@RRowleyTucsonRobert Rowley
They hold meetings, drink cappuccino in hotel lobbies and hold more meetings. Their phones ring with calls from Qatar, from Europe, from Benghazi. Former exiles huddle with teenagers who fought on the front lines and with men who were once powerful in the Gadhafi regime, and hope to be powerful again.
These are days of intrigue and exhilaration in the Libyan capital. Citizens committees are formed, then collapse and reappear under different names. Anyone who can claim a role in opposing or overthrowing Col. Moammar Gadhafi is talking politics. And in this cacophony of voices and ambitions, those of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists are emerging as the loudest.
The real strength of political Islam – whether a future government will veer toward religious fundamentalism or steer a more moderate pro-Western course – is one of the great unknowns in post-Gadhafi Libya.
Unlike Egyptians and Tunisians, whose rebellions against autocratic rulers preceded the uprising here, Libyans never experienced elections or even the parodies that pass for elections in many Arab countries. Political life is a vacuum. The Islamists, some of them seasoned underground activists and media-savvy religious scholars, are primed to fill it.
Chief among them are veterans of the Brotherhood, whose Libyan members operated more or less secretly both inside and outside the country during the Gadhafi regime. Now its members are openly networking in the many impromptu committees springing up to debate Libya’s future.
But with revolutionary solidarity starting to evaporate and pro-Gadhafi forces still fighting in parts of the country, Islamist activists are treading lightly about their intentions.
“We believe in partnerships,” said Imad El Bannani, a Brotherhood member and one of the leaders of a Tripoli coalition, known by its Arabic title Etilaf, which has quickly become a kind of forum for criticism of the national transitional government.
“The Muslim Brotherhood is not ready to organize and act yet in the political field,” he added.
That field is wide open, but people with roots in Islamic political activism are already in positions of influence.
The security chief of Tripoli, for example, is Abdel Hakim Belhaj, once the leader of a militant group that U.S. authorities considered linked to al-Qaeda. Mr. Belhaj has said he renounced violence after “corrective studies” in Libyan prison, and many of the civilian rebel leaders who know him say they are convinced he is neither an extremist nor politically ambitious.
Another prominent figure is the religious scholar Ali Sallabi, who was the Gadhafi regime’s emissary to convince Mr. Belhaj’s armed fighters to repudiate violence and who helped broker their release a few years ago.
Mr. Sallabi then became a leading figure in the uprising. He served as the rebels’ liaison with Qatar, which supplied arms and military training. His frequent appearances on the Qatar-based Arabic television station, al-Jazeera, helped vault him to sudden stardom in Libya.
Mr. Sallabi has since used his television platform to attack the interim prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril as a tyrant-in-waiting who relies too much on former Gadhafi officials. For his part, Mr. Jibril, once a professor in the United States, has insinuated that critics such as Mr. Sallabi are religious extremists.
The vehemence of their dispute reflects post-revolutionary stress, according to many Libyan rebel leaders.
“We haven’t ever been able to communicate without suspicion or fear,” said Mohamed Omeish, a Tripoli businessman and member of Etilaf coalition. “We are not used to dialogue or the exchange of ideas.”
Mr. Sallabi says he would like to create a religious party, but it would be one that would respect democratic principles. He has cited Turkey, where the ruling party is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood but operates in a secular state, as a potential model.
