(Part I of II)
Those who have been observing the Libyan scene for the past several years have not had much cause for celebration. Of late, however, certain aspects of life in Libya seem to have turned to worse, particularly the increasingly insidious influence of Madkhali Salafist ideology in the eastern part of that country. Over the past couple of months, some imported books have been impounded under the pretext of non-payment of customs duties and fees, women have been barred from travelling abroad without a male companion- allegedly for security reasons- and a fanatical Salafist cleric from Saudi Arabia was invited by the eastern authorities to preach sermons in the mosques of that part of the country, supposedly because those authorities found his anti-Muslim Brotherhood rhetoric to their liking (The Muslim Brotherhood dominates the western part of Libya and is held responsible by the east of Libya for having sabotaged the democratic results of the 2014 elections in which Islamists won only 16% of the vote.) It is certainly not entirely clear why the authorities in the eastern part of Libya have yielded so easily to the Salafists. Some have seen this as a sop to those who accuse the secularists of eastern Libya of being anti-Islamic, while others see in this a ruse designed to dispel any doubts- in the minds of those who still have any- about the intolerance and obscurantism of the Islamists.
- Husam Dughman, Author and Political Analyst
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