Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (1 March 1935-9 April 1980) was an Iraqi Shia imam and the founder of the Islamic Dawa Party. al-Sadr and his party were fierce enemies of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led secularist Iraqi Ba'ath Party, and al-Sadr and his sister were executed for attempting to assassinate Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz.
Biography[]
Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr was born on 1 March 1935 in al-Kazimiya, Iraq to a Shia Muslim family with origins in Lebanon. The family moved to the city of Najaf in 1945, and he delivered lectures on Islamic history from the age of eleven, being known as a child prodigy. At the age of 24, he wrote a book to refute materialism, and he criticized Marxism while forming an idea for Islamic banking; the Kuwaiti government recruited him as an advisor to assess how the country's oil wealth could be managed in an Islamic way.
In 1968, al-Sadr founded the Islamic Dawa Party to fight for Shia rights in Ba'athist Iraq, which was ruled by the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein. Saddam persecuted Shi'ite religious institutions in Najaf and attempted to enforce secularism in the country, but al-Sadr fought against his minority rule and sought to return Iraq to an Islamic nation. In 1974, the Ba'athist government executed 75 members of the party, and it blocked the annual pilgrimage from Najaf to Karbala in 1975. In 1979, al-Sadr organized an al-Dawa revolutionary wing, Shahid al-Sadr, and Saddam made Dawa membership punishable by death on 30 March 1980, executing 96 al-Dawa members that month. After a failed 1 April 1980 assassination attempt on Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, Sadr and his sister were both arrested and executed on 9 April.