The promise to the faithful was "a blissful millennium, a culminating age when the world as we have known it will be put right. . . . Very shortly, the wicked great of this world would be humbled or destroyed, and the lowly, or those of them who had proved capable of maintaining the true faith and the loyalty, would be exalted to share the good things of this world."
Musa al Sadr's tale merged with the millenarian sensibility of his people. The millenarian expectation of an extraordinary man who brings history to its appointed consummation, who appears when it is God's will for him to do so, was there for Musa al Sadr in a natural way. No one had to lean on the history or squeeze it too hard, or say that this modern tale was a playing out of an old belief.
The pious would have been scandalized; there was no need to do this. The millenarian expectation worked in the aftermath of the cleric's disappearance just as it had when Sayyid Musa al Sadr was proclaimed Imam Musa al Sadr. Sayyids are a class that claim descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Sayyids inhabited the breadth of the Muslim world, the title had some prerogatives, a claim of a special place in the Prophet's eyes. But the title of Imam was a very special one. Strictly speaking, there were in the Shia doctrine only twelve Imams—Ali, and the eleven designated Imams who followed him, over a period of some two centuries, with the last one going into occultation.
When Musa al Sadr "emerged" as Imam a mere decade after he had come to Lebanon, he had not claimed the title for himself. Nor had he been raised to the status of one of these twelve special, divinely ordained individuals; that would have been heresy. As with Khomeini in the late 1970s, the title of Imam was insinuated by followers and "accepted" by the designated cleric. In both cases, the designation, loaded with messianic expectation, emerged in the political arena. In Lebanon in the late 1960s, as in Iran ten years later, a cleric was set apart from other clerics and accorded a title with great evocative power and prestige. Both cases represented a break with Shia orthodoxy. Both cases represented the triumph of political activism over religious restraint.
If the beginning of Musa al Sadr's ascendancy fitted in with the ambiguity of the Shia symbolism—its mixture of things said and unsaid, its belief in an extraordinary individual to lead and redeem men—so did the disappearance in Libya. Musa al Sadr, his followers continued to say, will occupy the office he held (he was chairman of the Higher Shia Council which he himself had helped create in 1969, a mere decade after his arrival in Lebanon from his birthplace in Qom) until he reaches his sixty-fifth birthday in 1993. The ambiguity of the tale was a source of much of its power.
The disorder in Lebanon—a civil war that broke out in 1975 with no end in sight, a Syrian drive into the country in 1976, an Israeli invasion in March 1978, and more disorder and ruin to come, a terrible war fought in the summer of 1982 between Israel and the Palestinians—made the time appropriate for a great millenarian myth. The people of the historically quiescent Shia community of Lebanon that Musa al Sadr had led and had tried to transform needed courage to stake out a claim to that fractured country. And the tale of Musa al Sadr served a multitude of needs. Like a chameleon, he was different things to different people. The patricians among his followers saw him as a man of moderate politics, a reformer. For others, Musa al Sadr was to become a great avenger, his tale and memory a warrant for daring deeds and uncompromising politics. His legacy was there to be claimed by men of means and caution and by young suicide drivers.
Disappearance of an Imam: Sayyid Musa al Sadr and Shia Occultation Doctrine
