The House of Shennib includes notable public figures who have played a significant part in 20th century Libyan history: heads of state, ministers, authors and diplomats.

Omar Faiek Shennib (Arabic: سيدعمر الفايق شنيب Sayyid Omar Fayek Shennib)[3] was Libya's first Minister of Defense, Head of the Royal Court (Diwan), Vice President of the Libyan National Assembly [4] under the reign of King Idris Al Senussi.

Shennib served as President of the Cyrenaican delegation to the United Nations in the post-war period and was instrumental in the creation of a unified Libyan state in the years immediately following World War II following the withdrawal of Axis forces from the North African coast.

[5] Together with Idris, Shennib was part of the 1941 delegation to the UN which put forth the case for the unification of the three traditional free standing regions, Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan into the single nation state of Libya.

Prolific in the later fifties and sixties, Ahmed Fouad Shennib's poetry gained pan-Arab attention for addressing the subjects of Libyan nationalism and cultural identity in the post-independence era.

Following the commencement of World War II and the British occupation in 1942, and the young Al-Qaaddafi caught the attention of the Allied Forced who had come to oversee the administration of Benghazi city.

Following the war, he declined a position at Oxford as he was the first Libyan to be recruited by the British to assist in the political administration of Cyrenaica.

He was released four months later only to be rearrested in 1970 on charges of permitting King Idris to leave Libya and was imprisoned for a further two years.

[16] Identified as a key protester, Majid Al A-Qaddafi found safe passage to the US and eventually settling in Portland, Oregon where he kept a low profile.

As Commander of the Royal Army he was arrested in the first days after Qaddafi seizing power and imprisoned for four and a half years.

However, upon Shennib's arrival in Amman, he immediately informed King Hussein of Jordan of the plot against his life, defected from the Libyan regime, announcing his refusal to carry out the assassination.

Later, at a press conference in Cairo, Abdul Aziz Shennib revealed that Gaddafi had ordered the murder of Lebanese cleric Musa al-Sadr, whose disappearance in August 1978 had, until his revelation, been the subject of speculation.