Muammar Gaddafi

His exact birth date has not been published in reliable sources: the English article's infobox carries an editorial note to that effect and gives only circa 1942, while the Arabic and Urdu articles give 7 June 1942 and Wikidata carries two competing day dates (7 and 19 June 1942). The museum records the year only, as debated. He was born near Qasr Abu Hadi, a rural area outside Sirte in the deserts of Tripolitania, then under Italian colonial rule, into the small Qadhadhfa tribe. He attended elementary school at Sirte, where he progressed through six grades in four years, and then school at Sabha, where he became an Arab nationalist; in October 1961 he led a demonstration against Syria's secession from the United Arab Republic, and he and his family were expelled from Sabha after the disorder. He continued at Misrata Secondary School, graduated from the Benghazi Military College in 1965, and went to the United Kingdom for further military training in 1966. ^{1 2 3 4}

By the late 1960s King Idris's government was widely unpopular: the articles describe corruption and patronage in the oil industry, anger at the monarchy's Western alignment after the 1967 war, and riots in Tripoli and Benghazi. Gaddafi's Free Officers Movement struck first, ahead of a rival palace plot, in "Operation Jerusalem": on 1 September 1969, while Idris was abroad in Turkey and Greece, the officers overthrew the monarchy and proclaimed the Libyan Arab Republic. The English article's infobox names Idris I, as King of Libya, as Gaddafi's predecessor in the chairmanship of the Revolutionary Command Council, and the Arabic article states plainly that he rose to power in a military coup that deposed King Idris. ^{1 2}

As head of the Revolutionary Command Council he consolidated power, and in the "Popular Revolution" from 1973 he set out his Third International Theory in The Green Book, presenting a system of direct democracy while retaining personal control of major decisions. In 1977 Libya was refounded as a socialist "Jamahiriya" (state of the masses). His rule combined Arab nationalism and then an increasing pan-Africanism with deepening conflict with the United States and its allies in the 1980s, a reconciliation and privatisation period from 1999, and chairmanship of the African Union in 2009–2010. ^{1 3}

The English article treats his religion under ideology, not affiliation. It says his movement placed a far stronger emphasis on Islam than earlier Arab nationalist movements, that he deemed Arabism and Islam "one and indivisible", and that he insisted Islamic law should be the basis of state law. His biographer Jonathan Bearman is cited describing him in Islamic terms as a modernist rather than a fundamentalist, subordinating religion to the political system, with an idiosyncratic interpretation that clashed with conservative Libyan clerics; the article describes his call for an Islamic revival returning to the origins of the Qur'an and rejecting scholarly interpretations and the Hadith, which angered many clerics. The Green Book's programme is presented in the sources as "Islamic socialism". None of this names a school of law or theology as his affiliation. ¹

The museum records his faith as unknown. The Arabic article's infobox calls him a Sunni Muslim, but one infobox is a single attestation; Wikidata carries two religion values in one item — Quranism and Sunni Islam — which contradict each other; and the English and Urdu category filings place him under both Sunni and Quranist headings, which are filings, not statements. No two independent sources name the same school for him. ^{2 4 3}

In 2011, amid the Arab Spring, armed rebellion and NATO intervention turned into civil war. After the fall of Tripoli in August 2011, Gaddafi retreated to his hometown of Sirte, one of the last loyalist strongholds. On 20 October 2011 he was captured and killed at Sirte as the town fell. He was buried at an undisclosed location in the Libyan desert. ^{1 3}

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