My Friends

by Hisham Matar

But, notwithstanding the prominent position he held at the BBC, which irritated the dictatorship, and his weekly column in Al Arab newspaper, where he regularly exposed the oppressive practices of the Libyan and other Arab regimes, what Mohammed Mustafa Ramadan was about to do next had never been done before or since on the BBC and remains, particularly in view of the tragic events that followed, his most defiant act.

After 1969, the year Qaddafi assumed power, my father quietly turned down academic posts and lucrative positions on state-sponsored committees and disappeared into a job that suited neither his talents nor his ambition: he became a general history teacher in a middling school in a low-income neighborhood of Benghazi.

He was obsessed with the political history of the Arab World, with a focus on the rise of nationalism, what he liked to describe as “the colonizers’ parting gift.” He conducted his research in the dark, in his spare time, never publishing a word of it. This policy turned his vocation into a hobby and a refuge. The walls of his study at home were lined with books from floor to ceiling on subjects such as the Ottoman Empire, the Italian invasion of Libya, the British Mandate for Palestine. Stacks, arranged in columns on the floor, rose precariously like one of those ancient towered cities of Yemen.

We learned that when Italy invaded Libya in 1911, the Zowas were among the first to join the resistance and fought gallantly for fifteen years, until, without offering an explanation, they attended the parade to welcome Benito Mussolini on his first visit, in 1926.

The Zowas proved to be useful collaborators, delivering such devastatingly accurate intelligence that in 1931, five years after they met with Benito Mussolini, Omar al Mukhtar, the leader of the Libyan resistance, the man they had been loyal to up till then, was captured and publicly hanged.

What’s more,” Father said, “their timing was impeccable, because, in 1951, the patriarch of al Senussis became monarch of the United Kingdom of Libya.”

King Idris selected Hosam’s father, The Radar, to accompany his nephew and heir to the throne, Crown Prince Hasan, on the first al Senussis state visit to the United States, in 1962.

The Libyan government was one of the pioneers of what came to be called “The Killing of the Word,” the diabolical campaign that several Arab regimes embarked on in the 1970s. It was accelerated in the 1980s and continues to be occasionally practiced today and therefore cannot be said to have ended. Its main purpose was to get rid of, often in spectacular ways, outspoken journalists: shooting them in the middle of the street, or while eating lunch in a busy restaurant; or abducting them to torture and murder them, leaving their disfigured bodies as a warning to anyone who dared to criticize those who ruled over us. The details of such attacks did indeed cling to the memory. They stained the mind with blood. Arab journalists, editors, and publishers began to flee. Most went to London.

I had the vague impression, partly inspired by the chimes of Big Ben, that the English capital was a melancholy place and that this gathering of Arab writers there, which included authors my parents held in high regard, such as the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, and the Lebanese journalist Salim el Lozi, took place at night, long after the sun had set.

My parents knew of Salim el Lozi. They had read and admired his novel The Émigrés. And for the next few days they followed the story closely.

The paper contained his latest column, in which he likened the Libyan dictatorship to an occupying force, comparable to the Italian Fascists who had once ruled over Libya. As he approached, he found two men lingering nervously beside the gate in painfully tight jeans. They looked about half his age. He did not know this, but their names were Najib Jasmi and Bin Hasan el Masri.