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To carry out the duties of six top jobs, Gaddafi works up to 20 hours a day. Occasionally he disappears for days at a time—to meditate in the desert, his friends say. When he addresses his people, he sometimes speaks for four or five hours at a stretch, his voice bursting with urgency. "Don't believe anything I don't tell you; I will tell you everything; we should have faith together!" he may cry. The crowd replies: "With our spirit, our blood, our religion, we will fight at your side, O Gaddafi!"
Gaddafi takes most of his ideas from the Koran. He still presents a copy of the holy book to official visitors. To the Ambassador from Czechoslovakia, he once remarked, "You cannot read this. You cannot comprehend it. But keep it by your side. It may help you to ask some questions." The Koran explains Gaddafi's loathing of drink: "With God's help I will stamp out alcohol in Libya, just as Mao stamped out another evil, opium, in China."
For all his fanaticism, Gaddafi is doing the best he can to bring development to his poverty-ridden country. After a visit to Libya last week, his fourth in seven years, TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs reported: "I've never seen Tripoli port as crammed as it is today. Modest but modern housing is going up everywhere. Yet, on the 20-minute drive into town from the airport, the brand-new divided highway goes by acre after acre of makeshift shacks perched precariously on the windswept desert. But the new stress is on agriculture. Gaddafi the Bedouin, brought up to revere trees as a source of food and shade, has ordered a massive land-reclamation program to make 700,000 acres of desert arable. (Cost: $800 million.) His aim is to make Libya self-sufficient in food by 1975.
"To provide expertise, Gaddafi has had to turn to the foreigners he basically dislikes: Yugoslavs for a new port at Misurata; Italians for road building; Britons for a new airport at Tripoli; Egyptians to advise his ministries, run his courts and train his 22,000-man army; and, of course, Americans to pump oil. The Egyptians, who have always been arrogant and patronizing toward Libyans, are as unpopular as ever —and there are now 220,000 of them in the country. But nobody is as unpopular at the moment as the Americans. When a Libyan student asked Gaddafi this month why he did not throw the Americans out of Libya, the colonel replied, 'Nothing would please me more, but who else would pump the oil that we need? God damn America.' "
For all his charisma and wealth, Gaddafi cannot become the leader of the Arab world from a remote place like Libya. He must look to the neighboring land of Egypt. "Egypt is a country without a leader," he says. "I am a leader without a country." Accordingly, he has bought and bullied his way into the Arabs' first solid military and political alliances since the breakup of Nasser's United Arab Republic in 1961. Eighteen months ago, he got Egypt and Syria to join in a "Federation of Arab Republics" with Libya. Later this year he is set to join Libya with Egypt in a full-scale political merger. Egypt's Anwar Sadat, whom Gaddafi detests, will be the President, and Cairo will be the capital. But Muammar Gaddafi will be the bankroller, the resident fury and the heir apparent.