Episode: 129 — "Building the Homeland is Difficult in Libya" · Full Episode #129
Date: 26 March 2023
Language: Libyan Arabic
Dr. Mustafa Al-Tir (مصطفى الطير) is a pioneering Libyan sociologist. He was the first Libyan to receive a PhD in sociology, awarded by the University of Minnesota in 1971. He spent the subsequent decades teaching and researching across Libyan and pan-Arab institutions, producing a body of work on Libyan social structure that is, by 2023, foundational. He is, in his late eighties at the time of recording, one of the senior surviving figures of the first generation of Libyan academic social science.
He continues to swim approximately five kilometres a day off the coast of Tripoli. The fact is reported on the episode without embellishment. It is a simple statement about the man's relationship to his body and to the sea his city sits on.
Mustafa's doctoral work in Minnesota at the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s placed him inside the American sociological tradition at a particular moment — after the post-war expansion of the discipline, and during the period in which American social science was confronting the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement and the limits of its own quantitative paradigm. He returned to Libya with that training intact, and produced what was, at the time, the first systematic Libyan sociological work.
The return was not into a country with a developed academic infrastructure. The Libyan university system in the 1970s was still being built. Mustafa was, in effect, one of the people building it.
The most concrete piece of biographical detail in the episode is also one of the most extraordinary in Damiri's archive. Around 1961, a decade before he completed his PhD, Mustafa was teaching at a school in Sebha, in southern Libya. One of his students was a young Muammar Gaddafi — at that point a teenager, not yet a military officer, not yet anything other than a student in a southern Libyan town.
Mustafa, in his role as a teacher and later school administrator, personally signed the papers that expelled Gaddafi from the school. The reason was disciplinary. He delivers the fact without dramatisation. He does not reach for the obvious irony — the man he expelled went on to rule the country he was expelled into — and he does not produce a redemptive frame for the episode. He notes the fact, and he moves on.
See: The 3000 Communes Refusal
In the late 1980s, the Gaddafi state announced a programme to reorganise Libyan civil society into three thousand local communes — a structural extension of the Jamahiriya ideology, intended to dissolve the conventional distinction between state and citizen. Mustafa, by this point a senior academic with significant public standing, was asked to publicly endorse the programme. He refused.
The refusal was not produced through public confrontation. It was produced through the absence of public endorsement — Mustafa simply did not appear at the events at which he was expected to speak in support of the programme. The refusal had a cost. He describes the period without inviting sympathy; the cost was the cost.
The episode treats the refusal as the central biographical moment of his public life. It is the moment at which a senior figure in Libyan academia, with full understanding of what the refusal would cost him, declined to lend the state his name.
See: The 3000 Communes Refusal
The episode's most quoted line is Mustafa's formulation of what happened to Libya in the years after 2011. The line — "When Gaddafi went, the homeland went with him" — is not, as it might initially read, a regime apology. Mustafa was not a regime supporter. The line is a diagnostic claim about the post-2011 period: the state apparatus that Gaddafi had built was so completely organised around his person that its collapse, when he fell, was structural and total. The country did not transition. It dissolved.
The line is delivered by a man who refused, decades earlier, to publicly endorse Gaddafi's communes programme. The refusal and the diagnosis sit alongside each other without contradiction. The diagnosis is not approval. It is the senior sociologist's assessment of the system he had spent his life studying.
The detail closes the portrait. Mustafa, in his late eighties, continues to swim approximately five kilometres a day off the Tripoli coast. The fact is offered as a small piece of biographical information rather than a piece of inspirational content. It is a statement about a man whose body and discipline are still functioning at a level that most men forty years his junior would struggle to match.
"When Gaddafi went, the homeland went with him." (EP 129)