Disclaimer : it could be said that they are more secular than other despots in the region, that's it.
In pretty much every thread about the region, it's brought up that those fellows were ''secular'', unlike their foes, who are religious
I have a simple comparison to make : whatever he actually thought, can you imagine a POTUS candidate actually being hostile (not just neutral, fighting actively religious influence and imposing laws) to christianism in the US (please do not bring the ''War on Christmas, you will be look embarassing) ?
As people repeatedly took pain to repeat here on a daily basis, people in the region tend to be quite religious and it would be unthinkable for a leader to be secular in the sense understood in the United States (let alone Europe) The exalted leaders of the area are a-okay with killing fundamentalists whose plan is to dehtrone them
But any cursory knowledge of the story of those wonderful regimes would show you that Khadaffi, Sassam and Assad are perfectly fine with using religion, and for the first two openly islamist policies (but with them as the exalted leader)
Most obvious example : ''Khadaffi the secular'' had a unit of (in his mind) SPECTRE like special operative to bring revolution around the world, the Islamic Legion. The fact that this unit was incompetent and poorly led even for the Libyan army and managed to be routed several times by improvised African militias was a poor consolation to the fact that ''Khadaffi the secular'' lent the unit to regimes that were quite openly Islamist and pursuing islamist goals (1)-Idi Amin of Uganda, for instance (in a mostly Christian country) or rebels outfits in Chad.
Khadaffi the secular also used the fairly unique approach for a secular leader to outright bribe dubious African kleptocrats to convert to Islam (like Bokassa and Mobutu..but showing the limits of the accumen of the Exalted Leader, they took the money and ignored the conversion...)
(1)''Islamist'' in the broad sense of ''pushing for the domination, coined in a mix of Marxist and religious jabbering, of local muslim minorities in targeted countries