One night in the early nineteen-eighties, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi had a terrible nightmare: he walks into a barbershop, sits down in the padded chair, and closes his eyes. Suddenly, he feels the razor blade prick one side of his cleanly shaven neck. It is driven in deeper, then dragged all the way across. He woke up in a fright, convinced that the man who would someday assassinate him will be a barber. Or, at least, that was the story that went around to explain why, the following day, “the Leader” is said to have issued one of his more idiosyncratic decrees: that barbershops in Libya close. For days, no one could get a haircut.

Years later, in late 2009, the Egyptian novelist Idris Ali published a novella called “The Leader Gets a Haircut,” which mined the four years he spent working in Libya in the late nineteen-seventies. He includes testimony from ordinary Libyans about life under Qaddafi, and documents the inhumane conditions under which many Egyptians in Libya toiled. With savage humor, he depicts the dark absurdity of the Libyan dictatorship.

Ali had won the Best Egyptian Novel Prize for an earlier book, and his novella was hotly anticipated at the 2010 Cairo International Book Fair. But, as Ali waited for his publisher to turn up, he got a call informing him that earlier that morning Egyptian State Security Investigations, presumably under pressure from the Libyan government, had detained Ali’s Egyptian publisher and confiscated his copies of “The Leader Gets a Haircut.” Sales of the book were outlawed in Egypt. A few months later, Ali died of a heart attack.

My life, too, has been deeply affected by the collusion between the Hosni Mubarak government and the Libyan regime. My parents left Libya in 1979, escaping political repression, and settled in Cairo. I was nine. Eleven years later, when I was at university in London, my father, one of the most outspoken Libyan dissidents abroad, was kidnapped from our family’s Cairo home. Agents from Egyptian State Security Investigations visited one afternoon. They asked if Father would be so kind as to accompany them on a little errand. He never returned. Later, we learned that he was put on a private jet and sent to Libya. He is counted among Libya’s “disappeared.”

In 2006, I published my first novel, “In the Country of Men.” The publication of the book gave me a bigger platform to speak about my father’s abduction and Libya’s human-rights record. Even though I was in London, every time I wrote an article or gave an interview about these things I would walk around for days feeling the weight of the Libyan regime’s gaze at my back. It was as if a great gust were blowing through my rooms. In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to “disappear” my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out. I could no longer visit my family in Egypt, as it was deemed too dangerous.

Five years later, with Mubarak gone and Qaddafi about to fall, I got on an airplane bound for Cairo. As we were descending, I looked out over the city, all lit up and glittering. I felt that a terrible fate had been reversed. At the airport, the old pain I had carried for so many years about Egypt, which I blamed for the betrayal of my father, began to fade. When the immigration officer paged through my British passport and asked, “What’s your origin?,” his tone was not suspicious. When I said that I was Libyan, he smiled and replied, “What an honor. Come on, hurry up. Get rid of that tyrant.” We laughed, something I had never done before with an Egyptian police officer.

Walking into the family home, finding my family and my childhood friends waiting for me, and seeing old familiar objects—my father’s books, family photographs—I felt the tight fist in my heart release. Egyptian friends, who, since Father’s disappearance, had felt awkward and silently guilty around me, suddenly became closer than ever. It became clear to me that one of the things these dictators had tried to do was to humiliate us and distance us from one another. Everyone I met in Egypt seemed to be as obsessed as my family was with events in Libya. There was a palpable conviction that the two revolutions were reliant on one another for their success.

Whenever I found myself sitting in a café with Libyan and Egyptian writers, I wished that Idris Ali, a man I had never met, could be there. And now that Tripoli has fallen to the rebels, the man I most wish were here to witness this new dawn, in which we are holding in our hands the very sincere possibility of a better future, is my father. ♦