He was also active, by the early 1960s, in ideological politics and especially in the Arab Ba'ath (or Renaissance) Party.
The Amal Movement
In 1974, after Berri had practiced law for a time in Beirut (and had also traveled to the United States), he changed political affiliation. Leaving the Ba'ath Party, he affiliated with a charismatic religious leader by the name of al-Sayyid Musa al-Sadr. Al-Sadr began organizing a political reform movement among the Shi'ites in Lebanon in 1959. Initially Berri played only a minor role in al-Sadr's movement, and the onset of civil war in 1975 somewhat eclipsed that movement.
However, several things happened in the late 1970s that brought the movement into the forefront and with it brought Berri into prominence. First, when al-Sadr disappeared during an August 1978 trip to Libya he became an authentic hero for the Shi'ites. The movement that he had created, the Movement of the Deprived, was reinvigorated as the Amal movement ("Amal" means hope in Arabic, and it is also the acronym for the Detachments of the Lebanese Resistance).
Second, the Shi'ites became increasingly unwilling to remain in the crossfire between the Israelis and the Palestinian guerrillas who were deployed in south Lebanon.
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