Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar alGaddafi c?1942 20 October 2011 commonly known as Colonel Gaddafi was a Libyan revolutionary politician and political theorist He governed Libya as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977 and then as the Brotherly Leader of the Great Socialist Peoples Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011 He was initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism but developed his own Third International Theory Description above from the Wikipedia article Muammar Gaddafi licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia