Musa al-Sadr declined Ayatollah Broujerdi’s request to go to Italy as his representative and instead left Qom for Najaf where Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim urged him to accept an invitation to become the leading Shi’a figure in the city of Tyre, succeeding the city’s former Shi’a leader Abdul Hussein Sharif Al Din, who died in 1957. He left Najaf for Tyre in late 1959.