The Nafusa Mountains are an east-west escarpment of northwestern Libya, rising to roughly nine hundred metres along a two-hundred-kilometre arc from the Tunisian border to the Ghadames-Tripoli plain. The range marks the southern edge of the Tripolitanian coastal plain and the climatic boundary between the Mediterranean north and the Saharan south.
The Nafusa is the principal Berber-speaking heartland of contemporary Libya. The Berber towns of the range — Yefren, Jadu, Nalut, Kabaw, Zuwara on the coast nearby — speak Tanfusit (Nafusi), an eastern Berber variety classified within the Zenati branch and shared in continuous form across the surrounding mountain villages. Speaker numbers are estimated at around two hundred and fifty thousand across the broader Nafusa-Zuwara sphere.
The Nafusa is a historic centre of Ibadi Islam in north Africa, in continuous theological connection with the Mozabite Ibadi communities of the Algerian M'zab and the Djerbi Berbers of southern Tunisia. The Ibadi tradition has structured the political and ritual life of the principal Nafusa towns since the early medieval period and remains the dominant religious affiliation of much of the Berber-speaking population.
The Nafusa was the principal western front of the 2011 Libyan uprising. Berber militias of Yefren, Jadu, Nalut, and Zintan held the range against successive Gaddafi-regime offensives across the spring and early summer of 2011, breaking through to the coastal plain in mid-July and contributing decisively to the fall of Tripoli in August. The post-Gaddafi period has produced an unprecedented public assertion of Berber identity in Libya — Tifinagh signage, Tanfusit-language broadcasting, the Amazigh Supreme Council — although constitutional recognition of Berber as a Libyan national language remains a continuing demand.