Mainly, it's more than you want to know about the Arabic language. I'd best hurry with this before they catch him and no one cares even as little as they do now about this stuff. It may come in handy, though, when you read about the end game of the strongmen in Syria and Yemen.
I feel compelled to render a few last thoughts about this guy before he slips into oblivion. This could be my last chance.
Muammar's Last Name
The first issue is to explain why I spell the surname of the defunct Libyan dictator as I do, "Qaddhaafiy". The reason is that I studied Arabic as a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, and thus can read it. I'm transliterating directly from the spelling of his whole name in Arabic script, مُعَمَّر القَذَّافِي, which becomes "Muʿammar al-Qaḏḏāfī" when transliterated to Roman characters with diacritics.
Without the diacritics on the characters, there are differing conventions on how to render the sounds of Arabic phonemes. The first name is close enough to what you see in English publications, so we need not discuss it. the "al-" is the definite article in Arabic, that is, "the", which we don't use in names in English. That is why it's usually dropped in translation. This leaves the last name, which is spelled so many ways by non-readers of Arabic script that it's pointless to catalog them. Journalists who can't read the script rely on translators who, for the most part, are native speakers of Arabic. Translators often have peculiar notions of transliteration because of their multilingual backgrounds. They pick and choose which language's transliteration conventions they use, even mixing different conventions at random. Regional dialects come into play, which means that different Roman characters are often used for the same Arabic characters, especially proper nouns. If you can't read the script, it's impossible to tell how a transliterated word or name is actually spelled in the original Arabic, so you have no idea whether a transliteration is accurate or not.
There's more. Like Hebrew, Arabic uses diacritics, little tick marks and squiggles, for vowels; only consonants get a full character. Vowels, if written at all, are attached to the consonants that precede them. This is why there is an apostrophe in "Muʿammar": The apostrophe stands for the silent consonant "ayin" that is manifested as a constriction of the throat. Also, Arabic is "unicameral", which means that there is no upper or lower case. Case in transliteration is therefore an attempt to adapt Arabic to other languages, not anything that is related to the Arabic language itself.
Bearing these peculiarities in mind, here's the breakdown for my spelling for Muammar's surname, "Qaddhaafiy", phoneme by phoneme.
- Qa - This is the letter Qāf followed by the vowel 'a', which is changed to a darker sound, more like "aw". This letter is the first letter in the name of the country Qatar, which is always transliterated that way, with a 'Q'. We shall use the same convention here. It's sound is a guttural 'K' or 'G' sound, made in the back of the throat. This accounts for transliterations starting differently, such as with 'K', 'Kh', 'G' and 'Gh'. I don't know anything about the Libyan dialect, so I don't know which is closest. That's why I'm sticking with 'Q'.
- DDha - This is a double instance of the letter Ḏāl followed by the vowel 'a'. A single instance is usually transliterated as 'Dh', but I thought "DhDh" would be needlessly confusing. The sound is close to the 'th' in "the", which explains its misleading use in some transliterations of the name. We have to represent the doubling because doing so changes the sound somewhat. This doubling of consonants is not idiosyncratic and pointless as it is in English and Italian; it's akin to the doubling of consonants in Finnish where they also use that technique to represent a different sound.
- A - This is the letter ʾAalif, another silent consonant, that extends the vowel ('a') of the consonant that it follows to yield "ah". Here, it also causes the stress to applied to the preceding syllable.
- Fi - This is the letter Fāʼ followed by the vowel 'i', which is extended by the consonant following it.
- Y - This is the letter Yāʾ that extends the vowel of the consonant that it follows. Thus, the vowel 'i' attached to the 'F' becomes "ee". (Yāʾ can also act as a regular consonant with a vowel following it, but it does not here.)
Muammar's Fetishes
Let's move on to Qaddhaafiy's odd obsessions with certain women. When rebels went through his personal effects in the Tripoli compound, they found a fan-boy scrapbook dedicated to Condoleezza Rice. I kid you not. I'm waiting for them to find tokens of a similar preoccupation with Diane Sawyer. After she interviewed him a few years ago, she commented on how he seemed to be hitting on her. I saw something suggesting this while watching the interview. She's much more of a "babe" than Condoleezza, so I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't have a whole shrine to her somewhere. Maybe it's portable and he took it with him when he abandoned the compound. If it exists, it must be one of the most interesting pieces of dictator memorabilia to be found.
Muammar's Angels
The weird story I'm just aching to hear is the full low-down on the Amazonian Guard, Qaddhaafiy's all-female bodyguard crew. The girls take a vow of chastity, but dress and groom themselves like Charlie's Angels. There's got to be some real dish here underneath the now demolished veil of Libyan state security. The last thing I heard about them was that they had surrendered to the rebels. This indicates to me that Muammar's flown the coop, and may not even be in Libya any more. With no one to defend, the Guard had no reason to fight on. If Qaddhaafiy had fought to the death in the compound as he said he would, the Amazons would have been expected to go out in a blaze of glory with him. But, they didn't, so we will probably hear about what really went on when one of them gives an exclusive interview to a major tabloid. Were they his harem? We won't know until we hear from one of Muammar's Angels.
Muammar's Last Stand
Let's speculate about Muammar's imminent demise. It's been obvious for a long time that Qaddhaafiy is too crazy to be as smart as the president of Tunisia, who put as much gold as he could load onto a plane and flew to a country that wouldn't extradite him. The colonel said that he's going to fight until the end, but it's not clear what that actually means. Mubarak was somewhat delusional in thinking that he could just retire to a villa on the shore and live out the rest of his life in peace, but maybe he was just old and sick and didn't care any more. He's on trial for his life now and everyone knows this in Libya, so Qaddhaafiy can't expect anything different. His blustering bravado excludes the idyllic retirement option for him, which would probably entail a tent on the outskirts of Sirte and all the couscous he could eat. He knows that the rebels want him to answer for his crimes, so he's probably going to try to hide somewhere. Eventually, he'll be found. He may kill himself, like Hitler, or command a loyal supporter to kill him, like David Koresh or Jim Jones. Crazy guys who talk tough often surprise us with the meek, spineless ways that they do away with themselves.
I don't expect Muammar to take a spray of automatic weapon fire across the chest while he is also firing an assault rifle, but it wouldn't surprise me if he quaffs a cyanide cocktail or blows his own brains out as rebels pound on the door and threaten to shoot their way in. He seems too detached from reality to not expect a dramatic reversal in the fighting that would restore him to power. He's that nutty. Only when he fully grasps what is happening to him will his megalomania collapse. At that point, suicide will be much more attractive to him than the grim prospect of imprisonment, a public trial and a humiliating death at the end of a hangman's noose. He cherishes control, so losing control of his own death is surely much worse to him than death by his own hand. I would like to see the trial, though, so I hope that he doesn't off himself before the rebels nab him.
The last thing I expect him to do is dive into a hole in the ground like Saddam Hussein. The image of Iraq's former dictator being hauled off to jail, so bedraggled and filthy that his body was inspected for lice, must have completely freaked out Muammar. From what I hear, the Libyan strongman is a hygiene fetishist, which is not surprising for such an avid fancier of such interesting fashion choices. He couldn't possibly handle being seen in a tattered, soiled garment, let alone sweaty and dirty. Nope. He would rather die!