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An American living in Paris, I went to Libya on Easter weekend 2004 to mourn the end of a world. Reeling from the recent near-simultaneous deaths of close friends in the Sharm el-Sheikh plane crash in Egypt and of my Lebanese mother-in-law in Boston, something must have pulled me unconsciously toward the Mediterranean. My intent was only to go someplace, anyplace, off the map—or more accurately, in the Internet age, off the Web. Some months earlier, on a flight from Antigua, an island ravaged by mass tourism and development where I sourly noted the end of another paradise, I had come across an article in Corriere della Sera about the Roman ruins at Leptis Magna. What the hell, I thought: the US government had just lifted its ban on travel and investment in Libya, and the frisson of visiting the land of Muammar el-Qaddafi was undeniable—an enemy of my enemy is, at least in theory, a kind of friend.

Besides, I grew up with Qaddafi: since 1969, he was always there, in some shape or form. Fidel Castro, too, but Fidel—his name says it all—never changed, whereas Qaddafi continually reinvented himself, beginning in 1969 with the “Green Revolution” (a perverse misnomer in a country where oil is king). Hanging from his turquoise Beetle, a few years before I bought my own Bug, the young colonel led the military coup that overthrew the monarchy and established the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. (His VW now sits proudly on the ground floor of the Jamahiriya Museum in the Red Palace in Tripoli—at the entrance to the prehistory galleries.)

During the 1980s, when I became a graduate student, Qaddafi became a writer and philosopher, the author of bizarre poetry, stories, and the biblical Green Book, a strange admixture of Rousseau’s mistrust of democracy and a convergent Arab misogyny. And, of course, during that same period (but long after I had abandoned my own juvenile delinquency), Qaddafi became a terrorist, with the 1988 Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie and the 1989 attack on a French plane over Niger. Within a few years, things had changed: I had moved to California, then Paris, and Qaddafi had more or less dropped from view. We lost touch, although he remained as busy as ever: he first worked to remove UN sanctions imposed in 1992, then in 1999 proposed to lead the United States of Africa, before turning his attention to the US and Europe as useful sources of foreign currency and investment. Now he’s back. Having removed himself from the “Axis of Evil,” Qaddafi has opened the door of his house to the West after nearly a quarter-century of isolation. I was happy to visit.

And Libya is his house, at least the main room that is Tripoli. Not that there’s much sign of a repressive regime: no police or soldiers to speak of, just a few paper checks on the highway to Sabratha and Leptis Magna. On the surface, Libya is an empire of signs. Qaddafi is not only omnipresent on the capital’s streets, but is also inside the shops and cafes, in the souk—his portrait hanging beside the Spice Girls—and across the square from the principal mosque, the former Italian cathedral. The size and iconography is highly varied: sometimes Qaddafi appears as a youthful revolutionary leader, sometimes as a simple colonel, often the aging statesman, in Bedouin garb, embodying the 34th year of the revolution. Missing, however, is the image most visible in the West today: Qaddafi in the Bedouin tent surrounded by his paramilitary female bodyguards. That is for export only, it seems, and strangely belies the fundamental modernity of his rule.

For Libya is, without a doubt, a modern society, at least of a certain kind. Fueled by oil revenues since the 1970s, its per capita income and average standard of living are far superior to those of the developing world, even if its unemployment rate remains wastefully high. There is much poverty, but none of it very visible, and, outwardly, Tripoli is modern to a fault. Scooters and motorcycles are strangely absent, as are bicycles, but the streets of Tripoli roar with a cacophony of cars. The gracelessly aging colonial buildings of downtown Tripoli, spruced up with the ubiquitous green shutters, are laid out on a quiet, orderly grid of streets with shops that boast few known brands. In the souk, the greens seem to shade into blue, and the shops provide for daily life. So, too, does the vast open-air market next to the medina, where stalls and carts overflow with brand knockoffs and facsimiles, from Crust toothpaste to Love soap. Across the city, forests of satellite dishes grace Tripoli’s rooftops, even atop apparently unfinished and abandoned structures within and beyond the capital.

Yet this is not quite the modernity of the West: missing, for example, is the computer infrastructure that has so transformed our daily lives. True, there are an estimated 200,000 Internet users in the country, and several cyber-cafes in the middle of Tripoli’s souk are suggestive of things to come. Still, purchasing a seat in Paris on the Libyan state airline, Afriqiyah, with its garret offices on the rue de Rivoli, was a Rip Van Winkle experience as I watched a clerk write out by hand, in triplicate, the ticket itself, something I hadn’t witnessed since flying People Express in the mid-1970s. Changing money in a Tripoli bank was like backward time-travel: there wasn’t a computer in sight, and the transaction took nearly an hour, with me traipsing from office to office carrying forms filled out, again, in triplicate. Visiting the Libyan consulate in Paris for a visa was reminiscent of the Burmese consulate in Bangkok in the early 1980s: a few clerks on old typewriters with lots of whispering behind closed doors.

Of course, this is a regime in transition. The old system involved going to Libya as part of an organized tour, with most tourists heading for the desert. Now you can, in principle, go on your own, although I only got my visa through the services of “Shibani,” who claimed to be the cousin of a hotel manager in Tripoli. “Shibani” met me on the Champs-Elysée, put my passport into a cheap leather briefcase, and returned it—stamped—two days later, for a modest fee. He then insisted that I would be barred entry into Libya unless I contracted his tour services. Blackmailed, I agreed to hire a local driver through him, paying twice the rate I could have gotten onsite. (But Abdul turned out to be my best informant.)

Tripoli, though in transition, offers little tourist infrastructure geared to the non-Arab world. The monstrous, and overpriced, glass-and-concrete tower of the Corinthia Bab-Africa Hotel looms over the rubble of the souk and shares the skyline with the city’s major mosque. I stayed in a more modest, Arab businessman’s hotel that did not seek out an American clientele nor was inordinately hostile to one. There just wasn’t much interest, among shopkeepers or people on the street, in Westerners. I explored the Tripoli souk for two days with my camera exposed, and not once did anyone try to sell me anything. One small corner of the market near the Red Palace is reserved for the tourist trade, and it contains mostly goods imported from Morocco: toy camels and hookahs, slippers, and other predictable junk. On the street, in the new town and the old, I felt almost invisible. No one stared, no one gaped, even though there were a few Europeans (but no Americans, yet) on the streets. But hesitate, smile, greet someone—and another world opens up.

English is surprisingly functional, not the least because Qaddafi, perhaps anticipating this moment, has, for a decade, required its instruction in primary schools. “Where are you from?” asked an old fishmonger in a nearly empty fish-market. California. “Welcome to Libya. Do you golf?” he inquired. No, but my father does. “My handicap is four,” or some such, he said, words that would be equally meaningless in Arabic to me. That’s better than my father, I told him. “Come have some tea,” he replied, and so I did—just as I accepted the invitation by a group of teenagers at the ruins of Leptis Magna’s harbor, brokered through the one who spoke a respectable English, to join them for lunch. Three of them had just caught snapper and were grilling the fish at the foot of the magnificent lighthouse ruins—purported to have been the same size as Alexandria’s—while another tossed around a basketball. Afterward, I offered to pay, but they indignantly refused. This situation was replicated endlessly during my short stay. In the Tripoli souk, I was shocked by the greeting, “Hey, man, howz it hangin’?,” in response to my slow gaze into a barbershop. The Ghanaian barber, as black as night and with a million-dollar smile and uncanny American accent, urged me to come in and talk. “Welcome to Libya, man.” Although some in the souk were camera-shy, others—the baker at his oven, the weaver at his loom—were pleased to pose for pictures. Most indecipherable was the encounter with an old man who, with no English whatsoever, mimed and dragged me to the ruins of a massive synagogue in the middle of the medina. “Judia.” Unmentioned in the only English-language guidebook I could find, the temple’s charred interior had been used, apparently, by squatters for decades, and the Hebrew inscriptions on the façade and walls seemed more distant, even to me, a Jew, than the traces of the Roman world.

In the guest book at Leptis Magna, there were inscriptions from thousands of Italians who, it seems, never really stopped coming, even after Libya achieved independence in 1951. There was still no sign of Americans, however. But they will come, along with others from the West, for Leptis Magna is truly one of the most magnificent Roman sites I have ever seen, with its superb second-century baths commissioned by Hadrian, its great colonnaded streets, its vast forum, theater, port, and markets. (Google it, and you will see that Lonely Planet has declared exactly the same thing). Perfectly reconstructed by Italian archeologists in the early twentieth century, the site embodies the right combination of ruined foundations and rebuilt walls and columns, largely untouched despite the country’s dramatic transformations since independence and oil. Sabratha, the other major Roman site, to the west of Tripoli, was to my mind much less impressive, in part because the Italian archeologists of the 1920s over-restored the second-century theater, using limestone blocks only half the original size, but left the house foundations and most of the temples unreconstructed. Only the ancient amphitheater, largely unrestored, offers a more original and vivid impression. With its deep underground tunnels bisecting in the form of a cross (but originally used only to store sets and equipment), it seems an appropriate memorial to a place where lions ate Christians. Both Leptis Magna and Sabratha were rendered even more wondrous by the fact that the principal tourists were Libyan women, mostly veiled in cheap polyester, and schoolchildren, and that it is hard to find souvenirs (apart from the marble and ceramic shards scattered everywhere about the sites).

I want to go back to Libya, but I’m afraid it’s already too late. Last year, right when I left, the New York Times described that “giant sucking noise” in the Mediterranean as the flow of tourism and foreign investment into Libya; within months, Libya—“first taste of a once forbidden fruit”—was on the front page of the Times’s Sunday Travel section. Meanwhile, Qaddafi has been courted onsite by Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac and scores of American and European investors. Soon there will be restaurants for the tourist trade that will present an official version of Libyan cuisine; today, there are just the Italian leftovers served in a few overpriced and deserted eateries, inedible compared to the street food in the medina. The souk itself will change, and so will Tripoli, becoming predictably less safe as more money flows in. Soon there will be massive tourist hotels, replicas of the Corinthia Bab-Africa, where wealthy Europeans and Arabs will take refuge in comfortable, anonymous spaces. The souvenirs will be different, and although the beauty of Leptis Magna—like that of Greece’s Olympia off-season—might resist mass tourism, soon Libya will be more like Antigua or, for that matter, anywhere else.

Peter Sahlins is professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the University of California Study Center in Paris; he is the author of several books about France, including, most recently, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After.

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