Darnah, Qaddafi's So-Called "Islamic Emirate"
The New York Times reports:
DARNAH, Libya — This fiercely independent port city on the Mediterranean coast, once the center of a simmering Islamist insurgency in the 1990s, is now branded by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi as an Islamic emirate infiltrating his embattled country.
The charge, uttered again on Monday by Libya’s foreign minister, is familiar in the Arab world, where strongmen have long presented a stark choice to their subjects and their American backers: either dictatorship or Islamists, repression or chaos.
But Darnah offers a more complex reality: a mélange where secular currents are intersecting with religious ones, drawn together by nationalist opposition to Colonel Qaddafi’s four decades of often bizarre rule. This old Barbary port, with a reputation as one of Libya’s most pious cities and, in the words of a WikiLeaks cable, a “wellspring for foreign fighters in Iraq,” suggests a more nuanced picture of what role militant Islam may play in a city and country fumbling to forge a body politic in a land without one.
No one knows what will emerge in Libya, or in Egypt or Tunisia for that matter. But so far in each place, in a remarkable legacy of the uprisings, Islamist groups are collaborating with secular counterparts to call for democratic constitutions and the rule of law. Both groups seem to believe pluralism, if won, may best guarantee their survival.
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