Episode: 130 — "The Civil State Requires Parties" · Full Episode #130
Guest: Dr. Fairouz Al-Naas
Date: 2 April 2023
In 1950s Libya, Abdul Rahim Al-Naas — Fairouz Al-Naas's father — produced a handwritten political magazine. The publication ran to fifteen issues. Each issue was assembled by hand, copied by hand, and distributed by hand. There was no printing press. There was no commercial publisher. There was no permission from the state to produce political journalism outside the small set of sanctioned channels. The fifteen issues were produced anyway.
Libya in the 1950s was an independent monarchy under King Idris. It was not Gaddafi-era Libya — political space existed — but the space was conditional and surveilled. Independent political journalism in particular was treated by the state as a risk to be managed. Producing a political magazine outside the official press, even in handwritten form, was the kind of work that put a man's career and family on notice.
Abdul Rahim Al-Naas did the work.
The episode does not produce a full bibliography of the fifteen issues, and the wiki cannot reconstruct one from the episode alone. What is preserved in Fairouz's account is the form: handwritten, distributed across a small network, sustained for long enough to produce fifteen iterations. The content is described in summary as political analysis and commentary on Libyan public affairs at a moment when the country was still negotiating the shape of its post-independence settlement.
The fifteen-issue run is itself the document. Fifteen issues, each produced by hand, requires months of sustained work. The persistence is the evidence of seriousness. Most underground political journalism does not reach fifteen issues. Most underground political journalism stops at one or two before the cost of continuation becomes prohibitive.
Fairouz inherited the work. The episode does not present the inheritance as a romance. It presents it as structural fact: a child raised inside a household in which political work was a normal feature of the week absorbs, by daily exposure, both the methods and the threshold for what counts as serious. By the time the 2011 revolution arrived, Fairouz had been working inside Libyan political organising for years. Her father's magazine was not, for her, a piece of family folklore. It was the prior example.
The continuity is visible across the episode's three reference points. The 1950s magazine. The 1980s and 1990s diaspora opposition organising. The 2011 drive from Tripoli to Benghazi. The 2012 alternating-list law. Each event sits inside a longer line of inherited political work.
The story is also a study in what has been lost from Libyan public memory. The 1950s and 1960s produced a thin but real layer of Libyan civic and political journalism. The Gaddafi state, after 1969, systematically dismantled the institutions that had produced this layer and erased much of the documentary record. What survived survived in private hands — in family archives, in unpublished memoirs, in the testimony of the small surviving cohort who had been adults during the monarchy.
The fifteen-issue magazine belongs to this private archive. Fairouz's testimony on EP 130 is, in part, an act of moving it from the private archive into the public one.
The story documents a piece of Libyan political prehistory that the country's subsequent history has obscured. It also documents a particular form of inheritance — the inheritance of method, of seriousness, of what counts as work — that runs across generations of Libyan opposition activity.
It pairs naturally with Hisham Matar's account of his father's political work and with Mansour Bushnaf's account of writing at twenty-one. Each is a study in what Libyans were doing under regimes that did not permit them to do it.