Vanished Imam

Magnificent book vital to understanding As Sadr's role in redefining the politics of the Lebanese Shia and the genesis of Amal and Hezbollah. Through it you also learn a great deal about the Lebanese state and the interactions of its main communities. There are deep insights here and a visceral understanding of south Lebanon as only someone like Ajami (a Shi'i orig from that area) could impart them. The weakness is that it is perhaps too admiring, to the detriment of some alternative insights that a more balanced and objective view would provide.

This book is Ajami's best. It creates the ideological, sociological and historic context for the career of one of the most illustrious Iranian-born Lebanese Shiite mullahs in Lebanon. Ajami also provides clear genealogy of the roots of Mussa Sadr. In 1959, Sadr had arrived in Lebanon to succeed the mufti of Tyr in southern Lebanon. Unlike religious men of his time, Sadr took his position to unprecedented levels as he started preaching a reverse in the fortunes of the Shiite community of Lebanon that had presumably been until the arrival of Sadr a marginalized and impoverished group living under the grip of its unsympathetic feudal lords. Ajami skillfully captured the revolutionary and untraditional discourse of Sadr as he painted his importance in Shiite minds by comparing him to Shiite legendary imams. Ajami also highlighted the contradiction in Sadr's message upon the breakout of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. While Sadr first announced that he was opposed to violence, realities had in fact forced him to start forming his own armed militia. The book is informative while Ajami's entertaining style adds much value to this work.

Though the place is Lebanon and the time is mid-20th century, the story it tells offers a lot of insight into the present situation in Iraq. Ajami gives a brief, cogent history of Shi'a religious beliefs, history and politics. Musa al-Sadr, the vanished imam of the title, is a tantalizing individual who tried to bridge the abyss between the Shi'a past and its future. I found the book and the bespoke imam fascinating. Lebanon in the 1970s was a misunderstood religious, political and international disaster and there are frighening parallels to the events of today.