hink of it as a faded music video, dimly remembered from childhood, seen at 3 a.m. on a dying TV in a shag-rug basement. The scene unfolds in one languid shot, a palette of muted greens, wan blues, bloodless reds. A man walks through the alleyways of a medina, his linen shirt fluttering in a slow-motion breeze. The sloping corrugated iron roofs shade him from the worst of the sun; still, his Jheri curls catch the light like gemstones. We see the superimposed ghosts of Romans walking these alleys, Athenians, Phoenicians and Arab warriors too. Then, we watch as Mussolini’s colonial forces’ leather boots creak against the worn stone. They give way to dusty Bedouin in jallabiyas and rail-thin teens in tight T-shirts and acid-washed jeans, the history of this alley unfolding in seconds.

We follow the man as he passes a coppersmith banging rhythmically on a jug. He presses up with the balls of his feet in a hop-step, like a dancer keeping time. He is in fact a very good dancer, and has even written a song called “Ballerina Girl” that is, in short, about a girl who is a ballerina. Behind him, he hears the unmistakable spoon-on- a-champagne-glass tinkle of children’s laughter. He pretends not to notice. They follow him, these children, gathering in number as he walks on. He is, of course, used to the attention, but can’t quite hide his surprise. After all, he is on the edge of North Africa, in a country that was, until recently, considered to be the undisputed ass-end of the uncivilized world.

Then something truly extraordinary happens. The laughter stops. Murmuring begins. He hears a word in English. This stops him in his tracks. The children have raised their eyes as if in prayer. They move their hands like a blind person tracing the facial features of a new lover. “Hello,” they intone, looking blankly to the heavens. “Hello.” Despite his fame, despite the universal reach of his music, the man cannot help but be astonished.

“How do you know?” asks Lionel Brockman Richie, Jr., of the children in the medina. “How do you know?”

hen I first learned of Lionel Richie’s close encounter in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, I initially confused it for parody. The world-famous pop star had not, according to an article in GQ magazine, experienced an Islamic street seance, but rather a passable re-enactment of the “Hello” video clip (a staple on MTV in 1984, and a landmark moment in the history of the music video), in which a beautiful blind woman, who knows Richie only from his mellifluous voice, somehow sculpts a perfectly representative clay bust of his Jheri-curled visage.

“How do you know?” begged Lionel Richie of the children. I shared his bemusement. Certainly, his videos are prominent in the cultural memory of a generation of North Americans — a friend once described the “All Night Long” clip (in which Richie is followed by the denizens of a Reagan-era inner city ‘hood and is not murdered for his leather pants) as “a profound piece of eschatological imagination.” I was nonetheless taken aback by how far “Hello” had travelled. To a scion of the 1980s, the Richie songbook carries an almost oneiric weight. As with “All Night Long” and its attendant clip, the “Hello” video was an indelible piece of my childhood, a kiln-fired shard of memory somehow unearthed in the Muslim world.

On one level, the tale was a powerful, perfect metaphor: popular culture as a binding force. Hundreds of millions of people in over a hundred countries know Lionel Richie’s music, and adore it. According to GQ, anti-Ba’athist residents of Baghdad had blasted “All Night Long” as the Shock-N-Awe™ campaign commenced. “The only thing Shiite and Sunni now share, aside from their hatred of each other and their worship of Allah and his prophet, is their abiding love for Lionel Brockman Richie Jr.,” read the GQ article. What this rather narrow view of life in Baghdad elucidates is the surprise North Americans feel when our culture — our collective memories — are embraced by them.

Nonetheless, there were aspects of the “Hello” tale — little details — that troubled me. The “All Night Long” in Baghdad story went against the anecdotal evidence I’d collected about those fateful evenings in March 2003. And as much as I wanted to believe it (and for some reason, believing had become unreasonably important to me), the “Hello” re-enactment sounded, well, outlandish. Did hundreds of young Libyan children really have the “Hello” video downloaded onto their cognitive hard drives the same way a Westerner born of the 1980s did? In no way did I think that GQ or Lionel Richie had willfully fabricated these details. I just wondered if something had become garbled in the translation. I had to find out if that video re-enactment had happened. As GQ put it: “We... have a strategic, even moral, obligation to know: What is the freakin’ deal with Lionel Richie?”

year and a half after the alleged re-enactment, I sat in a battered Volkswagen Jetta and glanced across four lanes of furious Tripolitan traffic.

“These are the rules,” said Eder, the Berber. He readjusted his mirrored shades and settled low in the driver’s seat. “We look straight ahead. We don’t stare at the guards. We play careful, careful.”

I adjusted my own shades, pulled the brim of my cap low. “Roger that,” I said, like a cast member of CSI: Tripoli.

“There, ahead,” he barked. “You see it?”

I did. Behind the pell-mell tangle of traffic, a vast, fortified compound, the walls indented with the occasional Islamic tessellation. There were slats for gun barrels, turrets manned by men with machine guns.

“That’s what we call al-Qa’ida. The Fortress. Or al-Aziziyah. Seven checkpoints you have to drive through to get to the house. A very nice place, you would not say?”

I would not: Al-Aziziyah resembled nothing so much as San Quentin on steroids. As we drove by, a gate opened to admit a small convoy of armored trucks; I glimpsed another series of gates, another contingent of armed men. We had approached the compound from the north, along a traffic-clogged ring road that changed in character from Mediterranean boulevard to desert highway in the space of a few kilometres, embracing downtown Tripoli in a languid hug. Now, at high noon, the city was stunned into torpor by the bright North African sun; men sat idly along the sidewalks on their haunches, shading their scalps with scraps of cardboard. Dozens of muezzins called the faithful to midday prayer. In response, Eder turned up Rihanna’s “Umbrella.”

Al-Aziziyah is one of history’s punching bags. At precisely 2:00 a.m. local time, on the clear morning of April 15, 1986, the compound became the focal point of an undertaking called Operation El Dorado Canyon. Lasting all of eleven minutes, and unbeknownst to Tripolitans and those who learned of it over coffee and Frosted Flakes in North America, El Dorado Canyon was the most intricately choreographed bombing run in the seventy-odd-year history of the art. This was the era of go-big-or-go-home: A great airborne armada was dispatched to provide a “measured response” to the extracurricular antics of a man President Ronald Reagan dubbed “the mad dog of the Middle East.” This was one Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi, Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution, hereafter referred to as The Colonel.

Within the fortified walls of al-Aziziyah stood The Colonel’s gilded private residence, bombed mercilessly in a sort of much larger version of Castro’s exploding cigar. The Colonel had read the tea leaves (as well as the newspapers, which published several leaked reports about an upcoming “surprise” raid) and had slunk off for safer climes. He nevertheless made the curious decision of leaving behind his adopted baby daughter Hanna. Along with thirty-six other Libyans, she didn’t make it through the night.

Known principally for his pan-Arabic Islamofascism, a penchant for gold-plated AK-47s, and his considerable bouffant, The Colonel scrambled to power in a 1969 coup and rose to subsequent infamy as the world’s number one state sponsor of international terrorism. A week prior to Operation El Dorado Canyon, a suitcase bomb exploded in a Berlin discotheque called La Belle, killing two US servicemen and a Turkish woman, injuring a further 229. This was one in a long line of similar atrocities, perpetrated in an age before such things became the ubiquitous bric-a-brac of the daily news wires. With La Belle, The Colonel had finally been caught with his hand in the grenade jar.

Taken at face value, the whole business seemed like just another dance in the bitter pas de deux between America and the Muslim world, which is the fulcrum on which we now turn. And taken at face value, it was.

That is, until Lionel Richie stepped into the picture.

der’s one muscled arm lazily guided the steering wheel, the other fiddled with his squawking PDA. At his knee, he kept a soft briefcase containing the reams of official documentation that allowed me to be in the country, all of which made me feel like a newly adopted high-end puppy.

“Keep your eyes low,” he reminded me. “Careful, careful.”

The tour-group operator I’d retained to organize my Libyan visa — a process that redefined my understanding of backwater bureaucracy — had been uncharacteristically accommodating when I’d requested a guide in his mid-twenties. I’d banked on the fact that a younger man would be more open to straying from the rigid itinerary I’d been assigned. And while Eder was indeed young, I was wary when I mentioned, with exaggerated nonchalance, that I just so happened to be in the country on false pretences.

“Excuse me?” he said after a dithering attempt at explanation. He removed his mirrored shades in what I assumed was a precursor to violence. “So let me get this straight: You don’t want to go with the Germans on a walking tour of the ruins?” he asked.

“No. I kind of lied about that on the visa application form.”