Sheikh Mohammed Mahdi Shamsul-Dean and Renewal and Reformation Issues.

Abstract

This study deals with an aspect of the biography of the chief of the Islamic Supreme She`ai Council in Lebanon Sheikh Mohammed Mahdi bin Sheikh Abdulkareem bin Sheikh Abbas Aal-ShamsulDean Mohammed bin Makky Al-Jazeny Al- Amely who is known as the first martyr the author of (Al-Lama`a Al-Demisqhiyah). This aspect relates the renewal in his thinking and his reformative efforts that began in Al-Najaf Al-Ashraf where he was born in 1936 where his father was living to study the religious sciences in its Hawza. Sheikh ShamsulDean joined the Hawza too and that is what added the traditional characteristics on his thinking and personality.After his return to Lebanon in 1969, due to the threats of Al-Ba`th party in an attempt to tighten the grip on the Hawza, he joined the Islamic Supreme She`ai Council in Lebanon in 1975 when he was elected as the vice-chairman when the chairman was Sayid Musa Al-Sader who was lost in 1978 in ambiguous conditions during his visit to the Republic of Libya, so Sheikh ShamsulDean became the chairman of the Supreme Council, as he was the vice-chairman, in the most difficult period that the civil war ploughed with the country (1975-1990), hence Sheikh ShamsulDean faced the political and social status of Lebanon whose distinguished feature is (Pluralism), and, as one of the quelling parties in Lebanon, he had to find more flexible resolutions for the aggravated political problems which the society suffer, in addition to the dialogue among all the national, regional and international parties save Israel that he considered it as an absolute danger, by that he became one of the distinguished characters of the She`ai reformation and renewal in the contemporary Lebanon.