Episode: 13 — "Be a Weirdo and Live Your Life" · Full Episode #13
Date: 2020
Language: Libyan Arabic (predominantly), some English
Abdelwahab Elalem (عبد الوهاب العالم) is a Libyan writer, thinker, and member of Harakat Tanweer (the Enlightenment Movement). He holds a master's degree in Neurobiology from Germany. At the time of recording he was engaged in writing and cultural activism, with a particular interest in identity, social issues, and Libya's intellectual renaissance. He co-founded the T Plus platform.
While imprisoned, authorities sent a sheikh to Abdelwahab's cell — along with religious pamphlets — presumably to correct his thinking. Instead of engaging with the pamphlets, he asked for a Quran. He received one. He read it himself, on his own terms, without mediation.
The gesture was quietly devastating: he did not reject religion. He rejected the idea that someone else should stand between him and the text. The authorities wanted submission dressed as guidance. He responded with independent engagement.
See: The Sheikh in Prison
In prison, Abdelwahab arrived at a formulation he shared in the episode: "The cycle of death is when I leave and seek revenge. The cycle of life — that is the goal." He described the conscious decision to not let imprisonment turn him into a person who perpetuates violence. The revenge impulse was natural. Resisting it was the work.
This was not framed as forgiveness or moral superiority. It was framed as survival — specifically, as the survival of the person he wanted to be, as opposed to the person the system was trying to produce.
See: The Cycle of Life
Abdelwahab described an experiment — or provocation — related to the concept of "British Values" as taught in UK schools. He used it to interrogate the assumptions embedded in Western liberal discourse: who defines values, who gets to impose them, and what happens when those values are applied selectively. The specifics served a broader point about the hypocrisy of exported moral frameworks.
He spoke with conviction about a generation of young Libyans who were reading, writing, questioning, and building outside the state's collapsed institutions. He did not romanticise it. But he saw it clearly: the intellectual work was happening, even if nobody outside Libya was paying attention.
Abdelwahab co-founded T Plus as a platform for this kind of work — creating space for Libyan intellectual and cultural production. It was part of the same ecosystem as Harakat Tanweer: young Libyans building their own infrastructure for thought because the existing institutions had failed them.
"The cycle of death is when I leave and seek revenge. The cycle of life — that is the goal." (EP 13)