Word: imam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Where is he? That question, in bold Arabic script, was written across posters displayed on walls throughout the Muslim areas of Lebanon last week. They portrayed Imam Moussa Sadr, 50, the beloved leader of the country's 900,000-strong Shi'ite Muslim community, who inexplicably disappeared in late August. So long as the question of his whereabouts remained unanswered, the mystery of the missing Imam threatened to trouble relations between Lebanon, Libya and Iran-and possibly other nations as well...
...mystery began when the Imam and two aides flew from Beirut to Tripoli, ostensibly to attend ceremonies commemorating the 1969 coup that brought Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi to power. But the Imam was not to be seen at festivities in the Libyan capital. Instead, it was announced that he and his party were departing for Italy the day before the scheduled celebrations. Although he was booked on an Alitalia flight to Rome, the crew, when questioned later, did not remember the highly visible Imam-who is more than 6 ft. tall, bearded, and wears the imposing robes of an Islamic...
When word of the disappearance reached Beirut, horrified Shi'ites promptly accused Gaddafi of having imprisoned or murdered the Imam because the Libyan viewed him as a rival to his own ambitions as spiritual leader of the Muslim world. The embarrassed Libyans quickly sent a team to Rome that claimed to have documentary proof that the Imam had left Tripoli on schedule. The Palestine Liberation Organization, which feeds on Libyan oil money and also backs the Muslims in their struggle against Lebanon's Christians, dispatched its own investigators to Tripoli. They reportedly turned up the Imam...
Whatever the explanation of Moussa Sadr's disappearance, troubled Lebanon had lost a potent moderating force in the Imam. As a political as well as spiritual leader of the country's most impoverished community, he had founded technical schools, sports centers and medical clinics for the poor. He had repeatedly attempted to head off bloody sectarian strife. In 1975, during the Lebanese civil war, he interrupted an antiwar hunger strike to persuade Muslim guerrillas to lift the siege of a Christian village, and thus averted a massacre. Last week many of his followers were praying that Moussa Sadr...
...Faisal's ambitions for political leadership in the Arab world were sharply challenged, most notably by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, the secular prophet of a new kind of Arab nationalism. The two strong-minded leaders clashed directly only once before Nasser's death in 1970. After Yemen's Imam Badr was ousted in a Republican coup, Nasser sent in Egyptian forces to support the new regime. Faisal backed a counterrevolution by Yemeni Royalists. Eventually, Badr renounced his claim to the throne and the Republican regime prevailed ? but Nasser suffered heavy losses, and the cost of the war came...