Awjila is a Saharan oasis of eastern Libya, set in the Cyrenaican desert some three hundred kilometres south of the Mediterranean coast at Benghazi. The toponym is preserved continuously from the antique Augila of Herodotus — who described the inhabitants as a Berber population worshipping the sun and observing distinctive funerary rites — through the medieval Arabic geographers to the present day.
The oasis is the surviving easternmost outpost of Berber-speaking population in north Africa east of Siwa, with around three thousand speakers of Awjila Berber (Awjili) in the principal town and the smaller settlements of Jalu and Jikherra in the surrounding cluster. The variety is severely endangered and is classified within the eastern Berber group, sharing structural features with the Ghadames variety some seven hundred kilometres to the west.
Awjila was a principal staging point of the medieval trans-Saharan caravan trade between Tripolitania and the Lake Chad polities. The route from Awjila south through Kufra to Wadai (in modern Chad) was one of the major slave-and-gold corridors of the eastern Sahara across the medieval and early-modern periods, controlled successively by Awjila merchants, the Senussi Sufi order from the late nineteenth century, and the Italian colonial administration after 1911.
The Atiq Mosque, with its distinctive pyramidal mudbrick dome construction, is among the most distinctive surviving examples of Saharan religious architecture. The contemporary economy combines date cultivation in the surrounding palm groves, oil extraction at the major Sarir field a hundred kilometres to the south, and substantial outmigration to Benghazi and Tripoli. Documentation of the Awjila Berber language has been undertaken systematically only since the 2010s, with the linguistic-fieldwork community treating it as one of the principal salvage cases of the contemporary Berber sphere.