Episode: 68 — "Why Are We Like This?" · Full Episode #68
Date: Season 6
Language: Arabic
Yousef Al-Sawani (يوسف الصواني) is Director of Studies at the Center for Arab Unity Studies (مركز دراسات الوحدة العربية) in Beirut, one of the longest-running pan-Arab research institutions in the region. He is from Al-Zahra, a village approximately 35–40 kilometres south-west of Tripoli. Before the 2011 revolution he held senior positions inside Libya's policy and research apparatus, including leadership at the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation. He resigned from the Foundation in early 2011, after confirming for himself that live ammunition was being used against protestors.
He brought to the episode a long-form analytical register — the academic who has lived inside the political system he now studies.
Al-Sawani's father was forced out of school at the age of eight or nine during the Second World War. He was sent to work as a farm labourer. The interruption shaped the rest of his life — and, by inversion, the lives of his children. The father made sure that every one of his children received the maximum education available. The discipline was not framed as ambition but as compensation: the schooling that had been taken from him was to be installed, with full force, in the next generation.
The most often-quoted moment of the episode is the dukkan story. As a young man, Al-Sawani's father went into a village shop. The shopkeeper handed him a piece of bread that had gone moldy. The father wept — not from hunger but from the recognition of what the transaction said about him: that he was a person to whom moldy bread could be handed without consequence. He left the shop and, in time, opened his own. The shop he opened became something more than a shop. It became the village's intellectual salon — a place where books were discussed, where political conversation was hosted, where men came not only to buy but to think aloud. The dukkan became a fixture of village civic life, generated from a single act of humiliation.
See: The Moldy Bread
Al-Sawani resigned from his position at the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation in early 2011, in the opening weeks of the uprising. He described the resignation as the conclusion of an internal verification process: he needed to confirm for himself, beyond any plausible deniability, that real bullets were being fired at unarmed demonstrators. Once the confirmation was secure, the institutional position was no longer defensible from the inside. The resignation was not delivered as a public political statement — it was delivered as a personal response to the verification.
Al-Sawani offered a definition of secularism that he framed as widely misunderstood in Arabic public conversation. The Arabic term almaniyya (علمانية) carries connotations — atheism, hostility to religion, foreign imposition — that the underlying concept does not require. His definition is the structural one: secularism is the separation of religion from the state. It is a position about institutions, not about belief. The clarification is not original — it is the standard scholarly definition — but stating it plainly inside a Libyan-Arabic conversation is itself a contribution.
Al-Sawani used a specific incident — known locally as the Hibouni camel-slaughter — as a marker for the emergence of a civic Libyan identity in the post-2011 period. The incident centred on a public act of camel slaughter conducted as a community event. He treated it not as a curiosity but as a small, legible moment in which Libyans organised collectively around a shared civic ritual that did not derive its legitimacy from regime, tribe or militia. The incident is too local to function as a general theory; it functioned in his account as one example among several of what civic Libyanness, when it does emerge, looks like.
His current position at the Beirut-based Center places him inside the institutional infrastructure of pan-Arab thought. The Center has, since the 1970s, been one of the principal venues for long-form Arabic-language research and translation. His move there represents a continuation of the orientation that the dukkan installed in his family three generations ago: the seriousness of inherited reading, transmitted forward.
"Secularism means: separating religion from the state." (EP 68)