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The Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon
In the summer of 1978, Musa al Sadr, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Shia sect in Lebanon, disappeared mysteriously while on a visit to Libya. As in the Shia myth of the "Hidden Imam," this modern-day Imam left his followers upholding his legacy and awaiting his return. Considered an outsider when he had arrived in Lebanon in 1959 from his native Iran, he gradually assumed the role of charismatic mullah, and was instrumental in transforming the Shia, a quiescent and downtrodden Islamic minority, into committed political activists. What sort of person was Musa al Sadr? What beliefs in the Shia doctrine did his life embody? Where did he fit into the tangle of Lebanon's warring factions? What was behind his disappearance? In this fascinating and compelling narrative, Fouad Ajami resurrects the Shia's neglected history, both distant and recent, and interweaves the life and work of Musa al Sadr with the larger strands of the Shia past.
228 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 21, 2025
Libya. That’s where Musa al Sadr, a velvet-gloved demagogue with messianic pretensions and militant instincts, vanished in 1978, swallowed by Qaddafi’s "security" apparatus. His luggage arrived in Rome. He did not.
Ajami performs a near-ritualistic hagiography of the man, cloaked in scholarship, sidestepping the wreckage al Sadr engineered with a precision that smells of incense and moral compromise. Ajami’s teenage memory of the cleric — looming over his Beirut classroom “a threat to something unresolved in my identity” — nought to have been a warning. Instead, it becomes a frame.
The man who claimed descent from Jabal Amil and Imam Musa al-Kazim arrived in Lebanon with a Farsi accent, a black turban, and a political instinct honed in the power corridors of Qom and Najaf. Within a few years, he had mobilized Lebanon’s Shi’a poor into a sectarian pressure cooker. The soup kitchens fed bellies, the sermons fed vengeance. Amal, the militia he founded in 1975, trained alongside the PLO and quickly mutated from self-defense into political coercion at the barrel of a gun. This was no accident. It was design.
Ajami tries to shroud the cleric in tragic mystique, speaking of “messianic expectation,” of ghaiba and rujuh, of the Imam who vanished and might return. But the disappearance masks a far uglier truth. Al Sadr was no spiritual reformer swept away by geopolitical winds. He was an ideological architect of armed theocracy, a precursor to Hezbollah in rhetoric and tactics. He did not merely preach dignity for the oppressed — he translated it into factional violence.
The Amal Movement's alignment with Iranian revolutionary doctrine was an extension of his political theology. This was a trajectory inaugurated. The bearded reformer in a Volkswagen quickly became the diplomatic frequent flyer who built bridges with Assad, Arafat, and the ayatollahs, while quietly building a militia that would later shell Beirut and turn on its own.
His admirers call him a symbol of pluralism. But no pluralist denounces secularism, condemns the Lebanese left, and embraces armed theology. No pluralist builds a militia and calls it salvation. His ideology bore fruit in Hezbollah’s birth: suicide operations, hostage-taking, religious absolutism dressed in nationalist garb. He may not have drafted their charter, but he authored the thesis. His pious aura and Jesuit charm disguised the darker fact: he made violence sacred.
Ajami won’t say it. So I will. Musa al Sadr was no vanished Imam. He was the godfather of Lebanese Shi’a radicalism — articulate, telegenic, and strategic. He played the cleric for the press and the messiah for the desperate. But his true faith was power. When he declared, “We are the salt of this land,” it was already clear he intended to season it with blood.
That he vanished in Libya only amplifies the irony. Qaddafi may have buried the man, but the movement was already alive and armed. Hezbollah is his orphan. Amal is his blueprint. The theocratic militancy that erupted in Lebanon and spread like a plague across the region traces its roots back to his sermons in Tyre and his tactical alliances in Damascus and Tehran.
He preached reform and prepared revolution. He smiled for the cameras and trained fighters in the shadows. This book, if read without sentimentality, is less a biography than a posthumous confession. Five stars for revealing, however reluctantly, how theology becomes tyranny. And how a cleric becomes a general, then a ghost. Four stars deducted for putting this filthy Hitler wannabe of Tyre and Dahieh on a pedestal.
Ajami performs a near-ritualistic hagiography of the man, cloaked in scholarship, sidestepping the wreckage al Sadr engineered with a precision that smells of incense and moral compromise. Ajami’s teenage memory of the cleric — looming over his Beirut classroom “a threat to something unresolved in my identity” — nought to have been a warning. Instead, it becomes a frame.
The man who claimed descent from Jabal Amil and Imam Musa al-Kazim arrived in Lebanon with a Farsi accent, a black turban, and a political instinct honed in the power corridors of Qom and Najaf. Within a few years, he had mobilized Lebanon’s Shi’a poor into a sectarian pressure cooker. The soup kitchens fed bellies, the sermons fed vengeance. Amal, the militia he founded in 1975, trained alongside the PLO and quickly mutated from self-defense into political coercion at the barrel of a gun. This was no accident. It was design.
Ajami tries to shroud the cleric in tragic mystique, speaking of “messianic expectation,” of ghaiba and rujuh, of the Imam who vanished and might return. But the disappearance masks a far uglier truth. Al Sadr was no spiritual reformer swept away by geopolitical winds. He was an ideological architect of armed theocracy, a precursor to Hezbollah in rhetoric and tactics. He did not merely preach dignity for the oppressed — he translated it into factional violence.
The Amal Movement's alignment with Iranian revolutionary doctrine was an extension of his political theology. This was a trajectory inaugurated. The bearded reformer in a Volkswagen quickly became the diplomatic frequent flyer who built bridges with Assad, Arafat, and the ayatollahs, while quietly building a militia that would later shell Beirut and turn on its own.
His admirers call him a symbol of pluralism. But no pluralist denounces secularism, condemns the Lebanese left, and embraces armed theology. No pluralist builds a militia and calls it salvation. His ideology bore fruit in Hezbollah’s birth: suicide operations, hostage-taking, religious absolutism dressed in nationalist garb. He may not have drafted their charter, but he authored the thesis. His pious aura and Jesuit charm disguised the darker fact: he made violence sacred.
Ajami won’t say it. So I will. Musa al Sadr was no vanished Imam. He was the godfather of Lebanese Shi’a radicalism — articulate, telegenic, and strategic. He played the cleric for the press and the messiah for the desperate. But his true faith was power. When he declared, “We are the salt of this land,” it was already clear he intended to season it with blood.
That he vanished in Libya only amplifies the irony. Qaddafi may have buried the man, but the movement was already alive and armed. Hezbollah is his orphan. Amal is his blueprint. The theocratic militancy that erupted in Lebanon and spread like a plague across the region traces its roots back to his sermons in Tyre and his tactical alliances in Damascus and Tehran.
He preached reform and prepared revolution. He smiled for the cameras and trained fighters in the shadows. This book, if read without sentimentality, is less a biography than a posthumous confession. Five stars for revealing, however reluctantly, how theology becomes tyranny. And how a cleric becomes a general, then a ghost. Four stars deducted for putting this filthy Hitler wannabe of Tyre and Dahieh on a pedestal.
June 5, 2019
The book does not do justice to Imam Musa Sadr. Out of the 222 pages, less than quarter are about the Imam directly. Many aspects of his life and ideas are left out. Instead, the book is filled with "orientalist" conjectures about almost anything the author deemed relevant, from the history of Iraq, formation of seminaries in Iran, the Shia Sunni split, Greek mythology, and many other topics. This may seem a positive point for a person unfamiliar with the context of Imam Musa's life. However, it has two main problems: 1) a lot of what is said are not facts and merely the author's patronising speculations 2) a lot of information that could give a better understanding of the Imam are left out including his many lectures and writings.
Having said all of this, the book is among the very few English books on the Sayid Musa. So for that reason I am grateful to the author.
Having said all of this, the book is among the very few English books on the Sayid Musa. So for that reason I am grateful to the author.
March 9, 2011
Curious about the story that Musa al Sadr might still be alive in some dungeon of Gadaffi's (I refuse to spell that cur's name correctly by way of protest), I discovered this early book by Ajami, which turns out to be not only the most beautiful and evocative, but the most useful book I've read on the feeling of modern Arab, Iranian and Levantine politics, despite that it is 25 years old. So much hasn't changed, or is just now changing - in Iran, Libya and Egypt - that it is surprisingly apt. Most of all, the Vanished I. gives the most spacious and clearest explanation of the Shia outlook and experience that I've ever encountered (I've heard Ajami expound upon it here and there, but this is virtually a whole book about it. The book is most dated about Lebanon itself - but everything that has taken place since 1986 was set in motion by the main players in Ajami's account. I can't begin to summarize or crystallize what I now know about Sunni-Shi'a differences, but I assure you I am wiser about them.
One thing I can recount of which I was entirely unaware is that Persia is Shia only because of a dynastic change only 400 years ago - it was not "naturally" Shia, as I had always somehow stupidly assumed. And clerics and intellectuals had to be imported from what is now Lebanon to Shia-ize its population - much as areas of Europe were Catholicized or Protetestantized for similar reasons around the same time (did you know that northern Italy and Poland had big Protestant, even (the latter) Unitarian populations before the counter-reformation? So the link between Iran and Lebanon's (really Syria's) Shia was centuries old - and Al Sadr's family originated in the Lebanon, were "sent" to Persia in the 16th century, and he returned from Iran to Lebanon only in the 60s.
Also great is the portrait of Al Sadr himself - he is very much a sixties kind of guy - tall, big personality, got along wonderfully with other faiths. He is wonderfully in the mold of big clerics of that age - Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Father Ted Hesburgh, Bishop Pike, etc. The Lebanese loved him because he dressed well and had a sense of style, essential to success in Lebanese life - Ajami quotes someone who says that Musa Al Sadr was the first mullah he ever encountered whose shoes weren't dirty.
All in all, I'd say this is the second most beautiful and wise book on Arab religion and politics (well, Persianized Arab) after Doughty's Arabia Deserta.
One thing I can recount of which I was entirely unaware is that Persia is Shia only because of a dynastic change only 400 years ago - it was not "naturally" Shia, as I had always somehow stupidly assumed. And clerics and intellectuals had to be imported from what is now Lebanon to Shia-ize its population - much as areas of Europe were Catholicized or Protetestantized for similar reasons around the same time (did you know that northern Italy and Poland had big Protestant, even (the latter) Unitarian populations before the counter-reformation? So the link between Iran and Lebanon's (really Syria's) Shia was centuries old - and Al Sadr's family originated in the Lebanon, were "sent" to Persia in the 16th century, and he returned from Iran to Lebanon only in the 60s.
Also great is the portrait of Al Sadr himself - he is very much a sixties kind of guy - tall, big personality, got along wonderfully with other faiths. He is wonderfully in the mold of big clerics of that age - Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Father Ted Hesburgh, Bishop Pike, etc. The Lebanese loved him because he dressed well and had a sense of style, essential to success in Lebanese life - Ajami quotes someone who says that Musa Al Sadr was the first mullah he ever encountered whose shoes weren't dirty.
All in all, I'd say this is the second most beautiful and wise book on Arab religion and politics (well, Persianized Arab) after Doughty's Arabia Deserta.
August 21, 2021
While the book is ostensibly about Imam Musa al Sadr, the greater focus is payed to the Lebanese context he appeared into and the impact he had than on the figure himself. Written in a very evocative way rather than as a dry historical analysis, a very captivating read.
November 28, 2016
A Shia Imam who brought about social change in Lebanon
September 4, 2012
A captivating book about a man of great significance who became many things to many peoples. Ajami provides tantalizing insight into the dizzying social, political and economic current in which Mussa Al Sadr appeared, thrived and vanished. A must read for anyone interested in Shia politics and in Lebanon's modern history. A classic no doubt.
June 3, 2011
This book explains a lot about why Lebanon is the way it is. Very important for understanding Shia politics.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews