With the death Hizballh’s and Maliki’s Dawa Party spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah died today, it is very interesting to watch the position of the Iraqi Hawza, especially Sistani.
Since Maliki wants to change the Islamic face of his Dawa Party to a secular party, at the same time he Maliki needs to the Shiite public support.
Fadlallah’s moderate ideas to reform the Shiite Hawza and take it back to its original roots caused anger among other Grand Ayatollahs who decided to remove him from Al-Hawza circle and forced him to go to exile in Lebanon. In my article “What is Al-Hawza?” I wrote about Fadlallah’s problems with the Hawza.
In his many writings Fadlallah says:
We must emerge from the narrow cellars of our own ego and our miscalculations, and we have to face our issues and our thoughts and even our faith with self-criticism before we encourage the others to criticize us, because we have inherited the teachings of the ancients, which we should review and analyze.
Fadlallah’s ideas raised debates in the Hawza circles and many Shiites clerics wrote books criticizing his writings such as [Al-Mashhadi: Hawza condemns deviation, Al-Shakhouri: The phase of Hawza and the dust of change]. The most bold attack came from Mohammad Baqir Al-Safi who wrote a book called “Fadlallah’s Sedition” [available online in Arabic] accused Fadlallah of being connected to the U.S. CIA to destroy the Shiite powerful Hawza.
Even Iraq’s Grand Shiite cleric Sistani criticized Fadlallah ideas and issued a fatwa declares that Fadlallah doesn’t represent the main Shiite stream [image below].
[…] Though he was an early supporter of Hezbollah (and often mistakenly identified as “the spiritual guide of Hezbollah“), and justified the use of suicide bombings as legitimate resistance to occupation in Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere, he later criticized the group for its close relationship with Iran, and distanced himself from Ayatollah Khomeini’s system of velayet-e faqih (rule of the clerics.) He also strongly condemned the September 11 attacks as acts of terrorism. Though by no means a progressive (at the time of his death Fadlallah remained on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorists), his unorthodox views earned him condemnation from more conservative clerics as a tool of the West to undermine Islam. […]
[…] terrorists), his unorthodox views earned him condemnation from more conservative clerics as a tool of the West to undermine Islam.All in all, a fairly complex individual whose career, views and influence can’t really properly […]
[…] Though he was an early supporter of Hezbollah (often mistakenly identified as “the spiritual guide of Hezbollah“), and justified the use of suicide bombings as legitimate resistance to occupation in Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere, he later criticized the group for its close relationship with Iran, and distanced himself from Ayatollah Khomeini’s system of velayet-e faqih (rule of the clerics.) He also strongly condemned the September 11 attacks as acts of terrorism. Though by no means a progressive (at the time of his death Fadlallah remained on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorists), his unorthodox views earned him condemnation from more conservative clerics as a tool of the West to undermine Islam. […]