Filmmaker: Abdallah El-Binni
The downfall of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi last year was greeted with great hopes for the rebirth of a nation.
But
there was another hope felt by many inside and outside of the country -
that the end of his 42-year rule would allow some light to be shed on
the fate of a charismatic Lebanese cleric.
Imam Musa al-Sadr, the
leader of Lebanon's Shia Muslims, disappeared, along with two
companions, in the summer of 1978 during a visit to Libya to meet
Gaddafi.
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| Hand-painted portraits of Imam Musa al-Sadr can still be seen on the streets of Lebanon, 34 years after he disappeared |
As in the Shia myth of the 'hidden imam', this modern-day cleric left
his followers upholding his legacy and awaiting his return.
The
enigmatic cleric's popularity had transcended religions. Calling for
social justice and development, in 1974 al-Sadr founded the Movement of
the Deprived - aiming to unite people across communal lines.
Archbishop
Youssef Mounes of Lebanon's Catholic Information Centre remembers a
sermon al-Sadr delivered in a church, in which he warned of an imminent
sectarian war.
"It was a surreal scene," Mounes says. "Seeing the
turban of a Muslim imam under the cross in a Christian church. He
delivered a sermon at a very significant time."
Raed Sharaf
al-Din, al-Sadr's nephew, recalls how his uncle believed that Lebanon's
sectarian nature could cut both ways: "Imam al-Sadr used to say that
sects are a blessing, but sectarianism is a curse. It's a blessing to
have this diversity of sects in Lebanon. But when there is strife among
them, sectarianism is the worst thing for a country."
When civil
war erupted in Lebanon in 1975, al-Sadr led anti-war protests. And as
the war intensified, so too did al-Sadr's efforts to end it. As part of
this, he toured the Arab world to plead the case for south Lebanon.
In 1978, this took him to Libya where he was due to meet Gaddafi.
He was never seen again.
In
the years since, conflicting stories have emerged about what happened
to al-Sadr and his two companions. Now hopes have been raised that new
evidence and witnesses will emerge to help solve the mystery of the
missing imam.
| Discovering the vanished imam |
By Giles Trendle
In January 1990, I travelled to south Lebanon to report on the
ongoing fighting between Lebanon's two main Shia Muslim militias, Amal
and Hezbollah.
The road to south Lebanon led through the
notorious Ouzai district of Beirut, skirting the city's southern suburbs
where Hezbollah held sway and where a number of Western hostages were
believed to be being held captive.
Large, hand-painted portraits of two clerics hung from rusting electricity poles all along the stretch of road.
One showed the brooding scowl of then Iranian leader Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini. The other portrait was of a man with an altogether
different demeanour - softer, more enigmatic.
The picture captivated me. I knew this to be Imam Musa al-Sadr, but I knew little about the man.
By the time I drove past the two portraits of the Shia clerics, al-Sadr had been missing for 12 years.
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| The charismatic imam became the leader of Lebanon's Shia Muslim community, but his popularity transcended religions |
His portrait had captivated me then. How much more so did he enthrall
his own people, and many others in Lebanon, when he was alive.
Musa
al-Sadr was born in Iran in 1928 to a prominent Lebanese family. He
moved to Lebanon in 1959 after undertaking religious studies in the
eminent seminary of Najaf in Iraq.
Al-Sadr found the Shia in
Lebanon resigned to poverty and political exclusion. They were lorded
over by feudal masters from within their own community and by the more
urbane political classes from Lebanon's other sects.
The 1943
Lebanese National Pact had largely kept the Shia on the political
sidelines. The unwritten agreement granted them the 'speaker' of the
parliament, a third-place position behind the more powerful Sunni Muslim
prime minister and the Maronite Christian president.
Al-Sadr
clearly had a way of attracting attention and inspiring people. Six-foot
tall, striking and charismatic, he spoke of reform, greater justice and
empowerment for the masses. Within 10 years he was appointed as the
first head of the Higher Islamic Shia Council - effectively becoming the
leader of Lebanon's Shia community.
When civil war erupted in
Lebanon in 1975, al-Sadr held sit-ins and fasts to protest against the
violence. He campaigned for inter-communal harmony and tolerance.
One
famous story has him being invited to speak in a church. The Christian
worshippers packed the aisles of the church to hear the cleric deliver a
sermon on the blessing of diversity and the dangers of sectarianism.
A
turbaned Muslim cleric speaking beneath the Christian cross - this was
the self-assured and ground-breaking act of an innovator, someone ready
to cross the sectarian fault lines in a country with deep and primordial
confessional tendencies.
Many lauded the cleric for his stand against violence and prejudice. In his book The Vanished Imam, writer Fouad Ajami drew comparisons to Mahatma Gandhi. Others have made comparisons to Martin Luther King.
But
al-Sadr was a man of many dimensions, in a region of countless nuances.
Caught up in an environment of endemic violence, he understood the
necessity for self-defence and he established a militia called Amal.
So who would have wanted him dead?
In
the film, some well-placed Libyans say al-Sadr was killed after an
acrimonious quarrel with Gaddafi on a point of religion. The cleric's
own family members hint at a darker international conspiracy.
The
context at the time of al-Sadr's disappearance is revealing. In the
summer of 1978, Iran was heading towards a climax. Al-Sadr was in
cahoots with opponents of the pro-American (and pro-Israeli) Shah of
Iran.
As it was, the Shah fled his country in January 1979 and
the Iranian revolution culminated a few weeks later with the return of
Ayatollah Khomeini from exile. Al-Sadr had disappeared five months
earlier.
The revolution in Iran amounted to a Shia awakening. And
with this backdrop, supporters saw in the case of the missing cleric a
more potent symbolism dovetailing neatly with the Shia belief in the
disappearance of the 12th imam in the 10th century.
The
awakening found devotees in Lebanon. Backed by the new Shia theocracy in
Iran, and forged from the fury of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a
new movement of Shia militants emerged, calling themselves Hezbollah. A
year later they came to world attention when suicide bombers struck the
US embassy in Beirut and then the barracks of the US and French
'peacekeeping' forces in the Lebanese capital.
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| Giles Trendle with an Amal fighter in Kfar Hitti in 1990 |
Two years later, in 1985, I arrived in Lebanon for the first time.
The country had by then become a synonym for anarchy and carnage.
Moving around those parts of Beirut controlled by Hezbollah was
inadvisable for a Westerner such as myself.
But five years on, I
was heading to south Lebanon, through Hezbollah neighbourhoods, past
the portraits of the clerics on the road through Ouzai and on to the
village of Kfar Hitti, some 15km inland from the coastal town of Sidon.
Inter-Shia
fighting had been raging in the area. In Kfar Hitti, Amal militiamen
stood behind sandbagged positions looking across the rocky terrain
towards the neighbouring village of Kfar Melki where Hezbollah fighters
were emplaced.
The Shia had turned their guns against themselves. Hardly the sort of legacy al-Sadr would have wished.
Today,
more than 20 years on, Amal and Hezbollah have buried the hatchet. They
are now more politically aligned. Both groups have allied themselves
closely to Bashar al-Assad's Syria. Something of an irony: the heirs of
al-Sadr, himself a victim of one long-serving Arab autocrat, rallying to
the side of another.
Back in the 1970s, al-Sadr spoke of the dangers of sectarianism. He had sought ways to reach across religious divides.
With
the dark clouds of increasing sectarian violence on the horizon in
Syria, and possibly Lebanon, those with such a message of inter-communal
compassion will be sorely needed in the region. |
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