Jabal Nafusah

The Berber presence on the Jabal Nafusah plateau predates by far the arrival of Arabs in North Africa. It was in these isolated mountains that Berber communities found refuge and managed to preserve their own language and customs while the coast became Arabized.

In the seventh century, when the first disagreements arose over how Islam's religious leadership should be chosen, a group broke away from the mainstream and gave rise to Ibadism. The doctrine found fertile ground among the Berbers of northwest Africa, who saw in it a way to keep their distance from both the Arab conquerors and the dominant Sunni Islam. Jabal Nafusah became one of the most enduring strongholds of this tradition, a role the region still holds today.

Life on the plateau has always depended on the ability to draw a living from dry, rocky soil. Families grow olive, fig, apricot and palm trees, and raise goats and sheep on the hillsides. The olive harvest and olive oil production remain central activities in the villages’ calendar.

The ancient rock-cut houses, though less inhabited today than in the past, still mark the landscape and the collective memory of the people. Communal life revolves around the village and the mosque, with a strong sense of belonging to a place and a history that sets them apart from the Arabs of the coast.

The Nafusi are entirely Muslim, but follow Ibadism, a minority branch of Islam distinct from both Sunni and Shia Islam. For them, Ibadi affiliation is not merely a religious choice: it is part of their very Berber identity, a sign that they resisted the assimilation that erased other ethnic groups in North Africa.

This combination of ethnicity and doctrine makes the Islamic faith deeply intertwined with the pride of being Nafusi. Abandoning Islam, in this logic, would mean breaking not only with a belief but with the community itself and its long history of resistance.

The Nafusi language already has some Scripture portions translated, but the complete New Testament and the whole Bible do not yet exist in this language. For a people who so carefully preserve their Berber speech, hearing and reading the Word in their own language, not only in Arabic, would be a decisive step for the Scriptures to stop sounding like something foreign.

Among the Nafusi, Berber identity, Ibadi tradition and Islam form a single fabric: questioning the faith is seen as betraying one’s own ethnicity and the memory of resistance it carries. The plateau’s geographic isolation, the instability Libya has faced in recent years, and the near total absence of complete Scriptures in the people’s language make first contact with the gospel extremely rare.

The instability affecting Libya as a whole also reaches Jabal Nafusah, bringing uncertainty about security, governance and economic future for families who depend on subsistence farming. There is a real need for stability and governance that protects communities like this one.

In the spiritual realm, the need is nearly total: there is no known Christian community among the Nafusi, nor a complete Scripture in their own language. A people who have preserved their unique identity for centuries still waits for someone to tell them of Christ in the language they learned in the cradle.