Word: sadr
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...While in Paris on his European sabbatical, President Derek C. Bok has a chance encounter with the former Prime Minister of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr. Bani-Sadr recognizes the world renowned educator and, aware of Bok's efforts to make Harvard a force for progress in education throughout the world, the Iranian emigre offers Bok an opportunity to strike a blow for enlightenment and freedom on three continents. The exile tells Bok of the heroic efforts of a group of moderate Iranian educators who are struggling to give students a liberal arts education despite the mullahs' decision to eliminate funding...
...terrorism at the source and, above all, to further the goal of worldwide liberal arts education. Using back-channel communications that circumvent the office of acting President Henry Rosovsky, Bok dispatches Eliot House Master Alan Heimert '49 on a secret fact-finding mission during intersession to contact Bani-Sadr's associates...
...murky equations of the Middle East, power is usually bought with gunpowder. Johns Hopkins Professor Fouad Ajami, author of the recently published The Vanished Imam, a profile of Moussa Sadr, the charismatic Shi'ite cleric and political leader, calls the Shi'ites the "stepchildren of the Arab world." After a docile history centered on agriculture, they first took up arms in a serious way when Lebanon's civil war broke out, in 1975. But it was not until 1982, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, that the stage was set for the explosion of Shi'ite power...
Lebanese Shi'ites soon gained another source of inspiration: the Iranian revolution led by the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Moussa Sadr had supported Khomeini during the Ayatullah's long exile in Iraq and later in France. Fouad Ajami, director of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, describes the galvanizing effect of the Iranian upheaval in the spring issue of Foreign Affairs. "For the moderate Shia mainstream, this was a chance for the country's largest group to lay claim to its legitimate share of power," he says. "For more marginal and intemperate men, there...
Some believe that the current hijacking was plotted by a faction in Amal calling itself the Sadr Brigade, purportedly composed of friends and relatives of the Shi'ite detainees in Israel. There are many such informal alliances within Lebanon's Shi'ite community, most of them extremist and many of them revolving around a single electrifying personality. "We're not talking about neat organizations," says Helms. "These are people who are inclined to pick a title that suits them after they act." Indeed, the most famous such group, Islamic Jihad (Holy War), apparently exists solely as a disembodied and anonymous...