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<\/p>\nThe resemblance between Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of Libya’s former dictator, and Gamal Mubarak, son of Egypt’s, is no coincidence \u2014 and it’s more than skin deep. It’s a resemblance in trajectory more than in appearance, in mindset more than in image. Both are products of essentially the same environment: a closed system of power, a state run as family inheritance, and a father who sat on his country’s chest for so long that his name became indistinguishable from the regime itself.<\/p>\n
Both were raised inside a kind of authority that never rotated and never recognized the line between public and private. Influence was cultivated gradually, and each son was presented as the natural extension of rule \u2014 not as a response to the will of the people. By the early 2000s, both were on the rise, even as the regimes they stood to inherit appeared stable from the outside but were buckling under the weight of age from within.<\/p>\n
By the year 2000, Muammar Gaddafi was 58, having ruled Libya for 31 years. That same year, Hosni Mubarak was past 72, with 19 of those years spent ruling Egypt.<\/p>\n
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Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was born in 1972, the second of Muammar Gaddafi’s sons, and by far the most politically positioned among his eight children \u2014 closest to the center of power, and most likely to inherit it. By the turn of the millennium, he was 28. And while his father continued to tighten his grip on Libya, those watching closely already understood that Saif was the heir apparent \u2014 with the father’s tacit approval, and quite possibly his direct orchestration.<\/p>\n
From that point on, Saif’s name began to surface \u2014 not merely as the dictator’s son, but as a ruler-in-waiting. His public profile grew steadily, fueled by carefully curated activities designed to polish his image and repackage him in softer wrapping: less rough around the edges, more marketable \u2014 both at home and abroad. None of this happened in a vacuum. Between 1999 and 2000, hereditary succession had already swept through several Arab states, feeding the ambition and whetting the appetite for imitation.<\/p>\n
In those years, Mohammed VI took the Moroccan throne after his father Hassan II; Bashar al-Assad inherited Syria from Hafez; Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa assumed power in Bahrain following his father’s death; and Abdullah II became king of Jordan after Hussein. Four consecutive transfers of power that normalized dynastic rule as the default \u2014 not the exception.<\/p>\n
Unlike those cases, Saif didn’t have to wait for his father to die. He was given something arguably more valuable: time \u2014 while the regime was still in full force \u2014 to prepare himself for what came next. He completed his studies in economics in Austria and then Britain, before easing into charitable work and later human rights advocacy, in a deliberate effort to reinvent himself as the reformist face of a system that had never known reform.<\/p>\n
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When it comes to human rights discourse in the Arab world at that time, two experiences stood out as the most prominent and influential: the Moroccan and the Egyptian. And since the Gaddafi regime faced its harshest criticism from Morocco’s independent press and rights organizations, it made sense that the search for a more accommodating cover would lead to Cairo.<\/p>\n
That’s how a number of Egyptian human rights organizations were handpicked to play a functional role: propping up and polishing the image of the heir presumptive \u2014 the dictator-in-waiting \u2014 Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. The crowning achievement of this arrangement was his involvement in founding what was called the “Network for the Defense of Democracy.”<\/p>\n
Most people have never heard of this so-called network, which was announced in 2008 with the participation of Egyptian rights organizations \u2014 the same organizations that maintained complete silence over the murder of Libyan journalist Daif al-Ghazal, who was tortured to death in 2005. A case no less brutal than \u2014 and arguably worse than \u2014 what happened to Italian researcher Giulio Regeni in Egypt in 2016.<\/p>\n
And naturally, this network \u2014 neither under Saif Gaddafi’s leadership nor through its Egyptian partners \u2014 uttered a single word about the Abu Salim prison massacre. A slaughter that rivals the Rabaa al-Adawiya massacre for the title of one of the most horrific atrocities of the modern era in the Arab world.<\/p>\n
The death toll at Rabaa, according to Egypt’s National Council for Human Rights, was around 624. Human Rights Watch puts it closer to 800. Muslim Brotherhood activists estimate roughly 1,000. The numbers vary, but one fact doesn’t: those people were killed in under twelve hours. At Abu Salim, approximately 1,200 were killed in roughly ten.<\/p>\n
After the 2011 Libyan revolution, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. A death sentence followed inside Libya in 2015. But the warrant was never enforced, and the sentence was never carried out. By 2016, the man was free \u2014 his name back in the spotlight, gearing up to run for the presidency of Libya.<\/p>\n
A comeback that didn’t emerge from nowhere, but from a Libyan landscape weighed down by division, repression, and corruption \u2014 one that stirred in some Libyans a distorted nostalgia for the stability of tyranny. A scene reminiscent of when some Egyptians popularized the phrase “We’re sorry, Mr. President”<\/em> \u2014 with one difference: the “president” here wasn’t just Gaddafi the father, but Gaddafi and his son… the founder of the “Network for the Defense of Democracy.”<\/p>\n As for Gamal Mubarak \u2014 also the second son of his dictator father \u2014 he was about nine years older than Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. Born in 1963, he was 37 by the year 2000, while Hosni Mubarak was entering his twentieth year in power, already past 72.<\/p>\n Where Saif Gaddafi took the route of charity, development, and human rights work \u2014 in a country where political party life was virtually nonexistent \u2014 Egypt, with its fragile but functioning partisan landscape, offered Gamal a different path. In 2000, he joined the National Democratic Party, and from that point his rise was swift, propelled by deep influence within the circles of power and the not-so-subtle hand of his mother. Talk of hereditary succession shifted from whispers in political salons to open \u2014 if carefully worded \u2014 demands.<\/p>\n But here’s the key difference between the two cases: Saif Gaddafi’s rise as his father’s likely successor unfolded in near-total silence, whereas in Egypt, the succession project was met with a growing wave of public rejection. Especially in a charged regional climate \u2014 in the aftermath of the Gulf War, the occupation of Iraq, and the humiliating fall of Saddam Hussein. At that moment, opposing hereditary rule became a central demand of the Kefaya movement, the Egyptian Campaign for Change (“Freedom Now”), the April 6 protests, and the “He Will Not Rule”<\/em> movement \u2014 which later planted the first seeds of the National Association for Change.<\/p>\n Eventually, Gamal Mubarak stood trial alongside his father and older brother Alaa in a number of cases that lacked justice and fairness. Yes \u2014 the trials of Hosni Mubarak, Gamal, Alaa, and other regime figures were unfair trials.<\/p>\n Then, with the release of the Epstein documents, a letter surfaced \u2014 attributed to Gamal Mubarak’s wife \u2014 in which she relayed, in his words, his fear that neither he nor his father would receive a fair trial.<\/p>\n The irony here hardly needs elaboration: the heir to a regime that ruled without accountability for decades, afraid of injustice \u2014 only once he’s the one sitting in the dock.<\/p>\n Al Ahly vs. Zamalek: Zizo and the Broken Spirit of Egyptian Football<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\nGamal Mubarak \u2014 succession with a partisan flavor<\/strong><\/h3>\n