The Globe and Mail profiles Mohammed Busidra, the man who is positioning himself to become the main power-broker in post-Gaddafi Libya:

While secular and military figures have fallen into factional fighting, Mr. Busidra, 53, has brought together Libya’s disparate moderate Islamist leaders into the country’s only united political force. He has written a constitution that they have agreed upon, and is organizing Libya’s mosques into a political machine. This has made him, in the view of many people here, the figure who will wield the most political power, and likely control the country’s leadership, in the event of the dictator’s demise.

“We have to prepare our country politically now, to prevent any political vacuum from occurring when the criminal Gadhafi is gone,” Mr. Busidra said in the first interview he has given since early March. “And I can assure you, when we Islamists establish a party, which will be on a national basis, I think we will win comfortably.”

This assessment is shared, sometimes with alarm, by many of his opponents.

“The Islamist opposition are much better organized and financed than us because they are focused entirely on politics,” says Mohammed Bujamaya, founder of the Liberal Gathering, one of several secularist proto-parties struggling for recognition in Benghazi. “We are tied up with the crisis, while they have their figures outside of Benghazi and sometimes out of the country, scheming.”

Busidra claims to distance himself and his group from Salafists and rejects incorporating shari’a into Libya’s future constitution, and he has a large network of allies:

Mr. Busidra’s network is formidable: It includes the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood; the February 17 Martyrs’ Brigade, which is the largest fighting force among the rebel armies and is led by the influential cleric Ismail Al-Sallabi; the even more popular cleric, Mr. Sallabi’s Doha-based brother Sheikh Ali Sallabi; and a half-dozen other imams and leaders well known in Libya, including more moderate former members of the long-banned Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Mr. Busidra’s circle is opposed to the extreme Islam of al-Qaeda and other radical groups.

His group was among the earliest supporters of the protests that began in February:

But Mr. Busidra’s group has a number of advantages over any political competition. For one thing, their names – especially Mr. Busidra’s – are virtually synonymous with the February 17 protests whose brutal repression by Mr. Gadhafi’s forces marked the birth of the Libyan revolution. Mr. Busidra, already a well-known preacher, gained popularity in February when he issued a fatwa making it a sin not to join the protests.