Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi (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 People's 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 CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.