Amazigh, Zuwarah

The Zuwara Amazigh are the Berber people of Zuwara (Zuwarah, Zwara), a town on the Mediterranean coast 100 km west of Tripoli and 60 km from the Tunisian border: the only Amazigh town on the Libyan coast. They call themselves At Willul (Ait Willoul) and their town Tamort, "the land", and their speech Twillult. Zuwara Berber is usually filed as a dialect of Nafusi (jbn), the language of the Nafusa Mountains, but linguists such as Maarten Kossmann place it in a different branch of Berber, and Glottolog groups it with the speech of Sened in Tunisia; it was described by Terence Mitchell in a grammar and texts. Like the Nafusa Amazigh they are Ibadi Muslims, neither Sunni nor Shia.

The site has been settled since antiquity; the Arab traveller al-Tijani described two Zuwaras, Little and Great, around 1307, and a Catalan sailing guide of 1375 names the headland. Under Qadhafi the town's language was banned from schools and public life, and in 2006 about 45,000 hectares of its coastal land were seized for a free-trade zone. Zuwara rose against Qadhafi in February 2011, was among the first towns to elect its own council, and since then has made Tamazight a school subject, opened Libya's first Tamazight radio station and a university Tamazight department. The Zuwarans are a community of their own, distinct from the mountain Amazigh in speech and history though allied with them in Amazigh politics.

Zuwara is a fishing and trading town of whitewashed houses, palm gardens and long beaches, with Farwa island and its lagoon to the west. Families are close-knit and marry largely within the town. Old customs set Zuwara apart: Awessu, a summer sea festival in which people bathe and throw sea water to the sky, is thought to go back to pre-Islamic rites, and Juggeej, a summer gathering at a seaside saint's tomb, honours a holy ancestor with sacrifice. At Yennayer, the Amazigh New Year in January, families cook tamoqtal (wheat with lentils, peas and dried mutton) and ellousa, a paste of dried onion, tomato and pepper in olive oil. Since 2011 the town has had Tamazight classes in its schools (about 60 teachers in 26 schools in 2023), Kasas FM radio and Tamazight graduates of the University of Zuwara, and Amazigh flags and Tifinagh signs are everywhere.

Most Zuwarans are Ibadi Muslims: they pray with arms at their sides, keep plain mosques and follow the Ibadi scholars of the Nafusa and Djerba, as the Nafusa Amazigh do. Zuwara also keeps saint veneration alongside its Ibadi practice: the tombs of pious men, such as Sidi Said, receive vows and sacrifices, a tradition studied by Luigi Serra (1971), and the sea festival of Awessu survives from older beliefs. A small Salafi current in the town has damaged shrines, and the official religious authorities have denounced Ibadism, by a fatwa of the eastern government in 2017 and a statement of Tripoli's Dar al-Ifta in 2024; the town answered with protests, and defence of the Ibadi faith is now part of its Amazigh identity.

No Scripture, Jesus Film or audio exists in Zuwara Berber. Gospel portions in related Berber varieties of Tunisia (the Jerbi of Djerba and a "Jbali" variety) are on YouVersion, and Global Recordings Network lists a Zuara variety of Nafusi without confirmed recordings. Libyan Arabic resources (Scripture portions and the Jesus Film) are understood by every Zuwaran. No church or known believer among the Zuwara Amazigh is reported.