Tower of the Sun: Stories from the Middle East and North Africa

Chapter One

In the Land of the Brother Leader

Libya, 2004

When you visit another country, it’s hard to get a feel for what it’s actually like until you leave your hotel room, go for a walk, take a look around and hang out while soaking it in. Not so in Libya. All you have to do is show up. It will impose itself on you at once.

My flight touched down on the runway next to a junkyard of filthy, gutted and broken-down aircraft in an airport otherwise empty of planes. When I stepped out of the hatch into the Jetway, I came face-to-face with three uniformed military goons who scrutinized me and everyone else from behind oversize reflective sunglasses.

Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, mastermind of the 1969 al-Fateh Revolution (a euphemism for his military coup), Brother Leader of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, greeted arrivals in the passport-control room from a menacing, almost snarling gold-gilded portrait. A translated overhead sign (rare in Libya) said, Partners Not Wage Earners. In other words: Don’t expect to be paid.

A bored official glanced at my visa, rubbed his face, stamped my passport and pointed me toward my first Libyan checkpoint. A man in an untucked button-up shirt, with a cigarette jutting out the side of his mouth, waved me toward a metal detector. He hadn’t shaved in two days. I walked through. The alarm screamed, and I braced for a pat-down. He just stood there, took a long drag on his cigarette and stared bleary-eyed into space over my shoulder. I guessed that meant I could go. So I did.

There were no other planes coming or going, so it was easy to find my ride. His name was Abdul. He wore a snazzy black leather jacket and a Western-style goatee.

Welcome to Libya! he said as he led me into a parking lot the size of an Applebee’s.

We’re really busy right now. This is Libya’s high season. They must shut down the airport entirely during the low season.

The capital city of Tripoli was an asteroid belt of monolithic apartment towers. The streets were mostly empty of cars, the sidewalks empty of people. I saw no restaurants, no cafés, no clubs, no bars and no malls. Nor did I see anywhere else to hang out. Libya, so far, looked depopulated.

We drove past a shattered former government compound surrounded by a lagoon of pulverized concrete that once was a parking lot. It was obvious when that thing was built. The 1970s were the 1970s everywhere, even in Libya.

Only as we approached the center of Tripoli did traffic pick up. Hardly anyone walked around, and it was no wonder: a mile-long pit on the side of the road appeared to be the place to give juice bottles, plastic wrappers, garbage bags and worn-out tires the heave-ho.

I saw no corporate advertising: no Pepsi signs, no movie posters and no cute girls flashing milk-mustache smiles for the dairy industry. I did, however, see one hysterical propaganda billboard after another. They were socialist-realist cartoons from the Soviet era, the same kinds of living museum pieces still on display in North Korea and other wonderful places where starving proles live in glorious jackbooted paradise.

The happy-worker theme was a common one; smiling construction workers wore hard hats, and Bedouins turned widgetmakers basked in the glory of assembly-line work. One poster showed two hands chained together at the wrist below an image of Qaddafi’s sinister Green Book descending from heaven.

At the hotel I ran into my second Libyan checkpoint. A metal detector was set up at the entrance. A young security agent sat at a metal desk and showed off his open copy of the Green Book. He propped it at such an angle that I could read the cover, but he couldn’t possibly read what was inside.

I stepped through. The alarm screamed, detecting (perhaps) my dental fillings or zipper. He looked up, gave me a nodding What’s up, dude smile and went back to pretending to read.

I poked around the lobby while Abdul checked me in at the desk.

The gift shop offered a wide range of totalitarian propaganda books and pamphlets in multiple languages. A fantastic selection of Qaddafi watches ranged in price from $25 to $600. I bought one for $25. Qaddafi is shown wearing his military uniform, officer’s hat and sunglasses like a swaggering Latin American generalissimo. It was busted right out of the box, the hour hand stuck forever at nine o’clock.

The lobby was plastered with portraits of the boss in various poses. He wore shades in most of them, but in some pictures from his early days, he wore a buffoonish 1970s haircut instead.

I had to suck down my giggles. God, was this guy for real? His inexportable Third Universal Theory was internationalist insofar as it obliterated any sense that Tripoli was Middle Eastern or African—at least from the point of view of the backseat of the car. I could have been in any Soviet-era republic, or even in some parts of the Bronx. But look at those portraits! Now there was something exotic.

Most of the other men in the lobby (I hadn’t seen any women since I landed) looked like Arab businessmen who bought their suits from Turkish remainder bins. The only expensively dressed man sat at a shiny wooden desk, the kind you’d expect to see at a law firm. He had no work in front of him, not even papers to shuffle. His job was to stare holes through everyone who stepped into and out of the elevator.

There were no towels in my room. The bathroom was, however, generously stocked with products, all of them packaged in green—the color of Islam and Qaddafi’s so-called revolution. The hotel gave me green shampoo, green soap, green bath gel, green toothpaste and even a green shoehorn and comb. All were clearly (and, I must say, unnecessarily) marked Made in the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. There was no booze (it’s banned), no soda, no water, no juice in the minibar. A burn the size and shape of a deflated basketball was seared into the carpet.

I switched on the TV: nothing but hysterical state-run propaganda. I couldn’t lower the volume (the knob was broken), but at least I could change the channel and choose whether I wanted to be droned at or screeched at in Arabic.

My window overlooked the Mediterranean Sea and, closer in, a drained and stained swimming pool. There was a forlorn rocky beach down there, cut off from the hotel and everything else by a blank gray slab of a wall. The cold wind whistling into the room from the patio sounded like moaning ghosts trapped in a well.

*  *  *

Until the middle of 2004, Americans were banned from Libya, not by Qaddafi but by our own government. The travel ban was lifted, but tourists were still required to book their trip through a Libyan agency. The regime wouldn’t tolerate tourists running around loose on their own. You could make your own trip—you didn’t have to be a part of a tour group—but you’d still be babysat by a guide.

I didn’t go to Libya to see the sights, such as they are. I wanted to see a once forbidden country as it really was. So I set out on foot on my own while I had a brief chance.

It was a jarring experience.

The main drag along the sea into the city was one straw short of a freeway. There were no houses, businesses, restaurants or shops along the way—only clusters of vertical human-storage units surrounded by empty lots the size of a Walmart.

Trash was smeared on the sidewalks. It clogged all the street gutters. Almost every available blank space (and, oh, were there plenty of those) was a dump site.

I felt agoraphobic walking around. The streets were too wide, the buildings too far apart, the landscape barren.

The traffic was too fast, too close and too hectic. I was pinned on a thin ribbon of sidewalk between the Mediterranean and the freeway.

There was no way I could cross that river of mayhem and steel unless I found a traffic light and a crosswalk—an unlikely event, from the look of the place. There wasn’t much worth seeing on the other side anyway. Those towers and the empty lots strewn with soda cans, candy-bar wrappers and billowing plastic bags didn’t get any prettier as they got closer.

The sea was all but boarded up behind blank white walls and a decayed postindustrial concrete catastrophe of a waterfront. In the few places I could get a glimpse of the shoreline, it didn’t have the look and feel of the familiar Mediterranean but rather of an inland sea in a Central Asian republic. The city felt harsh and jagged, and the close but unreachable sea could not take the edge off.

Three young boys crouched next to the dry side of the seawall. They ran up when they saw me and asked for cigarettes. Those kids could not have been older than 10. I had two choices—corrupt Libya’s youth or be a stuffy, uptight naysaying American. I chose to corrupt the children. When I handed over the smokes, each slapped his fist on his heart and cried, Allahu akbar!

The freeway continued as far as I could see without any way for me to cross it. Traffic was relentless, and I didn’t dare wade into it without knowing the rules. I could have just bolted in front of the cars and they would have stopped. But I hadn’t been in the country for even two hours. I didn’t know how anything worked yet. So I went back to the hotel and ordered some dinner.

I’d say that was my mistake, but I did have to eat.

At the restaurant, there was no sign that said Please Wait to Be Seated. Should I seat myself? Who knew? I felt ridiculous just standing at the entrance. So I found a table.

A waiter finally came over.

Are you a tourist? he said.

Yes, I lied. Libya was a total-surveillance police state. One person in six worked for the secret police. Best, I thought, to keep my journalistic intentions to myself.

For tourists we have fish, he said. He did not give me a menu. I didn’t see a single menu anywhere in the country. In Libyan restaurants, you sit down and eat whatever they give you.

What kind of fish?

Eh, he said, taken aback by the question. Fish. Fish. You know, fish.

Great, I said. I’ll have the fish.

He brought me two small fish the size of my hand, each fried in a pan. Heads, fins and eyeballs were still attached. Bones and guts were inside. They tasted bad and smelled worse. The businessmen at the tables around me drank nonalcoholic Beck’s beer. But all I got was a bottle of water.

Abdul picked me up again in the morning. His job was to show me Tripoli’s sights. There weren’t many: Green Square, the museum and an old city smaller than downtown Boise. That’s it. That’s all there is.

We started with the museum. Phoenician and Roman artifacts were on the first floor. Upstairs was the Islamic period. The top floor was entirely dedicated to the glorification of Qaddafi.

One room displayed gifts to the colonel from foreign officials and heads of state—swords, jeweled boxes, a crystal map of Palestine that included Tel Aviv. A living-room set upholstered with a tacky floral print was roped off in a corner. That’s where Qaddafi sits with foreign guests he wants to impress, Abdul said.

Right outside the museum was Qaddafi’s Green Square—which isn’t green, by the way. It’s famous, but it shouldn’t be. This is no Italian piazza we’re talking about. It’s an asphalt parking lot ringed by a six-lane urban speedway.

The nice thing about Green Square is that it’s central. The Italian Quarter, built by Italy during Mussolini’s fascist-imperialist period, is on one side. The old city is on the other.

The old city was the only neighborhood that looked Middle Eastern. Too bad much of it also looked like the backstreet slums of Havana. Not all of it, though. A few buildings—like the old mosques, a soaring clock tower and the Arch of Marcus Aurelius—were stunning.

It was a pleasant place, actually. Ancient buildings with handcrafted details on them are dignified even in squalor. Rotting grandeur is still grand, after all.

The streets were too narrow for cars. Not one of the shopkeepers harangued me when I walked by as they did constantly in Tunisia when I visited there a few months earlier. There were hardly any cheap tourist gimcracks for sale. I could walk the old city in peace.

Almost everything was solely for local consumption: clothes, fabrics, jewelry, shoes, batteries and so on. One of the narrower streets was lined with almost medieval metal forges, where copper pots and crescent moons for the tops of minarets were banged into shape with hammers and tongs over fires.

I didn’t see theaters, clubs or any other places of diversion or entertainment. Until two years ago, Abdul said, there was nothing to do in Libya but sleep. Things are better now.

Things weren’t much better, though. Libya’s economy was still mostly socialist. There will be no fun without capitalism. Sorry. The state just isn’t gonna provide it, especially not a state that can’t even pick up the garbage.

So, Abdul, I said as we walked through the souk. How many Libyans wear a Qaddafi watch?

Um, he said and laughed grimly. Not very many. There are, you know, enough pictures around. He leaned in and whispered, I don’t like him much, to be honest.

I had imagined not.

Look over there, he said and pointed with his eyes. You see those two?

I saw a couple in their mid-20s chatting next to one of the gates to the old city. He wore a black leather jacket, she a long brown overcoat and a headscarf over her hair. They stood close together but didn’t touch. They looked soft, comfortable and content together as if they were married.

Five, 10 years ago I never saw anything like that. It was absolutely forbidden.

He told me to take off my shoes as he led me into a mosque. Seeing the handmade carpets, high ceilings, marbled walls, Roman columns, intricate tile work and soft lighting was like slipping into a warm bath for the soul. The heart-stopping beauty and serenity of the mosque in this harsh urban parking garage of a landscape was a strong incentive for piety, I suspected. I’m not religious, but I could see why some sought refuge from the modern in God. Modernity in this oppressive dystopian city was a spectacular galactic-size failure.

He dropped me off at my hotel before dark. Now that I knew the layout of the city, I decided to return to Green Square alone. I wanted to know what the real Tripoli, the not-touristed Tripoli, looked like.

It was worse on foot than by car and exactly what I expected: all right angles and concrete. Almost everyone in this part of town lived in a low barracks-like compound or a Stalinist tower. Landscaping didn’t exist. There were no smooth edges, no soft sights, nothing to sigh at. Tripoli’s aesthetic brutality hurt me.

I walked parts of the city that hardly any foreigners ever bothered to see. It looked postapocalyptic, as if it had been evacuated in war or hit with a neutron bomb. The sound of machine-gun fire off in the distance wouldn’t have seemed out of place.

Less than 1 percent of the people I saw were women. All those who did go outside wore headscarves. So much for Qaddafi’s being a feminist, as he claimed. Tripoli had as many women out and about as a dust-blown village in the boondocks of Afghanistan.

The few men I did see walked or huddled together. They looked sullen, heavy, severe. I felt raw and exposed, wondering what on earth they must have thought when they saw an obvious foreigner wandering around the desolate streets.

So I did what I could to find out. I smiled at everyone who walked past. You can learn a lot about a people and a place by trying this out. In New York City, people ignore you. In Guatemala City, people will stare. In Libya, they all smiled back, every last one of them, no matter how grumpy or self-absorbed they looked two seconds before.

I never detected even a whiff of hostility, not from a single person. Libyans seemed a decent, gentle, welcoming people with terrible luck. It wasn’t their fault the neighborhood stank of oppression.

Most apartment buildings were more or less equally dreary, but one did stand out. Architecturally it was just another modernist horror. But a 6-by-8-foot portrait of Qaddafi was bolted to the facade three stories up. It partially blocked the view from two of the balconies. The bastard couldn’t even leave people alone when they were home.

The posters weren’t funny anymore. There were too damn many of them, for one thing. And, besides, Qaddafi is ugly. He may earn a few charisma points for traveling to Brussels and pitching his Bedouin tent on the parliament lawn, but he’s no Che Guevara in the guapo department.

I felt ashamed that I first found his portraits even slightly amusing. The novelty wore off in less than a day, and he’d been in power longer than I’d been alive.

He was an abstraction when I first got there. But after walking around his outdoor laboratory and everywhere seeing his beady eyes and that arrogant jut of his mouth, it suddenly hit me. He isn’t merely Libya’s tyrant. He is a man who would be god.

His Mukhabarat, the secret police, are omniscient. His visage is omnipresent. His power is omnipotent.

And he is deranged. He says he’s the sun of Africa. He threatens to ban money and schools. He vanquished beauty and art. He liquidates those who oppose him. He says he can’t help it if the people of Libya love him so much, they plaster his portrait up everywhere. Fuck him. I wanted to rip his face from the walls.

*  *  *

If you go to Libya, you simply must visit Ghadamis. Known by travelers as the jewel of the Sahara, it’s worth all the money and all the hassle you have to put up with to get there.

In the early 1980s, Qaddafi’s regime emptied the ancient Berber Saharan city by decree. Everyone was shepherded into the modern concrete new town, which begins right outside the mysterious tomblike adobe gates of the old.

The old city doesn’t look like a city when you’re inside. It looks like a vast underground system of tunnels and caves lit by skylights. It’s not underground; it was built with a roof over the top to keep the infernal summer heat out and the meager winter warmth in. Some of the streets (which really are more like passages) are pitch black even at noon. There was no need for light. The inhabitants had memorized the walls.

It is not a small town. It’s an enormous weatherproofed adobe mini metropolis. There are seven quarters and seven gates, one for each resident tribe. Everything you’d expect in a city is there—streets, homes, offices, markets, public squares and mosques, all made of painted mud and sparkling gypsum. The only thing missing from the old city is people.

If Libya were a normal country—and if Ghadamis were a normal city—the old city would be packed with hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, bookstores, Internet cafés and desert-adventure tour offices. But Libya is not a normal country, and Ghadamis is an unwilling ghost town.

My travel agency replaced Abdul with a second guide for the trip to Ghadamis and into the desert. Yasir, I said to him. Why were the people of Ghadamis forced out of their homes?

I knew the answer already. It was part of Qaddafi’s plot to Arabize the Berbers and to construct the New Man, a ludicrous ideal hatched in the Soviet Union. (Berbers were also forbidden to write anything publicly in their own language.) But I wanted to see if a local was permitted to say it. He couldn’t—or at least didn’t—answer my question. He only shook his head and laughed nervously. There were others around who could hear.

The old city was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO. A few engineers were inside shoring up the foundations of an old mosque.

It’s astonishing, one of them said when I chatted him up. He was an Arab who had studied engineering at a Western university and spoke masterful English in fully formed paragraphs. The sophistication and aesthetic perfection in the old city contrasts markedly with the failures in the new.

No kidding. I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world. Neither have you. Because there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. And there never will be.

We’re here to make this place livable again because someday, you know . . . He trailed off, but I knew what he wished he could say. Someday Qaddafi would die. When his bones pushed up date palms, the people of Ghadamis could abandon their compounds of concrete and move back into the city that’s rightfully theirs.

I returned to the old city at night by myself and saw a single square of light in an upstairs room of an ancient house. The owners were forbidden to stay there at night. But it was nice to know that some of them still left the lights on.

*  *  *

When you visit another country, it’s inevitable: you are going to meet other travelers. And you’ll almost certainly talk about other places you’ve been. Go to Costa Rica, and conversations will turn to Guatemala and Bolivia. If you hang out in Cancún, you’ll meet people who like the Virgin Islands and Hawaii. In Paris you’ll hear talk of London, Prague and Vienna.

So what happens when you bump into others in Libya? In Tripoli, I met a photographer who spends every summer in Darfur. Out in the dunes, I met a long-haired, goofy, bespectacled English guy named Felix. This was the first time he had ever set eyes on a desert. (He really went for it.) He had a thing for totalitarian countries. I like to visit places based on ideas, he said. Then he checked himself. That doesn’t mean I like the ideas.

Where to next, Felix? I said.

North Korea, if I can get in.

I’d like to see North Korea, I said. But after that, what’s left?

Only the moon, he said and laughed. This is great, meeting you here. It’s nice to know someone else who’s open to nuttiness.

You’ll find nuttiness in Libya even out in the boonies. On the treacherous so-called road from Ghadamis into the dunes, someone used an enormous piece of ordnance that looked like a mini-Scud missile to mark a 3-foot chassis-busting hole in the ground.

Yasir couldn’t take me on that road in his van. So we hired Bashir to come with us. He was a burly man with a turban and a beard who taught philosophy in school. We didn’t hire him, though, for his brain. We wanted his Land Rover.

The three of us left Ghadamis and headed straight toward the Algerian gate only a couple of miles away.

Just beyond it, a 300-foot-tall mountain of sand was piled in layers.

You see that sand, Bashir said and pointed. I could hardly take my eyes off it. Two weeks ago I drove some Japanese tourists out here. The old guy asked me who built the dune. He chuckled and shook his head. I told him, well, my grandfather worked for a while on that project, but now he’s dead.

We can’t go there, Yasir said. We must visit Libyan sand. Last month some German tourists were kidnapped right on the other side of the border.

More than 100,000 people were killed in Algeria during the 1990s and into the 2000s in a civil war between the military regime and Islamist fanatics.

Have you ever been to Algeria? I asked.

No one here goes to Algeria, he said.

We drove over a hill and were surrounded on three sides by dizzying, towering, impossibly sized dunes. We slogged our way to the top, gasping, with calves and thighs burning, not daring to look down, to watch the sunset.

The top was unreal. The desert floor was another world far below ours. If birds were in flight, I could have looked down on them. On the western horizon was the Grand Erg Oriental, a sea of dunes bigger than France that looked from the side like a distant Andes of sand. Bashir prepared bread and sticky mint tea.

I watched the sun go down and the sky go out.

By Libyan standards, this was radical freedom. Life goes on even in countries like this one. No government, no matter how oppressive, can control all the people all the time—especially not in the vast and empty Sahara.

We ran down the sand and climbed back into the Land Rover. Bashir hit the gas. He zigged us and zagged us up, down and across the 300-foot-tall dunes along the border with Algeria. At one point—and I couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious—he said we had actually crossed into Algeria.

The stars came out. A full moon rose, turning the