Grand Ayatollah Mohamed Fadlallah, who died recently in Lebanon, was a lifelong supporter of the Palestinian cause, writes Mohsen Saleh* The past few months have provided an opportunity to review the ideology of the late scholar Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah, who died recently in Lebanon, and his vision of the Palestinian situation. There is no doubt that Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah was one of the world's greatest Shia authorities. His personality was characterised by openness, moderation and innovation in Shia ideology and doctrine, and at the same time he was a leading theorist and supporter of the resistance against the Israeli occupation. A careful reading of Ayatollah Fadlallah's writings and speeches shows a depth of vision able to overcome sectarianism in order to put his ideas into a wider Islamic framework embracing a humanitarian outlook. At the core was Ayatollah Fadlallah's vision of Islam, which called for its adoption as a complete way of life in thought and deed. Similarly, his cultural vision was open to accommodating others, which enabled meetings on common ground to serve the nation and confront its enemies. For Ayatollah Fadlallah, Palestine was a Muslim issue that was more important than any other in the world today, and one from which spring all the other issues affecting Arab and Muslim countries. Hence, he said, "our position towards the Palestinian cause is part of a religion we believe in, and not just a political slogan we consume today and leave tomorrow." He stressed that Palestine encapsulates the experience of the past century, with all the pains and dreams of the nation. "I do not dream without Palestine, and all dreams fall when Palestine falls," he said. "It is not a battle, not negotiation, and not a detail: Palestine is the story of the nation." Ayatollah Fadlallah called for the adoption of Islam as the best method to achieve victory over the Zionists, saying that "there is an alliance, and that is Islam in the face of Israel... We are stronger because we are with Islam. The political battle of Islam is the conflict with Israel, and there is no Islam and no Islamic political movement that is outside the conflict with Israel." He stressed that Israel was a usurper state. "Usurping [others' rights] is forbidden just as alcohol is forbidden," he said, "and there will never come a time when usurpation becomes lawful." The passage of time, even the passage of hundreds of years, does not give legitimacy to the taking of something that is not rightfully yours. He was part of the scholarly consensus that forbids the giving up of any part of Palestine. If an individual wishes to give up a part of his own home, that's one thing. But a nation does not have the right to give up its land, because the nation does not just belong to the people living at any one time. A nation is the sum of the generations of people who have lived and died. "The duty of the nation's scholars, whether Sunni or Shia," he said, "is to restore Palestine in its entirety, from the river [Jordan] to the sea, and to mobilise the Arab and Muslim conscience for its sake." Justice, Ayatollah Fadlallah believed, is a supreme value that helps to sustain life, and the removal of injustice and the restoration of people's rights, including the right of Palestinians to live in freedom and independence in their land with its holy places, is what justice requires. It is a mission founded in religion. "Your righteousness lies with God, with yourselves, with people and with life. This sums up all religions," the Ayatollah said. "To be unjust means being neither Muslim nor Christian nor a follower of Moses, because injustice has no religion. Justice is what unites the religions." According to Ayatollah Fadlallah, it is impossible to distinguish between Mecca and Jerusalem in terms of their importance for Muslims. He drew attention to the symbolic importance of Jerusalem, as a place that gives land, region and politics a meaning that goes beyond the city's size. The land itself becomes an issue and a message, he said. Politics needed to have a message, the Ayatollah believed, as did the homeland, and this symbolic need was gathered up in Jerusalem because the city was the cradle of messages from God, who wanted, through this pure place, to give humanity meaning. The size and seriousness of the challenge, Ayatollah Fadlallah believed, requires us to widen the conflict and integrate its concentric circles -- Palestinian, Arab, Islamic and human. It also requires us to prepare for battle, until God wishes victory and liberation. The Palestinian issue, he said, is Palestinian in its geography and people, Arab in its nationality, and Islamic in the depth of its meanings. As a result, Ayatollah Fadlallah refused to allow those who follow national, Islamist and leftist ideologies to indulge in disputes that could distract them from liberation, or exhaust their energies in differences among themselves. He said that Israel will not be strong forever and Arabs and Muslims will not be weak forever. As such, he said, the struggle to liberate Palestine could span generations, and he invited Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims not to impose time limits on resolving the issue. Just as, he said, we face an enemy that lived for many generations until it usurped the land, we must live for even more generations in order to recover what is rightfully ours. This "equation of freedom," he said, "is only truly understood by the mujahideen ". Although Ayatollah Fadlallah saw the struggle with Israel and Zionist Jews as having a religious dimension, he dismissed this with regard to Jewish politicians who, he felt, looked at religion as just a source of slogans that did not affect their policies or their relationships with aspects of Judaism. They had made the issue one of Jewish nationalism, which incorporates many racist ideas. For Ayatollah Fadlallah, the Zionists and Jews in general did not distinguish between Zionism and Judaism because a distorted view of Judaism contained within itself the concept of a "chosen people" that could lend itself to racist ideas against others who were not Jews. It has thus been relatively easy to mobilise Jewish thought and actions against Arabs and Muslims. In the eyes of Ayatollah Fadlallah, Israel represented an extension of Western civilisation. It had been established as a result of Western colonialism, and it was built on mutual interests that benefit both parties at the expense of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. This alliance puts Israel under the protection of the West, especially the United States, whose representatives have control over UN resolutions and the international media. In seeking by all possible means to uphold Israel's security, these forces, Ayatollah Fadlallah said, are like "an octopus that has an arm in every part of the world." This meant that "the issue between us and Israel is not limited to facing Israel in Palestine. Instead, it is a battle between the forces of global arrogance and the vulnerable." Conflict with Zionist Jews is not just a Palestinian matter, he believed, but was related to the Arab and Muslim presence in a region where America and other Western countries have sought to secure their interests. Hence, they created Israel and made sure that it was a strong state in the heart of the Arab world, in order to prevent the latter from interfering in Western economic and political interests in times of either war or peace. America's support for Israel, concluded Ayatollah Fadlallah, was the reason for Arab and Muslim hatred of American policies. US policy on Palestine was hypocritical, since it gave lethal weaponry to Israel and only words to the Palestinians. America, he claimed, was not interested in peace. Instead, it wanted to buy time and to create despair, until such a time as Israel had completed its plan to control most of Palestine and imposed its terms for an agreement. Ayatollah Fadlallah supported the resistance against the Israeli occupation and the Intifada in Palestine with all his strength. Although the Intifada alone could not liberate Palestine, he said, it could liberate our collective belief that the Israelis were unbeatable. The Intifada has let it be known that the Arab is not the man who is always slain, but is a man "who kills and gets killed," as the Quran puts it. He issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, authorising martyrdom operations against the Israeli enemy, since he said that there was no other option, even if the operations meant the killing of civilians. A martyrdom operation, he said, represented the oppressed depth of Palestinian conscience, with, contained within it, aspects of the Muslim Arab character with all its aspirations, pain, and spiritual values of jihad, pride, dignity and freedom, leading to the approval of God and paradise. In such operations, Ayatollah Fadlallah said, the body had no meaning, and male or female martyrs were taking on the pain of the nation in their actions, as though the nation were struggling through them and gathering itself to give them strength and courage. Thus, he ruled that "martyrdom operations are jihadist operations that are the highest types of jihad." There was no difference between a man or a woman carrying out such operations, he said, though a woman's martyrdom had greater rewards and was more altruistic than a man's. He often stressed the need to refuse to surrender to a reality that was being imposed by others, and he called for the adoption of a revolutionary reality that would refuse to accept the current reality and would seek to change it. The Ayatollah expressed his appreciation of the role played by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the resistance factions in the Al-Aqsa Intifada, and he did not hide his delight at the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections. He supported the position of Hamas and its government in the Gaza Strip, as well as its steadfastness in the face of the siege. He supported efforts to lift the siege, and he met with a delegation from one of the ships that managed to break the siege and thanked them for their efforts, saying, "the Gaza Strip is the world's largest prison. Not only are Palestinians dying because they cannot get what they need, but their deaths are being ignored by the world's conscience, which does not consider others except in terms of its own material interests." A "peace agreement" would be in the interest of the Israelis and Americans, he said, but both were pushing to get the greatest gains for themselves while leaving the Palestinians with nothing beyond basic autonomy. He asked supporters of the negotiations to "show me one ray of light" in them. In the Gaza/Jericho agreement (the Oslo Accords) he saw an Israeli agreement, not an Arab or a Palestinian one. It was an agreement that represented "Arab Palestinian defeat," he said, "an agreement of crime in every sense of the word." The most difficult dilemma facing the Palestinian leadership involved in the negotiations today, he felt, was that the leadership could neither abandon them nor continue with them. Nevertheless, Ayatollah Fadlallah remained optimistic about the future of the Palestinian resistance, saying that "the future will smile for the Palestinian people through bleeding wounds, and through a stream of blood that flows with giving, jihad and martyrdom." In considering Ayatollah Fadlallah's perspective on the Palestinian issue, it can be seen that he regarded it as something that could unite Sunnis and Shias, who could then use their combined energies to take on the enemies of Islam and win. * The writer is a professor of modern Arab history and director of the Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations in Beirut.
