Musa al Sadr, a politically active and controversial cleric, had arrived in Libya on August 25; he was last seen on August 31, in a Tripoli hotel. He was on his way to a meeting with Colonel Qaddafi, he told a group of Lebanese who ran into him. He and two companions—a cleric and a journalist—were never heard from again. Musa al Sadr had come to Lebanon as a young man, thirty-one years of age. He was in his fiftieth year when he made his fateful trip to Libya. The Libyans claimed that he had left for Italy August 31 on an Alitalia flight. The Italian evidence belied the Libyan claim. Only his baggage arrived in Rome, checked into the Holiday Inn by two Libyans—one of them dressed in clerical attire —posing as Musa al Sadr and his lay companion.
Hard-headed men were sure that Musa al Sadr had been murdered by Qaddafi. But the cleric's faithful followers were left sitting under his posters, repeating his words, awaiting his "return." In the aftermath of his disappearance, Shia politics in Lebanon was in many ways a fight over the realm and the inheritance of a vanished Imam.
Reality imitated and served a Shia myth in Libya in that summer of 1978. In the Shia doctrine, the twelfth of the Imams (the successors to the Prophet through his daughter Fatima) vanished to the eyes of ordinary men in 873-874, to return at some future date and fill the earth with justice. This is the doctrine of the Ghaiba, the concealment of the Hidden Imam. It came out of the early ordeals of Shiism, an embattled minority faith in the realm of Islam.
All eleven preceding Imams, so the Shia traditions maintained, had fallen in battle or had been poisoned or had died in prison at the hands of unjust usurpers of power. At its core Shia history was a tale of dispossession. The story of the martyrdom, al maψtil, of the Imams, related how the virtuous successors of the Prophet were denied the rule and the inheritance that should have been theirs. The Prophet had founded a state: it was both a religious and a political kingdom. He died in A.D. 632, some two decades after he received the revelation. In the scramble for his inheritance, the partisans, the shia, of the Prophet's family, maintained that legitimate succession belonged to the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law Ali and after him to the Prophet's descendants.
But the political kingdom was not to be Ali's or his descendants'; he was passed over for succession three times in a row. Under the rule of the first three caliphs (successors to the Prophet), Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman, Islam outgrew its Arabian birthplace, spilling into Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Egypt. It had become an affair of wealth and power. For the shia of Ali, however, history had become usurpation; the worldly had triumphed over the theocratic ideal. The caliphate finally came Ali's way a quarter century after the death of the Prophet. But it came during a time of discord in the Muslim polity. After a brief and contested reign Ali was murdered, and his son and designated successor, Hassan, abdicated in favor of Muawiyah, the governor of the Muslim province in Syria, a man of Banu Umayya—the Umayyad —whose leader had been an enemy of the Prophet. The Umayyads imposed on the Muslim community a system of hereditary rule. A century later, they were overthrown by another dynasty, the Abbasids, which manipulated the popular veneration of the Prophet's family to its own advantage. The Abbasids rose in rebellion in the name of ahl al bayt (the Prophet's family), but once triumphant they, too, ruled by the sword.
The 1982 Israeli Invasion to Lebanon
