Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, commonly known as Colonel Gaddafi, was a Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He governed Libya as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977. He was initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism but later ruled according to his own Third International Theory. A highly divisive figure, Gaddafi dominated Libya’s politics for four decades and was the subject of a pervasive cult of personality.
About Muammar Gaddafi in brief
Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, commonly known as Colonel Gaddafi, was a Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He governed Libya as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977 and then as the \”Brotherly Leader\” of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011. He was initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism but later ruled according to his own Third International Theory. A highly divisive figure, Gaddafi dominated Libya’s politics for four decades and was the subject of a pervasive cult of personality. Amid the 2011 Arab Spring, protests against widespread corruption and unemployment broke out in eastern Libya. The situation descended into civil war, in which NATO intervened militarily on the side of the anti-Gaddafist National Transitional Council. The government was overthrown, and Gaddafi retreated to Sirte, only to be captured and killed by NTC militants. His parents’ only surviving son, he had three older sisters’s upbringing in Bedouin culture influenced his personal tastes for the rest of his life. According to later claims, Gaddafi’s paternal grandfather, Abdalam Bouminyar, was killed by the Italian Army during the Second World War. His mother was named Aisha bin Niran, and his father, Mohammad Abdul Salam bin Hamed bin Mohammad, was known as Abu Meniar ; the latter earned a meagre subsistence as a goat and camel herder. His family came from a small, relatively uninfluential tribal group called the Qadhadhfa, who were Arabized Berber in heritage.
Along with other nomadic Bedouins, the family were illiterate and kept no birth records. Many biographers have set Gaddafi’s birthday as 7 June, although his sources have set it in 1942 or the spring of 1943, although it could have been pre-1940. His paternal grandmother was a Jew who converted to Islam; his paternal grandfather was killed during the Italian invasion of North Africa in 1911. His maternal grandmother was also a Jew; he was born near Qasr Abu Hadi, a rural area outside the town of Sirte in the deserts of Tripolitania, western Libya. In 1973, he initiated a \”Popular Revolution\” with the formation of Basic People’s Congresses, presented as a system of direct democracy, but retained personal control over major decisions. In 1977, he transformed Libya into a new socialist state called a Jamahirisya in 1977. He officially adopted a symbolic role in governance but remained head of both the military and the Revolutionary Committees responsible for policing and suppressing dissent. A particularly hostile relationship developed with the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, resulting in the 1986 US bombing of Libya and United Nations–imposed economic sanctions. From 1999, Gaddafi shunned pan-Arabism and encouraged rapprochement with Western nations and pan-Africanism. The Libyan people strongly opposed his social and economic reforms, and he was posthumously accused of sexual abuse.
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