Early Life & Opposition Politics
A Shia Muslim and neurologist by training, al-Rabai'i was born in Kadhimiya in 1947 to a Shia father and a Sunni mother, Al Rubaie graduated top of his class at the Baghdad School of Medicine in 1977 and gained his MRCP (Membership of the Royal College of Physicians) whilst at King's College Medical School in London in 1979. In his student years, Al Rubaie was a protégé of the leading intellectual Shia theologian of his time, Grand Ayatollah Syed Mohammad Baqir Al Sadr, the founder of the Islamic Da'awa party, which served as the main opposition to Saddam Hussain's repressive Ba'ath regime. Al Rubaie was a pivotal figure in the movement from its very beginning which brought him into direct conflict with Saddam's regime for which he was tortured on three separate occasions and sentenced to death in absentia the day after leaving Iraq to complete his medical studies in the UK.
While he was in exile in London from 1979 until 2003, Al Rubaie embarked on a successful career in both the UK public and private sectors. From 1979 until 1991, Al Rubaie was the head of Da'awa party's international section and, using his home as his base, was prolific in organising opposition conferences, publications highlighting Saddam's atrocities and fund raising events in order to assist Saddam's countless victims. Following the Gulf War of 1991 and the founding of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) Al Rubaie sought to bring the Da'awa Party into the mainstream of Iraqi opposition with the shared goal of toppling Saddam. This policy however brought him into conflict with the Da'awa hardliners in Tehran and for this reason Al Rubaie resigned from the Da'awa Party in 1991 to become a leading independent opposition figure.
Al Rubaie was a major contributor to the widely acclaimed document, "The Declaration of the Shia of Iraq", July 2002 (http://www.al-bab.com) which called for the protection of the civil rights of the Shia of Iraq. Many of the principles of this declaration were later incorporated into Iraq's new constitution of 2004 under the Interim Governing Council.
Read more about this topic: Mowaffak Al-Rubaie
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