Episode: 129 — "Building the Homeland is Difficult in Libya" · Full Episode #129
Guest: Dr. Mustafa Al-Tir
Date: 26 March 2023
In the late 1980s the Gaddafi state announced a plan to reorganise Libyan civil society into three thousand local communes. The plan was a structural extension of the Jamahiriya ideology — the doctrine, developed by Gaddafi through The Green Book, that conventional state institutions should be progressively dissolved into a system of direct popular committees. The three-thousand-commune programme was meant to be the late-period operationalisation of that doctrine: a country reorganised into small administrative cells, each in theory self-governing, in practice answerable upward through the security apparatus.
For the plan to acquire legitimacy beyond the security apparatus, the regime needed senior academic and professional figures to publicly endorse it. The communes had to be presented not as a regime intervention but as a recognition of Libyan social fact, validated by the people who were paid to understand Libyan social fact.
Mustafa Al-Tir, by the late 1980s, was the senior surviving figure of Libyan academic sociology. The first Libyan PhD in the discipline, trained at Minnesota, returned to a country that needed his expertise. He had been involved in building the university system through the 1970s and 1980s.
The regime asked him to publicly endorse the three-thousand-commune programme.
He refused.
The refusal was not produced through a public denunciation. There was no press release, no resignation letter, no act that could be photographed and circulated. The refusal was produced through absence: Mustafa simply did not appear at the events at which he was expected to speak in support of the programme. The refusal was, in form, withdrawal rather than confrontation.
Inside the structure of late-Gaddafi-era Libyan public life, the withdrawal was sufficient. The regime's public-legitimacy machinery did not require senior figures to oppose it; it only required them not to remain silent in support. Silence, in the late 1980s, was opposition. Mustafa's silence was registered, and the silence had a cost — in career terms, in institutional terms, in the standard set of pressures the regime applied to the small population of senior figures it could not trust.
Mustafa does not narrate the cost in detail on the episode. The reticence is consistent with the texture of the entire interview. He does not present himself as a man who paid a heroic price. He presents himself as a sociologist who, at a particular moment, could not in good conscience lend his name to a programme he did not believe would work. The cost is acknowledged without invitation to sympathy.
The 2011 revolution dissolved the regime that had built the communes programme. The communes themselves dissolved with the regime. The three-thousand-commune project belongs, by 2023, to a particular archive of Libyan administrative experiments — the artefacts of a state that organised itself around a single ideological text.
Mustafa's line about the post-2011 collapse — "When Gaddafi went, the homeland went with him" — sits in productive tension with the refusal. The man who refused the regime in the 1980s is also the man who, by 2023, can describe the regime's fall as a structural catastrophe for the country it ruled. The two positions are not contradictory. They are the two halves of a sociological reading of the same state.
The story is a case study in quiet refusal. Most of the public archive of Libyan political opposition to Gaddafi consists of the loud cases — the prisoners, the assassinated, the exiled. The quieter cases are less recorded. They consist of senior professionals who did not, when asked, lend the regime their names. The quieter cases were also a form of refusal, and they also had costs.
The story is the documentation of one such case.