ABSTRACT
In his biography of Qadhdhafi, Angelo Del Boca defined Libya as 'probably the country which is the most difficult to rule in the whole Arab world': in all likelihood, the distinguished historian of Italian colonialism had in mind the difficulty of keeping together a country with such strong centrifugal forces. The new military government immediately aligned themselves with Nasser's in the struggle against Israel and showed that their pan-Arabism had a peculiar Islamic and puritanical strand: they forbade gambling and the production, consumption and selling of alcohol, closed nightclubs and imposed the Muslim calendar. Following the weakening of pan-Arabism in the 1970s the stress on an overall pan-Arab identity gradually underwent a change of emphasis: the pan-Arab national narrative of the newly-born Jamahiriyya would no longer be centred on Egypt, but on Libya, seen as the vanguard of anti-imperialism, and on himself, as the guarantor of this revolutionary line.
