Tens of thousands of people swarmed around the coffin of Lebanon’s top Shiite cleric as it made its way through the streets of south Beirut to the mosque for burial on Tuesday.
Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, 75, died on Sunday after a long illness. The cleric was one of Shiite Islam’s highest authorities and most revered religious figures.
Seen by some as a spiritual mentor to the Hezbollah militant movement and by others as a voice of pragmatism and religious moderation, Fadlallah enjoyed a following that stretched beyond Lebanon’s borders to Iraq, the Persian Gulf and Central Asia.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“This is a sad day for the Muslim and Arab nation. I have been one of his followers since I was a child and I don’t know if anyone will be able to fill the vacuum left behind by Sayyed Fadlallah,” said Sayed Ali, a 32-year-old Kuwaiti mechanical engineer who flew in on Tuesday morning to attend the funeral.
The government declared Tuesday a national day of mourning, and schools and government offices were closed.
A sea of people surged forward as Fadlallah’s coffin, wrapped in black cloth with gold Koranic inscriptions, was carried out of his house in Beirut’s southern suburb of Haret Hreik. Many of the black-clad mourners carried his portrait as they marched.
Overcome by the heat and emotions, several people fainted and were treated by paramedics.
The massive funeral followed noon prayers. The procession first headed to Imam Rida Mosque in the nearby neighborhood of Bir el-Abed, where Fadlallah used to give his lectures and sermons in the 1980s. It then marched to a nearby spot where Fadlallah escaped a 1985 assassination attempt — an explosives truck that left 80 people dead and that was widely believed to have been the work of CIA agents.
US journalist Bob Woodward wrote that the late CIA director William Casey ordered Lebanese agents to plant the car bomb to retaliate for terrorist attacks on US interests in the Middle East.
Fadlallah was buried in Haret Hreik‘s Imamayn al-Hasanayn mosque.
Known for his staunch anti-US views, Fadlallah was described by Western media in the 1980s as a spiritual leader of the Lebanese militant Hezbollah — a claim both he and the group have since denied.
He supported the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, but distanced himself from the key principle advocating the leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the supreme, undisputed spiritual leader for the world’s Shiites.
Ahmad Jannati, a representative of Iran’s supreme leader, as well as Ali al-Adeeb, an aide to the Iraqi prime minister, attended the funeral along with other prominent foreign officials.
The stocky, gray-bearded cleric with piercing brown eyes below his black turban, was known for his bold fatwas, or religious edicts, including giving women the right to hit their husbands if they attacked them and banning so-called “honor killings” of women.
Fadlallah was born in Iraq in 1935 and lived in the country’s Shiite holy city of Najaf, where he was considered one of the leading clerics. He moved to Lebanon at the age of 30 — his family hailed from the southern Lebanese village of Ainata — and began lecturing on religion.
In the ensuing decades, he would prod Lebanon’s Shiites, who today make up one-third of the country’s population of 4 million, to fight for their rights.
During Lebanon’s 1975-to-1990 civil war, he was linked to Iranian-backed Shiite militants who kidnapped Americans and other Westerners, and bombed the US embassy and Marine base in Lebanon, killing more than 260 Americans.
Fadlallah repeatedly denied those links, but argued such acts were justifiable when the door to dialogue was locked shut.
With age, Fadlallah’s views mellowed and he lost much of his 1980s militancy. His sermons, once fiery diatribes denouncing US imperialism, took on a pragmatic tone as he urged dialogue among nations and religions.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.