Fadlallah of Lebanon and Points East……….
“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 Shiites of southern Lebanon were mired in grinding poverty as hardscrabble farmers in scattered villages or as tobacco sharecroppers, virtually ignored by the authorities in the League of Nations-authorized 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 Shiites of south Lebanon lagged in access to roads, rural electrification, and other state services, though that was beginning to change. Many Lebanese Shiites were emigrating, to West Africa, Sao Paulo, Detroit, and the Perso-Arabian Gulf, and they began sending back home remittances that allowed some families to move into the Lebanese middle class……….. The Da`wa dreamed not of a workers paradise but of a Shiite paradise. Islamic law would be the law of the land. Social injustice would be abolished through the judicious implementation of Islamic legal principles such as tithing. The Islamic state of the Islamic Mission Party would not be clerically run, but rather lay leaders such as physicians and attorneys could play a leading role. Among Fadlallah’s associates at the time was Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, another founder of the Da`wa………” Juan Cole
Fadlallah was extensively eulogized in the Sunni Arab media as well, mainly because he was the Un-Khomeini or un-Khamenei: he did not believe in Wilayat al-Faqih, rule by the clergy, an idea developed by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran and accepted by some, although not most, Shi’as.
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