ABSTRACT
This chapter is an assessment of the importance of Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍlallāh in ShīꜤī revivalism. In the shifting, challenging, and complex Lebanese political environment, the ShīꜤī community needed a strategic plan of power. This would provide a road map to attain its goals: a comprehensive theory of empowerment composed of all instruments available for the community. This chapter sets the socio-political, biographical, and intellectual context of Faḍlallāh’s theory of power. In Faḍlallāh’s biography, we can detect the roots of the three major features characteristic of his thought: compositeness, comprehensiveness, and the concern with empowerment. Due to his upbringing and education in Iraq and his rise to prominence in Lebanon, his system of thought was formed by an extensive knowledge of Sunnism, Marxism, and Christianity as well as by first-hand experience in the constraints and opportunities of political activism. The chapter also examines the factors that determined the social posture of the community prior to and during the civil war in Lebanon, as well as its major intellectual trends.
