In an article about Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, who died yesterday in Beirut, Juan Cole says in Informed Comment that the cleric was
revered by many Shiite Muslims and by many Lebanese and Iraqis. His life exemplified the awakening and increasing global influence of Shiite Islam.
Noting that the cleric was born to Lebanese parents in Najaf, Iraq in 1935 and moved to South Lebanon in 1966, Cole provides an overview of recent Middle East history.
Fadlallah’s life was shaped by British imperialism in Iraq, by the rise of secular Arab nationalism and of Communism, by the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 (many of whom were pushed into South Lebanon), by the Israeli invasions of Lebanon, by the rise of theocratic Iran, and by the advent of an imperial United States in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cole describes some events in Lebanon in the 80's:
From 1983-1986, a vigorous Shiite guerrilla resistance to Israeli occupation of Lebanese soil grew up, and Fadlallah cheered it on. Fadlallah was seen as an enemy by the US, especially the CIA, and by Israel. In 1985 someone attempted to assassinate him with an enormous bomb, but he had been delayed and it killed 80 other persons and wounded over 250, instead. The dead included women, children, and a bride. One of Fadlallah’s bodyguards who escaped death but saw the carnage was Imad Mughniya, who went on to become one of the more notorious terrorists of the past few decades. It is alleged that Reagan administration CIA director William Casey authorized the bombing.
He says this about Fadlallah's views of Iran, Shiite law and Muslim unity:
Unlike Mughniya, Fadlallah mellowed with age. When the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran emerged, underpinned by Imam Ruhollah Khomeini’s doctrine that the clerics must rule Muslim societies, Fadlallah rejected that principle, known as the ‘guardianship of the jurisprudent’ (wilayat al-Faqih). He also tried to modernize Shiite law affecting women, and in 2007 gave a fatwa condemning honor killings in absolute terms that made his stance more progressive than Lebanese statute on the matter.
Fadlallah in the second half of his life sought an accommodation of Shiite tradition to modernity. By his own lights, he did not take extreme positions, rejecting Iranian theocracy but also decrying American dominance, preaching against Israel but also blaming internal Muslim disunity for the ease with which enemies dominated Muslims.
Cole concludes:
Fadlallah's activism in many ways foreshadowed the great Shiite awakening of the 1960s and after, and helped change the ideological landscape of the Middle East.