Who is musa sadr

Headed by judge Hassan Chami, it met dozens of key figures of the outgoing Gaddafi regime, including intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi and former Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa. The future of Lebanon's political dynasties. UN urges Lebanon to act over freedom of expression crackdown. He kidnapped him and held him in at least three different prisons across the country. Lebanese veteran journalist and founder of the now-shuttered As-Safir, Talal Salman, remembers a conversation with Gaddafi in March With several colleagues, Mr Salman spent a few hours talking to Mr Sadr in his hotel room on the night of August 28, He said several times that he needed to leave Libya before September 1.

As the case remains unsolved, he has become a somewhat mystical figure neither dead nor alive. If he returned today, Mr Sadr would be 90 years old. Sadr, known to his followers by the honorific Imam Musa, was a tall, charismatic, Iranian-born cleric who moved to Lebanon in the late s and helped mobilize Lebanon's traditionally marginalized and downtrodden Shi'ite community.

At the time, most Lebanese Shi'ites were beholden to a handful of powerful feudalistic landowners and were poorly represented in Lebanon's sectarian power-sharing system.

Sadr quickly set about establishing vocational centers, orphanages and Islamic institutes and lobbied the government for a more equitable distribution of the state's resources. With his Persian-accented Arabic, striking physical appearance and unflagging energy, Sadr earned respect across the sectarian divide.

He even took to preaching in Christian churches, to the initial outrage of the more conservative members of the Shi'ite clergy. Abdullah Yazbek, an adviser to Sadr, recalls accompanying Sadr to a Christian village in southern Lebanon where the cleric was due to speak.

When the Christian congregation spotted him in the church, they began chanting, "Allahu akbar," or "God is great," a traditional Muslim invocation. Says Yazbek: "The way people treated him, it was as if he was Jesus Christ. In he moved to Tyre, with the active support of his teacher and mentor, Muhsin al-Hakim.

One of his first significant acts was the establishment of a vocational institute in the southern town of Burj al-Shimali. Today it still provides vocational training for about orphans. A physically imposing man of intelligence, courage, personal charm, and enormous energy—one of his former assistants claims that he frequently worked 20 hours a day—al-Sadr attracted a wide array of supporters.

Imam Musa, as his followers referred to him, set out to establish himself as the paramount leader of the Shi'ite community, which was most noteworthy at the time for its poverty and general underdevelopment. Imam Musa helped to fill a yawning leadership vacuum that resulted from the increasing inability of the traditional political bosses to meet the cascading needs of their clients.

From the s on, the Shi'ites had experienced rapid social change and economic disruption, and the old village-based patronage system was proving to be ever more an anachronism.

Musa al-Sadr was able to stand above a fragmented and victimized community and see it as a whole. He reminded his followers that their deprivation was not to be fatalistically accepted.

He felt that as long as they could speak out through their religion they could overcome their condition. As he once observed, "Whenever the poor involve themselves in a social revolution it is a confirmation that injustice is not predestined.

He shrewdly recognized that his power lay in part in his role as a custodian of religious symbols. But above all else he was a pragmatist. It is both a tribute to his political skill and a commentary on his tactics that one well-informed Lebanese should have commented that nobody knew the position of Imam Musa. He was often a critic of the Shah of Iran, but it was only after the Yom Kippur October War of that his relations with the Shah deteriorated seriously.

He accused the Shah of suppressing religion in Iran, denounced him for his pro-Israel stance, and described him as an "imperialist stooge. Like the Maronite Christians, the Shi'ites are a minority in a predominately Sunni Muslim Arab world, and for both sects Lebanon was a refuge in which sectarian identity and security could be preserved. It is not surprising that many Maronites saw a natural ally in Imam Musa.

He was a reformer, not a revolutionary. He sought the betterment of the Shi'ites in a Lebanese context. He often noted, "For us Lebanon is one definitive homeland. Musa al-Sadr recognized the insecurity of the Maronites, and he acknowledged their need to maintain their monopoly hold on the presidency.

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