Omar al-Mukhtar and the Airplanes Under the Throne

There is a famous story about Omar al-Mukhtar (عُمَر الْمُخْتَار), the Libyan resistance leader who spent years fighting the Italian occupation. It involves an old man, some very modern airplanes, the Throne of God, and two short Arabic sentences that do an astonishing amount of rhetorical work.

There is only one problem.

We do not actually know whether Omar al-Mukhtar said them.

That makes the story more interesting, not less. Because now we get three things for the price of one: a remarkable episode of modern Arab history, a small Arabic grammar laboratory, and a lesson in how quotations turn into legends.

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Who Was Omar al-Mukhtar?

If you ask a random person in Europe or the United States about Omar al-Mukhtar, there is a fair chance you will get a blank stare. In Libya and across much of the Arab world, the name is anything but obscure.

Al-Mukhtar became one of the great symbols of resistance to Italian colonial rule in Libya. He fought the Italian occupation from its early years and eventually became the central military leader of the Senussi resistance in Cyrenaica (بَرْقَة). The Italians captured him in September 1931. Days later, they hanged him.

He is remembered as the “Lion of the Desert” (أَسَدُ الصَّحْرَاءِ) and as “Shaykh of the Martyrs” (شَيْخُ الشُّهَدَاءِ). His portrait has appeared on Libyan currency, his name went onto streets and institutions, and in 1981 Anthony Quinn played him in a film that turned him into an international cinematic icon.

But before the rifles, the ambushes, and Anthony Quinn, there was a teacher.

Al-Mukhtar belonged to the Senussi order (السِّنُوسِيَّة), the powerful religious and social network that shaped much of eastern Libya. He studied in its institutions, taught in its zāwiyas (زاوية), knew the tribal landscape of Cyrenaica extremely well, and acquired military experience before the Italian invasion. He had spent time with the Senussi movement farther south, in the region of Wadai and present-day Chad, where Senussi forces were confronting French expansion.

So the popular picture of a harmless elderly Quran teacher who suddenly picked up a rifle in his fifties is a little too cinematic. The teacher was real. So was the Quranic education. But so was the previous experience of armed conflict.

Mukhtar Does Not Mean Omar Was “the Chosen One”

There is a tempting little etymological story hiding in the name مُخْتَار.

It comes from:

اِخْتَارَ – يَخْتَارُ

ikhtāra – yakhtāru

to choose, select

And now Arabic gives us a small morphological bonus.

Because اِخْتَارَ is a hollow Form VIII verb, its active and passive participles (اِسْمُ الْمَفْعُولِ) collapse into the same surface form: مُخْتَار.

Depending on context, مُخْتَار can therefore mean either choosing or chosen. As a personal name, Mukhtār is conventionally understood in the latter sense: chosen or selected.

The word belongs to the root خ-ي-ر, the same family that gives us خَيْر, goodness or better, and خِيَار, choice.

So can we poetically translate Omar al-Mukhtar as “Omar the Chosen One”?

No. Nice try.

Mukhtār was his father’s name. It was not an epithet bestowed on Omar. The morphology is real; the heroic interpretation is ours.

The Airplanes and the Throne

Now to the famous story.

By the final years of the resistance, Omar al-Mukhtar’s fighters faced an enemy with enormous technological superiority. The Italians had aircraft, artillery, motorized units, radio communications, and vastly greater resources.

In the popular Arabic version of the anecdote, someone points to the obvious problem: Italy has airplanes. The Libyans do not.

Al-Mukhtar supposedly replies:

أَتُحَلِّقُ فَوْقَ الْعَرْشِ أَمْ تَحْتَهُ؟

A-tuḥalliqu fawqa al-ʿarshi am taḥtahu?

“Do they fly above the Throne or below it?”

The answer, naturally, is: below it.

Then comes the line for which the whole anecdote exists:

مَنْ فَوْقَ الْعَرْشِ مَعَنَا، فَلَا يُخِيفُنَا مَا تَحْتَهُ.

Man fawqa al-ʿarshi maʿanā, fa-lā yukhīfunā mā taḥtahu.

“The One who is above the Throne is with us, so what is beneath it does not frighten us.”

It is an excellent line.

It may also be a legend.

Did He Actually Say It?

The safest answer is: we cannot establish that he did.

The anecdote circulates widely in modern Arabic writing, sermons, speeches, newspaper columns, and social media. But the exact dialogue is not securely documented in the major historical accounts of al-Mukhtar’s life that I could trace. Different versions also change the speaker, the wording, and even whether the final sentence contains مَا تَحْتَهُ or مَنْ تَحْتَهُ.

That is usually a warning light for quotation hunters. When a sentence comes in several polished variants but no one can produce an early source, quotation marks should be handled with care.

Some later versions identify the man speaking with al-Mukhtar as al-Sharif al-Ghariyani (الشَّرِيف الْغَرْيَانِي). That detail is at least historically plausible. Al-Ghariyani really was involved as an intermediary in Italian attempts to negotiate with al-Mukhtar in 1929. But a real meeting does not automatically authenticate every sentence later attached to it.

So let us call the airplane exchange what the evidence allows us to call it: a famous anecdote attributed to Omar al-Mukhtar.

And now that the quotation marks have been properly disinfected, we can enjoy the Arabic.

Analysis of the Grammar

أَتُحَلِّقُ: Why Is the Verb Feminine Singular?

The first word packs two pieces together:

أَ + تُحَلِّقُ

The first أَ is هَمْزَةُ الِاسْتِفْهَام, the interrogative hamza. It turns the sentence into a question.

تُحَلِّقُ means flies or soars. The implied subject is الطَّائِرَاتُ, the airplanes.

In Arabic, الطَّائِرَاتُ is plural, but it is a non-human plural. In standard Arabic, non-human plurals regularly take feminine singular agreement.

So we get:

الطَّائِرَاتُ تُحَلِّقُ

The airplanes fly.

Not تُحَلِّقُونَ, not يُحَلِّقُونَ. The airplanes may be terrifying machines of modern warfare, but grammatically Arabic treats them like a feminine singular.

فَوْقَ الْعَرْشِ: Why Does الْعَرْشِ Have Kasra?

فَوْقَ means above. It is a ظَرْفُ مَكَان, an adverb of place.

But grammatically it is also the first half of an iḍāfa-construction:

فَوْقَ الْعَرْشِ

That makes الْعَرْشِ the مُضَاف إِلَيْهِ, so it is genitive. Hence the kasra: الْعَرْشِ.

The same machinery appears in تَحْتَهُ. Let’s see: تَحْتَ is below, while ـهُ means it, referring back to الْعَرْش.

أَمْ: Not Just Another “Or”

In the following sentence, the speaker offers two alternatives: above or below?

أَتُحَلِّقُ فَوْقَ الْعَرْشِ أَمْ تَحْتَهُ؟

That is exactly the territory of أَمْ after an interrogative. It is not merely tossing another option into the sentence. It sets up a choice between A and B.

The question is structurally simple. Rhetorically, it is a trap. There is only one possible answer.

مَنْ Is Not Conditional Here

Now we reach the most interesting grammatical point:

مَنْ فَوْقَ الْعَرْشِ مَعَنَا

مَنْ can indeed be conditional in Arabic. But it is not conditional here.

Here مَنْ is an اِسْمٌ مَوْصُول, a relative pronoun meaning the One who. It functions as the مُبْتَدَأ, the subject of the nominal sentence.

فَوْقَ الْعَرْشِ supplies the relative information: who is above the Throne. مَعَنَا, with us, supplies the main predicate.

So the skeleton is:

The One who is above the Throne + is with us.

No condition. No if. No جَوَابُ الشَّرْط waiting around the corner.

مَا Is Doing the Heavy Lifting

The second half is even nicer:

فَلَا يُخِيفُنَا مَا تَحْتَهُ

يُخِيفُ comes from:

أَخَافَ – يُخِيفُ

to frighten, make afraid

Compare that with خَافَ, to be afraid. Arabic has switched from the experience of fear to the causing of fear.

The ـنَا in يُخِيفُنَا is the object: frightens us.

So what is doing the frightening?

مَا تَحْتَهُ.

Here مَا means that which or what. Grammatically it functions as the subject of يُخِيفُ.

That gives us:

“What is beneath it does not frighten us.”

This matters because the sentence is sometimes translated as let what is beneath it not frighten us. That would turn لَا into a prohibition or exhortation. But here لَا is simply لَا النَّافِيَة, ordinary negation. The verb remains indicative: يُخِيفُنَا.

If this were prohibitive لَا, we would expect a jussive form. Arabic is annoyingly good at leaving grammatical fingerprints.

What About the Theology?

The rhetorical move is easy to understand even if the theology behind expressions involving الْعَرْش, the Throne, has been discussed in very different ways by Muslim theological schools.

The Quran repeatedly uses the Throne in language of divine majesty and sovereignty. The anecdote simply changes the scale of the argument. Italian aircraft may dominate the sky visible to the fighters, but they are still part of creation. The terrifying new technology suddenly becomes very small.

That is why the line works so well. It does not answer military arithmetic with better military arithmetic. It changes the measuring system.

The Airplanes, at Least, Are Very Real

The quotation may be uncertain. The aircraft are not.

Italy invaded the Ottoman provinces that became modern Libya in 1911. On 1 November that year, Italian pilot Giulio Gavotti dropped small bombs from his aircraft onto Ottoman positions. The attack is commonly described as the first aerial bombing carried out from an airplane in warfare.

Air power would become much more important in the colonial wars that followed. By the time al-Mukhtar was leading the resistance in Cyrenaica, airplanes were not a curiosity. They were part of the machinery used to scout, bomb, pursue, and isolate mobile fighters.

Italy also used chemical weapons in its Libyan campaigns. The securely documented agent is mustard gas, or yperite, with documented use from January 1928 and again during the final campaigns around 1930.

So even if the famous reply about aircraft is folklore, it grew around a very real imbalance of power.

Mussolini Did Not Invade Libya in 1911

It is surprisingly easy to compress Italian colonialism into one giant block labelled “Fascism”. Oftentimes, people assume that Mussolini’s forces attacked Libya.

• Italy attacked Ottoman Libya in 1911 under the government of Giovanni Giolitti.
• Benito Mussolini was the Italian dictator who founded the National Fascist Party and ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943, establishing a fascist regime that allied with Nazi Germany during World War II.

Italy had unified only in the nineteenth century and entered the colonial race later than Britain and France. France already controlled Algeria and occupied Tunisia in 1881, an event that caused particular anger in Italy. Britain occupied Egypt in 1882. Libya, directly across the Mediterranean and still formally Ottoman, became the obvious Italian target.

The Italo-Turkish War ended in 1912 with an Ottoman settlement and withdrawal. Local resistance did not end with it.

Under Fascism, Italy then launched a much harsher campaign to impose effective control over territories it claimed but had never fully subdued. This is where the language of Libya as Italy’s Quarta Sponda, the “Fourth Shore”, became especially useful to Fascist imperial propaganda. Libya was presented not merely as a colony but increasingly as an extension of Italy across the Mediterranean, wrapped in references to Roman imperial glory.

That is a later ideological layer. It should not be projected backward onto the decision to invade in 1911.

How Al-Mukhtar Kept the Resistance Alive

Cyrenaica was difficult territory for an occupying army. The Jabal al-Akhdar (الْجَبَلُ الْأَخْضَرُ), the Green Mountain, contains wooded uplands, valleys, rough ground, and routes that local fighters knew far better than incoming troops.

Al-Mukhtar exploited that geography. His fighters operated in relatively small, mobile formations, often numbering in the low hundreds, able to attack and disperse before much larger Italian forces could pin them down.

This was not an army trying to defeat Italy in a conventional battlefield showdown. It was a resistance trying to remain alive, deny the occupier secure control, strike when conditions were favourable, and disappear when they were not.

For years, it worked.

Italy Changed the War

By 1930, the Italian leadership had decided that defeating the fighters required separating them from the civilian population that supplied information, food, shelter, animals, and recruits.

Governor Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani, who directed military operations in Cyrenaica, pushed the conflict into its most brutal phase.

Large parts of the nomadic and semi-nomadic population of Cyrenaica were forcibly removed from their homes and confined in concentration camps. Estimates vary, but roughly 100,000 to 110,000 people were interned. Estimates of the number who died differ much more sharply, ranging from around 40,000 in more conservative calculations to 60,000 or more in higher estimates.

The exact numbers remain debated. The basic fact does not: civilian internment on a huge scale became a deliberate weapon of the war.

The Italians also constructed a barbed-wire barrier roughly 270 kilometres long along the Egyptian frontier toward Jaghbub (الجغبوب), a remote desert village in the Al Jaghbub Oasis in the eastern Libyan Desert. It is geographically closer to the Egyptian town of Siwa (واحة سيوة) than to any Libyan town of note. Its purpose was brutally practical: cut the resistance off from supplies, movement, and contact across the border.

This, more than any duel between brilliant generals, explains the endgame. The resistance was being deprived of the human landscape that had made guerrilla warfare possible.

Capture, Trial, Execution

In September 1931, al-Mukhtar was captured after a clash near Slonta in eastern Cyrenaica. The commonly given capture date is 11 September, although some detailed Libyan accounts place the engagement at Wadi Bu Taqa (وادي بوطاقة) a little earlier. Accounts broadly agree that his horse was hit or disabled during the fighting, leaving the elderly commander unable to escape.

He was taken to Benghazi and brought before a special military court. Sources differ by a day on the precise tribunal date, but the proceeding moved with extraordinary speed. He was sentenced to death.

On the morning of 16 September 1931, Omar al-Mukhtar was hanged at Suluq (سُلُوق). Around 20,000 Libyans were reportedly assembled to witness the execution, including people brought from the camps.

The intention was obvious: kill the leader publicly and let the spectacle kill the legend.

The second part did not go according to plan.

The Most Famous Last Words He May Never Have Said

If you search for Omar al-Mukhtar quotations today, one sentence quickly appears:

نَحْنُ لَا نَسْتَسْلِمُ. نَنْتَصِرُ أَوْ نَمُوتُ.

Naḥnu lā nastaslimu. Nantaṣiru aw namūtu.

“We do not surrender. We win or we die.”

It is often followed by an even more memorable prediction:

عُمْرِي سَيَكُونُ أَطْوَلَ مِنْ عُمْرِ جَلَّادِي.

ʿUmrī sayakūnu aṭwala min ʿumri jallādī.

“My life will be longer than my executioner’s.”

The problem is that these lines are securely found in the movie Lion of the Desert, where Anthony Quinn delivers them as Omar al-Mukhtar. Their status as verbatim words spoken by the historical al-Mukhtar is much less secure.

This is a lovely example of a phenomenon historians know very well: cinema can become memory.

A screenwriter writes a line. An actor gives it a face and a voice. Millions of viewers hear it. The scene is retold without the film around it. Eventually the dialogue wanders out of the cinema and returns wearing the clothes of a historical quotation.

That does not make the sentence meaningless. It simply changes what sort of evidence it is.

Another Arabic Detail: عُمْر and a Very Neat Trick

The alleged prediction is especially elegant in Arabic because of the repeated عُمْر:

عُمْرِي … مِنْ عُمْرِ جَلَّادِي

عُمْر means a lifetime or lifespan. So the line literally compares one lifespan with another.

But my life will be longer is not really about biological survival. The condemned man is about to die. The sentence flips the meaning of life from years lived to time remembered.

Historically authentic or not, that is very efficient rhetoric.

What Did He Actually Say at the End?

Later accounts disagree about al-Mukhtar’s final words. One widely repeated tradition connects him with the Quranic formula:

إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ

Innā lillāhi wa-innā ilayhi rājiʿūn.

“Indeed, to God we belong, and indeed to Him we return.”

Sura 002, Ayah 156

The words come from Qurʾān 2:156 and are traditionally spoken in response to death and calamity.

But here too, caution is better than a cinematic close-up. Accounts of his final moments differ. We can safely say how he died. We cannot reconstruct every syllable he uttered on the way to the gallows.

The Hollywood Movie

Half a century later, Omar al-Mukhtar received one of the most lavish historical biopics ever made about an Arab anti-colonial leader.

Lion of the Desert (أَسَدُ الصَّحْرَاءِ), released internationally in 1981, was directed by Syrian American filmmaker Moustapha Akkad (مُصْطَفَى الْعَقَّاد) and financed largely with Libyan state money. Its reported budget was around $35 million, enormous for the period.

The cast was ridiculous in the best possible way.

Anthony Quinn played Omar al-Mukhtar. Oliver Reed played Rodolfo Graziani. Rod Steiger became Mussolini. Irene Papas, John Gielgud, and Raf Vallone were also in the film.

And for German readers: yes, Sky du Mont is in it too, playing Prince Amedeo, Duke of Aosta.

On YouTube, you can find the entire movie in the English and Arabic version.

Arabic version of the movie (YouTube)

English version of the movie (YouTube)

History occasionally has casting choices that look as if someone accidentally shuffled several completely different DVDs together.

The Film Italy Did Not Want to See

The film presented Italian colonial violence unusually directly, including concentration camps, executions, forced displacement, and the machinery of Fascist repression.

That made it politically explosive in Italy. The film did not receive the censorship clearance required for normal theatrical distribution and was effectively kept out of Italian cinemas. Decades later, in 2009, Sky finally broadcast it on Italian television.

There is a strange historical loop here. Fascist Italy had tried to turn al-Mukhtar’s execution into a demonstration of imperial power. Half a century later, a film about that execution became uncomfortable precisely because it forced Italians to look again at what that power had done.

Moustapha Akkad Had Two Cinematic Lives

The director, Moustapha Akkad, himself deserves a detour because his filmography looks almost impossible.

For many viewers in the Arab world, Quinn is remembered above all for two great historical epics. In The Message (الرِّسَالَة), released in 1976, he played Hamza (حمزة), the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle and one of the earliest Muslims’ fiercest defenders, traditionally known as the “Lion of Allah” Quinn gave him commanding charisma, warmth, and quiet power.

The Message became a landmark of historical cinema and a cultural phenomenon across the Arab and Islamic world. Maurice Jarre’s score earned an Academy Award nomination, and nearly fifty years later the film still regularly appears on Arab television around major religious holidays. Then came Lion of the Desert.

In Hollywood, however, Akkad had a second identity.

He was the producer behind Halloween.

Yes. That Halloween.

The same filmmaker associated with Anthony Quinn playing Hamza and Omar al-Mukhtar was also a key producer behind Michael Myers and the long-running American horror franchise.

Arabic historical epics on one side. A man in a white mask stalking suburban teenagers on the other.

Film history contains multitudes.

Akkad’s Own Ending Was Horribly Real

On 9 November 2005, Akkad was staying at the Grand Hyatt in Amman (عَمَّان), Jordan. He was in the hotel lobby receiving his daughter Rima, who had arrived from Beirut.

They were not attending a wedding in that hotel, as the story is sometimes retold. Akkad was in Jordan because he planned to attend a wedding in Aqaba (الْعَقَبَة) two days later.

A suicide bomber detonated explosives in the Grand Hyatt as part of coordinated attacks on three Amman hotels carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq. Rima was killed immediately. Akkad was badly wounded and died in hospital on 11 November.

The attacks caused enormous anger in Jordan, especially because so many of the dead were Arab civilians and because another bomber struck a wedding celebration at the Radisson SAS.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (أَبُو مُصْعَب الزَّرْقَاوِي), leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, subsequently issued an audio statement defending the attacks. He claimed that Muslim wedding guests had not been the intended targets and that the hotels had been selected because intelligence personnel supposedly operated there. Contemporary reporting noted that the recording could not be independently authenticated.

The irony is difficult to miss. A filmmaker who spent years trying to put Arab and Islamic history onto Western cinema screens was killed by a jihadist organization claiming to act in Islam’s name.

History, Grammar, Legend

So did Omar al-Mukhtar really look at Italian airplanes and ask whether they could fly above the Throne?

Maybe.

But history does not currently give us enough evidence to put the sentence confidently between quotation marks and walk away.

And that distinction matters. Al-Mukhtar does not become less extraordinary because one brilliant quotation might have been polished by oral memory. The documented story is already extraordinary enough: a Senussi teacher with earlier military experience led a badly outgunned resistance against a colonial state using aircraft, mustard gas, mass deportation, concentration camps, and a 270-kilometre barrier to break it. He was captured, tried, and publicly hanged. The resistance ended. His reputation did not.

The legendary sentence survived for a reason, though. Its Arabic compresses an entire worldview into a few words:

مَنْ فَوْقَ الْعَرْشِ مَعَنَا، فَلَا يُخِيفُنَا مَا تَحْتَهُ.

An اِسْمٌ مَوْصُول, two spatial expressions, one Form IV verb, and a complete reversal of the balance of power.

Historically uncertain.

Grammatically excellent.

And perhaps that is exactly how legends work.

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Drißner, G. (2026, August 18). Omar al-Mukhtar and the Airplanes Under the Throne. Arabic for Nerds. https://arabic-for-nerds.com/history/legend-of-omar-al-mukhtar/

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Published: August 18, 2026

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