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Their next class is civil interaction, in other words, how to have a conversation without turning it into a confrontation.

"It'll be interesting to see the extent to which al-Qaida spins this phenomenon," said Bill Braniff, who works at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center. He says al-Qaida would love people to believe there is a connection between the missing boys and the video. "What we are seeing is al-Qaida trying to control the propaganda output," he says. "They are not trying to control the activity on the ground to the same extent as they are trying to control the propaganda about the activity on the ground."

combines the role of social worker, therapist, lawyer and religious adviser.

''These people in fact are defined as agencies of the government,'' said Muhammad Serag, a professor of Islamic Studies at the American University in Cairo. ''They are not trusted anymore.''

Should ancient statues be destroyed or preserved? Should women be allowed to drive, to work, to travel without the permission of men? Can boys and girls attend school together? Is it permissible to buy insurance, to wear a sports jersey with a cross design, to shake hands with a non-Muslim, to take pictures, to view family photographs? All of this has been addressed in fatwas.

''When each and every person's unqualified opinion is considered a fatwa, we have lost a tool that is of the utmost importance to rein in extremism and preserve the flexibility and balance of Islamic law.''

The Tripolitan shore is, after all, where America’s centuries-long relationship with the Muslim world properly began. Operation El Dorado Canyon was but another in a long line of American military engagements with the variegated rulers of Libya, a legacy that dates back over 200 years. Within the DNA of those dusty, forgotten battles lies the code of enmity that continues unabated. But this concomitant history also hints at a lengthy cultural involvement— a mutual fascination that was tinged with both revulsion and wonder.

The stage darkens. Lights swing back and forth, illuminating the Hanna House. Then all goes quiet. An icon of the 1980s— onetime member of R’n’B supergroup the Commodores, 90 million solo records sold, over a dozen Top 10 singles on the Billboard charts—stalks up to the spotlight, a smile on his face, the velvety Mediterranean breeze fluttering his navy-blue shirt. He then belts out five of his most beloved hits in front of the enraptured guests, culminating in a rousing sing-along, accompanied by 40 angel-costumed children typical to this sort of proceeding, of the “We Are the World” anthem he co-wrote with Michael Jackson. “Hanna will be honoured tonight because of the fact that you’ve attached peace to her name,” Lionel Richie tells the crowd. “I love you Libya! I’ll be back.” Yes, but how did he come to be there in the first place?

The take-home message was that the man who wrote “Dancing on the Ceiling” was a greater nuncio for peace—or at least common ground—than any number of official envoys, roadmaps or summit meetings. But there was one item in the story that made me choke up, Beaches style. I played it again—just to make sure I hadn’t misheard. Then I made my way through the blustery autumnal day to the newsstand to purchase a copy of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. In print, the story hit me with a wallop I usually associate with passages from great literature (or first-edition comic books). Richie told GQ that when he visited the Tripoli medina, a contingent of Libyan children had massed around him, closed their eyes, made wavy gesticulations with their hands, and moaned “Hello.” This was not a séance, but rather a passable rendition of the “Hello” video clip (a staple on MTV in the station’s early years, and a landmark moment in the history of the music video), in which a gorgeous blind woman, who knows Richie only from his mellifluous voice, somehow sculpts a perfectly representative clay bust of his Jheri-curled visage. “What’s going on here? How do you know?” begged Lionel Richie of the Libyan children. “How do you know?” How did they know? Lionel Richie’s videos are prominent in the cultural memory of a generation of North Americans; a friend once described Richie’s “All Night Long” clip as “a profound piece of eschatological imagination.” Indeed, to a scion of the 1980s, the Richie oeuvre carries an almost oneiric weight. Like “All Night Long,” the “Hello” video was an indelible piece of my childhood, a kiln-fired shard of memory now flung into the quandary of the Muslim world.

popular culture as a binding force. Hundreds of millions of people in over a 100 countries know Lionel Richie’s music, and adore it. According to the GQ article, anti-Ba’athist residents of Baghdad had blasted “All Night Long” as the Shock ’n’ Awe™ 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.,” wrote Mr. Corsello.

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 reenactment had happened. Mr. Corsello put it perfectly: “We … have a strategic, even moral, obligation to know: What is the freakin’ deal with Lionel Richie?”

The Libyans I’d met so far were polite but reticent. “Such questions!” they’d remark, sounding like so many Peter Lorres in Casablanca. “Behind the questions, what do you hope to find, Mr. Richard? There is only darkness.” Indeed, it was impossible to get a peripheral sense of what was going on in Libya: I felt out of my depth, immersed in an ostensibly bright world that was defined by brutality. Securing an interview felt like pinning live butterfly specimens. I kept in mind the recent case of five Bulgarian nurses, sentenced to death on trumped-up charges of injecting the AIDS virus into poor Libyan children. They had been horribly mistreated; it took some filthy dealing on the part of European governments to secure their freedom. And I knew that any locals implicated in my quest could expect much worse.

maybe you think we’re backwards here

we spent our evenings haunting stores that sold bootleg DVDs of titles that had yet to be released stateside

in the vanguard of a new Libyan generation, surfing the demographic wave of a massive Middle Eastern birthrate, pulled west by the accident of his tribal affiliations, plugged in because of an unprecedented technological sea-change in how media were disseminated. And that put him as much at odds with the Libyan mainstream as I was.

One thing I was slowly learning in the Muslim world: There is no Muslim world. There is no monolithic, stand-alone Other.

Cultural critic Greil Marcus once described early rock and pop as “music that affirmed meaninglessness and in that affirmation contained every conceivable kind of meaning.” This stands as a testament to what popular culture does best: unite us in an indefinable, unrefined moment of merriment, sadness, sentiment, titillation. There are two great equalizers: Death and pop culture. That’s what Lionel Richie meant by his story. And that’s why his story meant so much.