Excerpt:
It's been a week of mourning and remembrance for many in the Middle East and also locally in the wake of Sunday, July 4th's passing of top Shi'a Muslim cleric Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah in a Beirut hospital due to internal bleeding, a condition for which he was admitted in June. Fadlallah was 74 years old.
A diverse group of hundreds of thousands of mourners and dignitaries from various backgrounds and places such as Kuwait, Qatar, Syria, Iran, Bahrain, and Iraq gathered at the Hassanein mosque in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Tuesday, July 6th for his burial, which occurred after his body was carried by supporters around Shi'a neighborhoods south of the Lebanese capital city.
Among the stops on the emotional procession were the Imam Rida Mosque in the neighborhood of Bir el-Abed, a place where Fadlallah gave numerous sermons and lectures in the 1980s, and a spot nearby where he managed to avoid a 1985 assassination attempt via car bomb. The attempt left about 80 people dead and was widely believed to be the work of the CIA according to research done by Pulitzer-winning American journalist Bob Woodward. The U.S. has denied involvement in the incident.