Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah, the black sheep of the Hawza … Why it is important to watch Maliki’s reaction?

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].