1956 is anti-Semitic. The second distinction is their coverage. While the 2009-2010 books cover Libya’s history from ancient times to the era that the books were produced, the history of Libya for the 2023-2024 books stops at 1969, leaving Libyan pupils not exposed to the last 50 years or so of Libya’s history. In fact, much of the current textbooks cover more of the Ottoman history in Libya and the region than Libya’s history post-1951 independence.

The selective coverage of history and the negligence of other historical events is also gaining much attention. In May 2023, a Libyan Facebook group with more than 1 million followers (a substantial number given that Libya’s population is nearing 7 million) posted ^[4], “For anyone who checked today’s questions for the 9th-grade final exam will know that our students are learning Ottoman history more than the Turks themselves!! #for_whose_benefit”. How did this come about that Libyans are learning more about Ottoman history than Libya’s history?

During a dialogue with one of the workers at the center responsible for authoring and producing Libya’s textbooks, I inquired about the abundance of Ottoman history. He replied, “There is a committee in Turkey that tells us [the center] what to write and cover”. I asked, “Does not the center have control over what is to be covered and how it is covered?” He answered, “Not really. We are forced to listen to them” (Elkorghli 2021). Though I could sense his anti-Ottoman sentimentality from our conversation and not just his answers, which made me question the authenticity of his answers given his position on Ottoman historic presence in Libya. However, there is in fact a Turkish influence on Libya, politically, economically, and educationally. In an article titled, Are Libyan Turks Ankara’s Trojan horse? The author notes that there is a Turkish-Libyan Koroglu Association “which aims to revive the Ottoman legacy in North Africa… [r]cognize the Koroglus as Turks and grant them citizenship rights… push for a committee to work on rectifying distortions about the Ottomans in the school curriculum” (Tastekin 2019). These very Trojan horses of Ankara have made military and border agreements such that since November 2019, Libya and Türkiye share maritime borders. While Libya’s textbooks are still stuck in the past and don’t cover what has been happening, recently Türkiye added this agreement and the redefinition of borders to their school curriculum (Kostidis 2024).

Given the war that is plaguing Europe between Russia and Ukraine, one can only notice the amount of intentional erasure (e.g., demolishment of statues, change of street names, banning of canonical Russian literature, etc.) being done by numerous European countries so that their history no longer recognizes Russia’s contributions to humanity, especially World War II. Influential international entities, such as the European Union and NATO, demand before accession that history textbooks to include the Holocaust but from a Western-aligned perspective, as opposed to the Soviet one (see Beresniova 2014). Similarly, in Libya, though not because of EU and NATO influences, WWII is viewed as a grand war between Nazi Germany and Italy on one side, and the allied forces of just the UK, US, and France on the other. No mention of the Soviet Union and their sacrifice of more than 28 million people that had perished fighting the Nazis. One of my interlocutors who worked on the history textbooks that covered WWII told me that the initial draft included the Soviet Union’s contributions to WWII, but Dar Al-Ifta (Fatwa Council) and their security forces approached the curriculum center and told them to erase anything that speaks positively about the Soviet Union (Elkorghli 2024). Dar Al-Ifta is largely aligned with Türkiye and the Muslim Brotherhood politics. And given the turbulent history between Pan-Arabs and the Communists on the one hand, and the Islamists (particularly the Muslim Brotherhood) on the other, it becomes clear that the latter, as it gained power and influence in Libya, will be erasing traces of Soviet history altogether.

These instances of silences and selective coverage of history that is done un-thematically and un-chronologically speak to how the politics of post-2011 Libya are not just confined to disputing factions who are running the country, it has true consequences on how Libya’s history and heritage will be handled. There is a tendency of domesticating faraway history for the present conjuncture (e.g. glorifying Ottoman history due to current ties to present-day Türkiye) so the past can project the present and legitimize it. Throughout Arabs’ history, this has been repeated. As Samir Amin wrote, “The Arabs… placed their origin in Islam. In this process, they had to erase from their heritage the contributions made by the civilizations of the ancient Orient, treated as Jahiiliya, i.e., as irreligious times” (Amin 2010, p. 67). Contemporary Libya is doing the same because it is treating its recent history of Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, and national liberation as dead ideas that are not to be interpellated. After all, erasing Libya’s recent history will cut it off from any basic understanding of the present, let alone its heritage.