How to Tie a Tagelmoust.

Sabha, Libya.

I met Mohammed in Sabha, a ragged little town in south central Libya, late in the day as a nasty sandstorm was gathering on the horizon. Mohammed was the leader of a team of Tuareg men who were assigned to protect and look after me, my wife, several friends, and the Ambassador of the United States to Libya, the first in over thirty years, during our safari into the vast Sahara desert. This was many years ago, when Qaddafi was still alive and in charge of everything in Libya, before the collapse into civil war that occurred after his death, before the murder of US Ambassador Chris Stevens in Bengazi. It was, in retrospect, a small precious window of time, when a westerner could travel to Libya, and when one could dare to hope that Libya was somehow working its way into becoming a democratic nation-state. That was not meant to be, but back then, I was invited to visit Libya by the Ambassador, an invitation I would not ignore. That night, having gathered together in this desert town in preparation for our trek the next day, our little group of westerners were unaware of the impending storms that Libya would face just a few months on, concerned only with the darkening sandstorm that was moments away.

“Sir, watch how I do it”, Mohammed said, as he knotted his tagelmoust in the back, and swirled a few yards of cloth around his head. In an instant his face disappeared…