The Shi'i Muslim cleric Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah (born 1935) was a leading political leader in Lebanon beginning in the 1980s.

Sayyid Muhammad Husayn (Hussein) Fadlallah was born in Najaf, Iraq, in November, 1935, but his roots were in Lebanon. He was the son of the late 'Abd al-Ra'uf Fadlallah, a major Shi'i Muslim cleric from the town of Ainata in southern Lebanon. In the 1980s Fadlallah emerged as one of the leading political figures in Lebanon, where he attracted a wide following in the large Shi'i community, particularly within the ranks of Hizballah (or Hezbollah), the "Party of God." From the pulpit of the Imam Rida mosque in Bir al-'Abd, a suburb of Beirut, Fadlallah's sermons gave shape to the political currents among the Shi'is, especially during the latter half of the 1980s.

As a young man Fadlallah trained in the Shi'i seminaries of Najaf, where he mastered the...