Episode: 130 — "The Civil State Requires Parties" · Full Episode #130
Date: 2 April 2023
Language: Libyan Arabic
Dr. Fairouz Al-Naas (فيروز النعاس) is a Libyan academic and political organiser. She served as Secretary-General of the National Front Party (الجبهة الوطنية), one of the political formations that emerged in Libya after the 2011 revolution and traced its lineage to the older anti-Gaddafi opposition movements operating in exile through the 1980s and 1990s. She is the daughter of Abdul Rahim Al-Naas, a Libyan political figure whose 1950s underground political activity is the foundation of the episode's most extraordinary archival material.
Fairouz's father, Abdul Rahim Al-Naas, produced a handwritten political magazine in 1950s Libya. The publication ran to fifteen issues. It was assembled by hand, copied by hand, and distributed by hand inside a country that was, at that point, an independent but constrained monarchy in which political organisation outside sanctioned channels was risky work.
The fifteen issues were a piece of mid-century Libyan civic infrastructure that no commercial press would have produced. The work belongs to a category of pre-Gaddafi Libyan political journalism that has been largely lost to the country's subsequent history. Fairouz, in the episode, treats the magazine not as nostalgia but as a living inheritance — an example of what political work looks like when the formal channels for it are closed.
See: The Fifteen Issue Magazine
On 17 February 2011, with reports of the eastern protests beginning to consolidate, Fairouz drove from Tripoli to Benghazi to be physically present for what was already, by mid-morning, recognisably the start of something larger than a single demonstration. The line she repeats in the episode is the one she repeated to herself on the drive: "Even if we die in it." The protests in Benghazi were already being met with live fire. The drive was not a precaution-laden journey; it was a decision to be inside the event.
The drive is recorded in the episode as a single piece of biographical detail without elaboration. Fairouz does not produce a heroic frame for it. She produces a structural one: the political work she had been doing — alongside her father's example, alongside the older opposition movements — required, in February 2011, that she be inside the protest physically. The drive was the form the requirement took.
In 2012 Libya passed an alternating-list electoral law — a piece of legislation requiring party electoral lists to alternate between male and female candidates. The law passed in Libya before equivalent legislation passed in Tunisia, which Tunisia's larger international visibility had previously made the assumed regional pioneer on the issue. The fact is recorded in the episode as a piece of comparative regional politics that the conventional narrative has obscured.
The alternating-list law was, in Fairouz's framing, an early structural commitment by the post-revolutionary Libyan political system to women's representation. The implementation of the law across the decade that followed was uneven. The passage of the law itself, however, was an unambiguous moment of legislative seriousness.
The episode's framing question is the civil state — al-dawla al-madaniyya — and the role of political parties in making it possible. Fairouz's position is that a civil state without organised political parties is structurally unsustainable; the parties are the institutions through which a polity translates plural preferences into legislation. The position runs against a Libyan public mood that, by 2023, had grown deeply hostile to political parties on the grounds that the parties had failed to deliver after 2011.
Fairouz's counter-argument is that the parties had not been given the conditions in which they could function. The repair, in her framing, is not the elimination of parties but the construction of the conditions under which they can work.
"Even if we die in it." — on the drive from Tripoli to Benghazi on 17 February 2011 (EP 130)