By Stephanie Nolen

SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

Wednesday, September 18, 2002

Imagine Moammar Gadhafi looking moodily out his office window, musing on how to show the world Libya has changed.

Free elections? Too risky. An unfettered press? Messy. Ah, but a beauty pageant; that would say something about progress in the Great Jamahiriya.

When Gadhafi's son Seif al Islam suggested that Tripoli host the Miss Net World pageant, the Libyan leader was by all accounts intrigued.

"My dad had two questions," the younger Gadhafi explained in a telephone interview from Croatia, where he is on a diving holiday. "Will it be (in keeping with) our traditions and Islamic laws? And I said yes. And will it be good for our economy or not? I told him it's good for our economy, it will promote tourism. And he said okay."

It will be the first-ever beauty pageant in Libya.

The Oct. 27 telecast of Miss Net World will feature 25 young women culled from Internet beauty contests from South Africa to Slovakia to Singapore.

The event was held for the first time last year in France, but went largely unnoticed. Organizer Omar Harfouch could think of no better way to draw attention to the pageant than to hold it in Libya.

"If I do it in Milano, so what? I will have one person interested," Harfouch explained in a telephone interview from London. "Now, the first question everybody asks is, 'Why Libya?' "

Indeed, those were Gadhafi's first words, too, which is why Harfouch recruited the leader's son to help make the case.

Despite the contest's seeming incongruity with Libyan culture, the younger Gadhafi, 30, said he is not worried that the event will spark an Islamist backlash.

"The girls will make the show in traditional clothes, nothing extra-sexy or something against Islamic religion," he said, noting that his father is in favor because he is "in favor of women, and thinks they should take a role in society and be equal to men."

So as not to offend local custom, however, the pageant will replace the traditional swimsuit contest with a runway walk in jeans and T-shirts bearing each contestant's national flag and a heart-framed picture of the Libyan leader.

Harfouch has replaced the traditional panel of pageant judges with electronic voting that will be open to anyone with an Internet connection.

"It's new and revolutionary," he said. "With the Internet, there is no need to have old and ugly judges; it's usually men of 60 judging beautiful girls of 16."

The voting will be conducted through the pageant's Web site (www.missnetworld.tv), which Harfouch says gets more than one million visitors a month. Voters must register so they can't vote more than once, but he said there wasn't much funny business during the last Miss Net World competition.