Finally, the world knows how Muammar Gaddafi spelt his name

In 1953, the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke published a short story called the Nine Billion Names of God, where the purpose of the lamas in a remote monastery is to unearth each of those names. Vishnu, it is said, had a more modest 1,000 names.

For as long as he ruled, which is to say 42 years, global media has struggled to get the correct way to spell the name of Libya’s just-deposed strongman Muammar Gaddafi. Two years ago, ABCNews.com compiled all the different versions and came up with an astonishing total of 112 variants of how the surname was being spelt across the world. The US State Department, which was presumed to know best, spelt it as Qadhafi.

Qaddafi is how The New York Times and many other Western media outlets spelt it, assuming that the letter Q better represents the glottal stop that the name is pronounced with. Many other organisations refer to him as Kadafi, and here in India, we’ve stuck to Gaddafi, a spelling that The Washington Post also shares.

Gaddafi himself was in no hurry to dispel the spelling confusion over his name. When he spoke in public, he stuck only to Arabic, though it is said that he could speak English fluently. Visitors to his tented residences in the West were addressed similarly, while interpreters translated.

After Libya became a pariah for the West after its alleged links to the bombing of an aircraft in 1988, it was easy for Gaddafi to avoid Western media. Thus, of the 112 variants of his name, it remained a mystery which one he officially used. Finally, in defeat and death, the mystery has been solved. Libyans sifting through the possessions in Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli have found the passport of his eldest son Mohammad. There, in English, is the correct spelling of the name, one of the least-used variants. It’s not Gaddafi. It’s Gathafi.