Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah

He held relatively liberal views on the status of women. When he died in 2010, TIME magazine wrote about his contrarian stance:

Fadlallah was hospitalized several times in the months before his death, suffering from internal bleeding. His frailty prevented him from delivering Friday sermons in the weeks preceding his death. Fadlallah's media office announced his death at Al-Hassanein Mosque in the southern Beirut suburb of Haret Hureik on 4 July 2010. He was 74. His office said the funeral was scheduled for 6 July at 13:30 p.m. leaving from his house, his burial to be in Al-Hasanein Mosque. His family received condolences at the mosque.

In September 2009, Fadlallah issued a fatwa banning normalisation of ties with Israel. He also objected to any territorial settlement, saying "the entire land of Palestine within its historical borders is one Arab-Islamic country and no one has right to spare on[e] inch of it." Another English translation (from the Arabic in Al Akhbar) was given in The Daily Middle East Reporter.

Despite his ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran, Fadlallah distanced himself from the Ayatollah Khomeini's legacy of Veleyat-e Faqih as theocratic rule by Islamic clerics was said to argue that "no Shia religious leader, not even Khomeini… has a monopoly on the truth." He also first endorsed Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani rather than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the marja for Shia in matters of religion, before claiming the role for himself. In a 2009 interview, Fadlallah said that he did not believe wilayat al-faqih has a role in modern Lebanon.

In November 2007, Fadlallah accused the United States of trying to sabotage the election in Lebanon: "The insanity of the U.S. president and its administration is reflected in Lebanon by their ambassador pressuring the Lebanese people and preventing them from reaching an agreement over the presidential election."

During the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, Israeli warplanes bombed his two-story house in Beirut's southern Haret Hreik neighborhood. Fadlallah was not at home at the time of the bombing, which reduced the house to rubble.

Fadlallah made statements in favour of suicide bombings against Israeli citizens. In a 2002 interview with The Daily Telegraph, he said:

Ranstorp, Magnus, Hizb'allah in Lebanon - The Politics of the Western Hostage Crisis, Palgrave Macmillan,1997

Fadlallah was sometimes called the "spiritual mentor" of Hezbollah in the media, although this was disputed by other sources. He was also the target of several assassination attempts, including the 1985 Beirut car bombing.

As one of the alleged leaders of Hezbollah, a status both he and the group denied he was the target of several assassination attempts, including the allegedly CIA-sponsored and funded 8 March 1985 Beirut car bombing that killed 80 people.

On 8 March 1985, a car bomb equivalent to 440 lb (200 kg) of dynamite exploded 9–45 metres from his house in Beirut, Lebanon. The blast destroyed a 7-story apartment building and a cinema, killed 80 people and wounded 256. The attack was timed to go off as worshippers were leaving Friday Prayers. Most of the dead were girls and women who had been leaving the mosque, though the ferocity of the blast "burned babies in their beds," "killed a bride buying her trousseau," and "blew away three children as they walked home from the mosque." It also "devastated the main street of the densely populated" West Beirut suburb. but Fadlallah escaped injury.

According to Bob Woodward, CIA director William Casey was involved in the attack, which he suggests was carried out with funding from Saudi Arabia. "In his book Woodward portrays Casey as a wily and aggressive director who made the CIA his personal instrument of foreign policy. In early 1985 Woodward reports, Casey went "off the books" to enlist Saudi help in carrying out three covert operations. One was the attempted assassination of Sheik Fadlallah, who had been linked to the bombings in Beirut. After that plot failed, Woodward writes, the Saudis offered Fadlallah a $2 million bribe to cease his terrorist attacks. He accepted, and the attacks stopped. Woodward's account of the incident was denied last week by the Saudi press agency and by Fadlallah's office." Former Lebanese warlord and statesman late Elie Hobeika was accused as one of those likely responsible for the actual operation.

At his funeral, his supporters carried his body around Shia neighbourhoods in southern Beirut, then marched to the spot of his 1985 assassination attempt before returning to Imam Rida Mosque, where he was laid to rest. Thousands of mourners gathered at the mosque for prayer services before the funeral procession. Delegations included representatives from Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Syria and Iran. Thousands of his followers also gathered outside his mosque in Haret Hreik. Al-Manar broadcast the funeral. They said thousands of his followers took part in his funeral and told "his eminence for the last time their 'own secrets' and vowing to stay committed to his path. They told him that even if he has died, he will remain the ideal and the model for them, that even if he has died, his eminence will remain a great man in the eyes of all those who had the chance to know him, and his views will continue to circulate from one generation to another". Al-Manar said his followers "launched a school of beliefs and thoughts, a school that would always be committed to the main causes of Islam, from Jihad to Resistance, and face all foreign threats against the region." It claimed that Fadlallah "committed to the central cause, Palestine, calling to fight occupation through all possible means. His eminence issued different 'fatwa's calling to fight Israel and boycott American goods and ban normalizing of relations, and was a 'true supporter' of Islamic unity all over his life. In his last moments before his death, Sayyed Fadlullah was still preoccupied with the cause. He was asking about the dawn prayers and telling his nurse that he wouldn't rest before Israel's vanishing."

When the Lebanese Civil War forced him to leave the area, he moved to the Southern Suburbs where he started to give priority to teaching and educating the people. He used the mosque as his centre for holding daily prayers giving lessons in Qur'anic interpretation, as well as religious and moral speeches, especially on religious occasions such as Ashura. He soon resumed his academic work and began to give daily lessons in Islamic principles, jurisprudence and morals. In 1982 Dawa unites with other Islamic Shia armed organizations (Islamic Amal, Islamic Jihad Organization, Jundallah and Imam Hussein suicide squad) to found Hezbollah.

He has been variously attributed by the media as being the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. Al Manar said he had "inspired the leaders" of the group. It added that "From the pulpit of the Imam Rida mosque in the Bir al-Abd neighborhood, Sayyed Fadlullah's sermons gave shape to the political currents among mainly the Muslim Shiite sect [of Lebanon], from the latter half of the 1980s till the last days of his life." Other sources, such as journalist Robert Fisk, also refuted such claims that he was affiliated with the group.

After 21 years of studying under the prominent teachers of the Najaf religious university he concluded his studies in 1966 and returned to Lebanon. He had already visited Lebanon in 1952 where he recited a poem eulogizing Muhsin al Amin at his funeral.

In 1966 Fadlallah received an invitation from a group who had established a society called "The family of Fraternity" (جمعية أسرة التآخي Jam'iyat Usrat at-Ta'akhi) to come and live with them in the area of Naba'a in Eastern Beirut. He agreed, especially as the conditions at Najaf impelled him to leave.

Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (also Sayyed Muhammad Hussein Fadl-Allāh; Arabic: محمد حسين فضل الله; 16 November 1935 – 4 July 2010) was a prominent twelver Shia cleric from a Lebanese family. Born in Najaf, Iraq, Fadlallah studied Islam in Najaf before moving to Lebanon in 1952. In the following decades, he gave many lectures, engaged in intense scholarship, wrote dozens of books, founded several Islamic religious schools, and established the Mabarrat Association. Through the aforementioned association, he established a public library, a women's cultural center, and a medical clinic.

Fadlallah was born in the Iraqi Shia shrine city of Najaf on 16 November 1935. His parents, Abdulraouf Fadlullah and al-Hajja Raoufa Hassan Bazzi, had migrated there from the village of 'Aynata in south Lebanon in 1928 to learn theology. By the time of his birth, his father was already a Muslim scholar.