The rise to power of the radical Shia Moslems may be the most surprising political development of recent times. Just 20 years ago, Islam was scorned by educated people in the Middle East as backward and stagnant. Instead, Arab nationalism and other secular ideologies predominated.
In The Vanished Imam (Cornell University Press, 228 pages, $17.95), Fouad Ajami uses the story of one religious man - Musa al Sadr - as a vehicle to explain the kind of forces behind Islam's political shift. Mr. Ajami, a professor of Islamic studies at Johns Hopkins University and the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, knows his subject well. This is a book of great power and unusual artistry.
Musa al Sadr's story can be quickly outlined. Born in Iran to a prominent clerical family of Lebanese origin, he moved to Lebanon in 1959, at the age of 31. Taking up a modest position in the Shia religious hierarchy, Sadr immediately began trying to mobilize the Shia community.
He faced three main problems. First, the Shia were the most downtrodden of Lebanon's many sects. Alone, they had no community organization nor militia. Things were so bad that the hundreds of thousands of Shia in Beirut lacked a cemetery and had to take their dead back to the ancestral villages. Second, the Shia tradition of submission and political quiescence, of accepting their lot however others might shape it, meant that change was hard to achieve. Third, there was the tendency of educated Arabs to disparage Islam.
 Musa al-Sadr (L) with Gamal Abdel Nasser in an undated picture. |
Sadr also engaged in community organizing. The rich were goaded into donating funds for communal purposes, the farmers inspired to make demands for irrigation works and higher tobacco prices, the toughs organized into a Shia militia. He even persuaded the outside world to drop the derogatory name by which the Shia of Lebanon were known.
By 1969, the Shia had become active participants in Lebanese public life and Sadr had become their unrivaled leader. As a reward for his leadership, Sadr came to be known, by common acclaim, as "Imam," an extraordinary title carrying strong messianic overtones.
Sadr's regeneration of the Shia was completed by the time the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975. In that climate of savagery, Sadr's quiet methods lost their utility, and he became aimless and troubled. Then, in August 1978, came the event that ended Sadr's life and permanently enshrined his reputation. On a six-day trip to Libya, he met with the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar Qadhafi, and then disappeared without a trace. To this day, his fate remains a complete mystery.
What made the Imam's vanishing so significant is that it exactly fit the millennial expectations of Shiism, a faith premised on the disappearance of righteous leaders and their reappearance at the end of time. (The closest Christian parallel would be for a saintly persecuted figure to be crucified by a tyrant.) Sadr's disappearance resonated profoundly among the Shia. "Muammar al Qaddafi and Musa al Sadr," writes Mr. Ajami, "could have easily stepped out of the Shia literature and the Persian miniatures that reproduced scenes of struggle and defeat: a merciless soldier and an unsuspecting guest who had walked into a treacherous place."
"His aura hovered over the ruined world of the Shia in Lebanon, and its politics became, in many ways, a fight over the realm of a vanished Imam." Today, Nabih Berri leads the mainstream Shia effort to win pride of place in Lebanon, to gain those spoils so long denied. Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah leads those who glorify power and, against all odds, would create an Iranian-style government in Lebanon, disregarding the country's fractured populace and many religions.
This book can be read for its information, much of which is otherwise unavailable. But The Vanished Imam offers much more than a utilitarian account of recent developments in Lebanon. It takes the raw stuff of daily politics and turns it into a classic account of human achievement and strife. The details are local, but Mr. Ajami endows the story with a universal significance. His tale of the stranger who transforms a people and then, when his work is done, reenacts its most sacred drama, has the literary power of a masterpiece.
Dec. 27, 2011 update: Thirty-three years after Musa Sadr's disappearance and a few months after Qaddafi's demise, some clues emerge about the Lebanese leader's fate. This from an article in Beirut's Daily Star newspaper based on an unnamed source in Libya's National Transitional Council:
"Imam Musa Sadr died in his prison cell where he was being held since his disappearance at the hands of [security] members of the Gadhafi regime in 1978," the source told local Al-Liwaa newspaper in an interview published Tuesday. The source said Sadr died from natural causes in the summer of 1998. He was being detained in an underground cell at Tripoli's central prison, the source added. His body was kept at the prison's morgue until the early days of the outbreak of the Libyan revolution, according to the source. ...
the source said initial investigation conducted by the Libyan interim national council showed that the corpse may have been taken out of the morgue by Gadhafi's forces to "cover up the crime." According to some evidence and accounts of a number of witnesses, the source said Sadr's body is likely buried in a mass grave that had been recently discovered in a Tripoli suburb. The Libyan source said the Council has no clue on the whereabouts of Sadr's two companions.
Dec. 12, 2015 update: This case won't die. Qaddafi's son Hannibal was 3 years old when Sadr disappeared in his father's Libya but the Lebanese authorities are holding him for questioning.
