Juan Cole: A Colossus Has Departed
[Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History and the Middle East scholar at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on the Middle East and the West-Islam relations.]
The death of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah at 75 marks the passing of a cleric revered by many Shia Muslims and by many Lebanese and Iraqis. His life exemplified the awakening and increasing global influence of Shia Islam. Although Fadlallah became less radical with time, changing his view of deploying violence for political purposes, he did not become less anti-imperialist. He recently decried US military operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
He opposed Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He denounced Arab countries for failing to respond vocally to the Israeli assault on a humanitarian aid flotilla on May 31, and called for an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. He preached Sunni-Shia unity and warned that the disunity of Muslims made imperialism in Muslim lands possible. He is said to have gone to his death hoping for the collapse of Israel.
Fadlallah was born in 1935 in Najaf, Iraq, to Lebanese parents, and he lived and was educated and lived there until 1966, when he came to the homeland of his ancestors, Lebanon. When Fadlallah was born, the Shias of southern Lebanon were mired in grinding poverty as hardscrabble farmers in scattered villages or as tobacco sharecroppers, virtually ignored by the authorities in French Mandate of Lebanon. Even when the rise of secular, Sunni-dominated Arab nationalism in Iraq impelled him to leave for Beirut in the mid-1960s, the Shias of south Lebanon lagged in access to roads, rural electrification, and other state services, though that was beginning to change....
Read entire article at Khaleej Times (UAE)
The death of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah at 75 marks the passing of a cleric revered by many Shia Muslims and by many Lebanese and Iraqis. His life exemplified the awakening and increasing global influence of Shia Islam. Although Fadlallah became less radical with time, changing his view of deploying violence for political purposes, he did not become less anti-imperialist. He recently decried US military operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
He opposed Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He denounced Arab countries for failing to respond vocally to the Israeli assault on a humanitarian aid flotilla on May 31, and called for an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. He preached Sunni-Shia unity and warned that the disunity of Muslims made imperialism in Muslim lands possible. He is said to have gone to his death hoping for the collapse of Israel.
Fadlallah was born in 1935 in Najaf, Iraq, to Lebanese parents, and he lived and was educated and lived there until 1966, when he came to the homeland of his ancestors, Lebanon. When Fadlallah was born, the Shias of southern Lebanon were mired in grinding poverty as hardscrabble farmers in scattered villages or as tobacco sharecroppers, virtually ignored by the authorities in French Mandate of Lebanon. Even when the rise of secular, Sunni-dominated Arab nationalism in Iraq impelled him to leave for Beirut in the mid-1960s, the Shias of south Lebanon lagged in access to roads, rural electrification, and other state services, though that was beginning to change....