This paper investigates the adaptive fuzzy decentralized fault-tolerant control (FTC) problem for a class of nonlinear large-scale systems in strict-feedback form. The considered nonlinear system contains the unknown nonlinear functions, i.e., unmeasured states and actuator faults, which are modeled as both loss of effectiveness and lock-in-place. With the help of fuzzy logic systems to approximate the unknown nonlinear functions, a fuzzy adaptive observer is designed to estimate the unmeasured states. By combining the backstepping technique with the nonlinear FTC theory, a novel adaptive fuzzy decentralized FTC scheme is developed. It is proved that the proposed control approach can guarantee that all the signals of the resulting closed-loop system are bounded, and the tracking errors between the system outputs and the reference signals converge to a small neighborhood of zero by appropriate choice of the design parameters. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the control approach.