Meet the likely architect of the new Libya « Shabab Libya

Washington Post Prophecy:

December 9, 2011

As Ali Sallabi walked through the lobby of Tripoli’s Radisson hotel — a 1980s concrete tower separated from the Mediterranean coast by the soft lines of a whitewashed 16th-century mosque — the Muslim cleric couldn’t take two steps without being approached by fawning Libyans, eager Western journalists and glad-handing representatives of foreign aid organizations.

People slipped him bits of paper with their phone numbers. Armed rebels — teenagers, most of them — asked him to pose for photos on their cellphones. Women sought his blessings.

A short time ago, hardly anyone in the West knew or cared who Sallabi was. But the 47-year-old cleric has quickly transformed himself from longtime spiritual leader of the anti-Gaddafi opposition — albeit from self-imposed exile in Qatar and other gulf states — to chief architect of Libya’s most likely next government, an Islam-based democracy whose shape and leanings remain wholly unclear.

As enthusiastic as his welcome is at home, the reaction abroad to Sallabi’s rise in post-revolutionary Libya has grown wary, even bordering on panicky. Like his Muslim Brotherhood compatriots in Egypt and the new Islamist government in Tunisia, Sallabi is trying to weave a path between wildly optimistic expectations in his country and downright dread from the United States and Western Europe.

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