The inhabitants of Tripoli never permitted the intermingling that you saw in this café. Tripoli was a city divided into two halves, each of which was also divided into another two halves, and perhaps these halves were divided further in successive divisions that never ended once they began. One half of society consisted of women imprisoned behind the walls of their homes, and men deprived of a natural life, prisoners themselves within the walls of oppression. Even before this, there was the old, poor, collapsing half hidden within the narrow lanes and muddy alleys. This was the Libyan half that lived in the old city with its guests from long-standing foreign communities of Jews, Maltese, Greeks, Armenians, and Circassians who were themselves separated into many subdivisions.
The other hal
