The other Saif: The reformist who stayed

On 3 February, four masked gunmen entered Saif al-Islam Gaddafi’s compound in Zintan, a mountain town in western Libya, disabled the security cameras, and shot him nineteen times. He was fifty-three. He had lived there since his capture in 2011 first as a prisoner, then, after his release in 2017, in a kind of internal exile. No one has claimed responsibility. In the coverage that followed, the world was reminded of the man it had decided he was nearly 15 years ago: the dictator’s son who chose blood over reform. That is not the man I knew.

I met Saif on the first day of registration at the London School of Economics. We were standing in the same slow queue, two strangers bound for the same classroom. He was behind me. I introduced myself, asked where he was from.

“Libya,” he said.

I told him I wished I could visit, but my Arabic wasn’t good enough. “And I don’t think I’d get a visa,” I added.

With quiet certainty, he replied, “No problem. I’ll get you a visa.”

I laughed. “Who are you? Do you keep visas in your basement?”

In that moment, a friendship was born between two Bedouins starting a new journey he from Sirte, of the al-Gaddafi tribe, and I from a small Saudi town called AlBaha, of a southern tribe. For most of that year, I didn’t fully grasp who he was. He had no bodyguards with him in the classroom, he would appear quietly, and vanish the same way. To me, he was simply the only other Arab in my programme a quiet classmate I’d see in the library, at our adviser’s office, or in another seminar we shared, on Legitimacy, taught by Professor Rodney Barker. He was, I thought, reserved, yet always gracious and kind.

I remember trading thoughts in campus cafés about Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew I had spent some of my youth in neighboring Malaysia and the applicability of the Singapore and Malaysia models to Libya, along with ideas about just war. He spoke with pride about Libya’s potential. On the day UN sanctions were lifted, he said, “We have made history today.” I thought the “we” was simply an expression of patriotism. I showed him how to navigate JSTOR. We took our exams side by side.

In retrospect, I think he opened up to me because I was one of the few people who treated him as just another student. By the time I figured out who he was, we had an unpracticed routine. One of the things Saif remembered about me was that my father was Saudi, that he had died when I was young, and that I felt walled off from my Arab roots and wanted a way back in.

Before the end of the programme, he made me an unusual offer.

You want to spend time in an Arab country. Come spend a year as a consultant to our National Economic Strategy the map for what Libya will become, inshallah.

I had just gotten a job at a New York investment bank. When Saif called, I took a leap of faith. I managed a deferment and found myself, a few days after graduation, on a BA flight to Tripoli.

Walking into the arrivals terminal whose painted lime green and covered in images of Muammar Gaddafi, my heart sank. Had I made a horrible mistake? Then I saw a smiling classmate, seemingly immune to his father’s ubiquitous image. I was driven through the baking sun into the capital, past Green Square a monument to his father’s 1969 revolution, and now the location of an upscale outdoor café. I watched from the car as men walked into a mosque at the call to prayer. My apprehension dissolved quickly.