Death of a Misurata fighter

One of Andrea Camilleri’s police novels is called The Shape Of Water. As one of the characters puts it early on, death is like water: having no shape, it takes the form of the vessel holding it. In the Inspector Montalbano stories, death, no matter how private, takes the shape that Sicilian society gives it.

The posthumous care taken of the fallen fighter combined the duties of friendship, patriotism and religion...- Ranier Fsadni

Last Monday, a Misurata fighter brought over to Malta for intensive care lost the battle for his life. Having survived the 70-day siege of his city, he was wounded, three days before the fall of Tripoli, in the hard battle for Zliten (a coastal town between Tripoli and Misurata, important to capture if the 4,000 Misurati soldiers were to reach the capital). I knew his brother-in-law, Yousef, himself a former combatant, who asked to see me so that he could give me the list of all the medical staff and others in Malta he wanted to thank for easing Saif Elnaser’s last hours of pain.

That is how I found myself present at the hospital mortuary as his body was prepared for burial, according to the Islamic rites, and then transported to the airport in a small procession of friends and embassy staff. There was something universally moving about the careful tenderness with which Saif Elnaser, a bear of a man, was washed by a group of young Libyan men, some of them half his size. But the universality had aspects that also said something about contemporary Libya.

The mortuary attendant who entered the room to supply some more gauze remained there, struck, as he told me, by the dignity and respect the dead man was accorded during the ritual washing: sponged gently three times, turned over delicately so as not to disturb the cloth covering his intimate area, wrapped in a plain white shroud, and sprinkled with orange-blossom scented water.

“He must be like a groom,” Yousef told me softly, as we both looked at the face of the man in the shroud. The image was new to me, although I was aware that the perfume heralded the company of angels. Earlier, Yousef had patted his brother-in-law’s face with eau de cologne, holding back tears while barely audibly declaring: “God is most great.”

Tolstoy’s The Death Of Ivan Ilyich shows the encroaching death of a man whose symptoms are present in the very tissue of his card-playing social life. It is not too much of a stretch to see, in the death of Saif Elnaser, a few symptoms of Libya’s new life. I would highlight two.

First, there is religion. Following the recent speech by the chairman of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, some observers have raised eyebrows about the claim to want a Libya whose laws have the Sharia as their source.

The Sharia, of course, can be a source without dictating the actual letter of the law. In the same speech, Dr Abdul Jalil referred to women having a leadership role in the new government, clearly a statement that many Muslims would consider to be sourced in the general principles of justice enunciated by Islam but not one dictated by Islamic law.

But the point I want to make here is a different one. The posthumous care taken of the fallen fighter combined the duties of friendship, patriotism and religion in ways that cannot be sharply separated – not by the participants, certainly not by an observer.

The coffin was draped in Libya’s new flag, in the presence of Libya’s Ambassador. On the way to the airport, the procession stopped briefly to say prayers at the mosque. A state that sought to separate sharply between practices the combined neighbourliness, civic-mindedness and religious duty would be imposing a distinction that would need a disciplined top-down imposition that could well be counterproductive for the building of a Libyan democracy if it left much of its population feeling culturally disenfranchised.

The word Dr Abdul Jalil chose to describe the kind of Islam and political culture that Libya would embrace was “middle”. Although idiomatically translated as “moderate”, “middle” captures better Mr Abdul Jalil’s other image of a “road”, a journey that must be travelled – where what is “middle” is relative, too. (Incidentally, in choosing such an image he was also being faithful to the original meaning of “Sharia”, with its connotations of path, journeying and exploration.)

Such an argument appeals both to tradition and to awareness of change. And this is the second feature I want to highlight about Saif Elnaser’s last hour in Malta.

As the state’s official seal was pressed into the sealing wax on the coffin and the flag draped over it, he was claimed not just by his family and friends but also by his country.

The story of Saif Elnaser’s courage is being echoed across the country in stories about the courage of countless Libyans, fallen and still alive. The role that women played in the last six months is emerging more clearly in news reports. My own experience, following conversations, is of an almost inexhaustible compulsion to share stories that one has seen and heard. I am struck by how Muammar Gaddafi features only in the past tense, how easily a future without him is being imagined.

ranierfsadni@europe.com