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Fadlallah, Muhammad Husayn (1935– )
militant Shii religious leader and spokesman for the
Hizbullah organization in Lebanon
Shaykh Fadlallah was born in Najaf, iraq, where
his Lebanese father was a Shii religious scholar. At
the Shii madrasa in Najaf, he pursued advanced
Islamic studies in order to become one of the
Shii Ulama. He also became politically involved
by opposing the growing influence of the Com-
munist Party in the Iraqi government during the
1960s. Among the most influential people in his
early career were Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim
Khui (d. 1992), one of the most prominent
scholars of Shii jurisprudence (fiqh) in Iraq, and
Shaykh Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (d. 1980), a
politically active member of a prominent family
of Iraqi religious scholars. In 1966, Fadlallah was
appointed by Khui to serve the needs of Shia liv-
ing in the low-income neighborhoods of Beirut,
lebanon.
During the devastating Lebanese civil war,
which lasted from 1975 to 1990, Shaykh Fadlal-
lah emerged as a leading community activist.
Inspired by the success of the Islamic revolution
in iran of 1979, he played an instrumental role
in organizing Shii militants in the early 1980s
and became the head of hizbUllah in 1985. He
continues to be this organization’s chief spokes-
man. Fadlallah holds strongly anti-Israeli and
anti-American views and combines them with an
ideology of Islamic revolution and political Jihad.
During the 1980s, he was implicated in assassina-
tions and kidnappings in Lebanon, the bombings
of the U.S. embassy and of the U.S. and French
military headquarters in Beirut, and the Lebanese
Shii resistance to the Israeli occupation forces.
Consequently, both Israel and the United States
regard him as a terrorist leader, and there is some
suspicion that the United States was involved
in a failed assassination attempt against him in
- Although he has been supportive of Iranian
ayatollah rUhollah khomeini and religious hard-
liners in Tehran, he has broken with them over
their notions of Islamic government under the
absolute authority of a religious expert (faqih).
Instead, he has expressed support for a division
of political power among religious and secular
leaders. Much of his work in Lebanon has focused
on charitable organizations and social services,
which has won widespread support for Hizbul-
lah among the Lebanese Shia. He approves of the
participation of women in public life, and he has
also been a strong supporter of militant Palestin-
ian Islamist organizations, although not of Yassir
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