Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr was born in 1935 in al-Kāẓimiyya, near Baghdad, into a learned Shiʿi family with roots in Jabal ʿĀmil in Lebanon. His father died when he was a small child, and his older brother Ismāʿīl oversaw his early schooling. In 1945 the family settled in Najaf, where he studied jurisprudence and legal theory with leading teachers including Abū al-Qāsim al-Khūʾī and his maternal uncle Muḥammad Riḍā Āl Yāsīn. He began lecturing young and soon became one of the most respected teachers of uṣūl al-fiqh in the Najaf seminary.
In the late 1950s, as communism and secular nationalism gained ground in Iraq, al-Ṣadr set out to state an Islamic alternative in modern intellectual terms. Falsafatuna (Our Philosophy, 1959) examined theories of knowledge and argued against dialectical materialism, while Iqtisaduna (Our Economics, 1961) compared Marxist and capitalist economics with a system reconstructed from Islamic legal sources. Later works, al-Bank al-lā-ribawī fī al-Islām (1969) and al-Usus al-manṭiqiyya lil-istiqrāʾ (1972), dealt respectively with interest-free banking and with a probabilistic account of inductive reasoning. His Durūs fī ʿilm al-uṣūl became a standard seminary textbook, and his late lectures introduced a thematic method of Qurʾanic exegesis.
Al-Ṣadr is also regarded as the intellectual inspiration of the Islamic Daʿwa Party, and in 1979 he wrote short essays on the constitution of an Islamic state, published as al-Islām yaqūd al-ḥayāt. His growing influence brought repeated arrests by the Baʿthist government. He was detained again in April 1980 with his sister Āmina, known as Bint al-Hudā, and both were executed that month.
His work remains a central reference for Islamic economics, Shiʿi legal theory and debates on Islamic governance, and several of his books have been translated into English and Persian.
