Sheikh Abdul Mahdi Karbalai, the senior cleric of Karbala’s Imam Hussain shrine and survivor of multiple assassination attempts, emerged as a powerful voice during Iraq’s war against ISIS, rejecting sectarian framing of the conflict and emphasizing Shia-Sunni-Christian unity
Sheikh Abdul Mahdi Karbalai (middle) at the Imam Hussain shrine in Karbala with Agha Sultan (left), consulting engineer and educationist, who coordinated the 2016 media visit to Iraq’s holy shrines.
By Sameer Arshad Khatlani
Sheikh Abdul Mahdi Karbalai, who leads Friday prayers at the shrine of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Hussain in Iraq’s Karbala, is a survivor of two assassination attempts. In the middle of the civil war after the American invasion, a bomb hit Karbalai’s convoy near a checkpoint in Karbala and left him wounded and his two bodyguards dead in 2008. Four years earlier, he was injured in a blast near the shrine in 2004.
As a survivor of terrorism, Karbalai felt strongly against it. The sentiment was most pronounced inside the opulent and ornate shrine, where cleric Karbalai was the first among the senior clerics our group of journalists covering the war on ISIS met in February 2016. Karbalai spoke to us in Arabic. He began by emphasising that they had invited us to convey a message to the world that they were fighting the war against ISIS for peace. Karbalai acknowledged the media’s important role. But he regretted that some of the media were mostly projecting the war to be between the Shia and the Sunnis. He insisted that it was not the case.
The Sunnis, Karbalai added, have suffered at the hands of ISIS and were fighting shoulder and shoulder with the Shias. He said they were carrying forward Hussain’s mission and highlighted how the Imam influenced many world leaders, including Gandhi. Karbalai was among the signatories to a March 2020 statement of Iraq’s religious leaders, which endorsed the need for justice and the rights of victims and survivors of ISIS.
Iraq’s Religious Leaders and UNITAD Call for Justice, Accountability for ISIS Crimes
The statement was issued following an engagement of the UN’s Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIS (UNITAD) with Iraq’s religious authorities, including Christians. The leaders repudiated and condemned the violence of ISIS as ‘completely contrary to their respective faiths.’ They underscored that ISIS’s crimes impacted members of all religions across Iraq and that all survivors must be supported in their efforts to continue their lives within their communities. The statement recognised acts of heroism in which members of their respective communities rose in defence of those from other religious and ethnic backgrounds:
…the religious leaders spoke with one voice in acknowledging the tremendous suffering members of their communities had endured as a result of sexual and gender-based violence and in underlining their commitment to ensure that survivors of such crimes are fully supported and do not suffer from any form of stigmatization.
UN’s Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIS
The communique said the critical importance of ensuring that ISIL (ISIS) members are held individually responsible for crimes committed, through fair trials in a court of law, as well as the investigation of cases of those who disappeared and were abducted by ISIL, was further underlined in the statement. ‘In this regard, all religious authorities expressed their strong collective support for the work of UNITAD.’
Karbalai and Iraqi Clergy Struggle Against Terrorism
Karbalai echoed many of these comments during his interaction with us. He repeated the common refrain we heard from the clergy in Iraq that people across religious and sectarian divides were responding to cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s call and defending the entire world. ‘ISIS has killed a lot of Sunnis, who are battling them. ISIS’s violence has affected all Iraqis—Shia, Sunni, and Christians—and we are fighting together,’ said Karbalai, who wore a white turban and black flowing robes.
Karbalai added that they cannot allow ISIS to have its way and kill whosoever opposes them. He insisted Iraqis were fighting the real jihad against ISIS on Sistani’s call to defend their country against barbarity. The Iraqi clergy resented the practice of calling terrorists jihadis and repeatedly highlighted that the Arabic word jihad means to struggle with the bigger being the struggle against evil within. The smaller and the real jihad, it argued, entailed self-defense they were involved in against ISIS.
Jihad appears in the Quran 41 times and dissuasion from fighting, qital or harb, 70 times. The clerics we met in Iraq insisted that people involved in terrorism are terrorists and not jihadis, as the killing of innocent people is anything but a struggle that jihad means. They repeatedly cited the Quranic verse, which says the killing of an innocent is as good as slaying the entire humanity. The clerics said calling terrorists jihadis legitimises terrorism and the twisting of Islamic doctrines.
Military and Intellectual Fight Against ISIS
The clerics said the resistance against ISIS terrorists was what the real jihad was for, and tens of thousands of Iraqis signed up voluntarily on Sistani’s call. They credited successes against ISIS to Sistani’s call for lesser jihad symbolically from one of Islam’s holiest shrines—Caliph Ali’s mausoleum in Najaf. Iraqi journalists, who were present at Karbalai’s briefing, echoed the arguments over cups of sweet black tea and filo pastries dipped in honey before we met cleric Syed Afzal al-Shami at the shrine.
Shami more or less echoed Karbalai. He spoke about Sistani’s call for resistance against ISIS and credited it for the successes against the group. He made it a point to underline that Muslims were ISIS’s primary target and emphasised that there was not a military solution alone to the problem. Shami added that its ideology has to be taken on both militarily and intellectually.
Syed Saduddin, director of the secretariat of Imam Hussain Shrine, was very aggressive in his pronouncements, unlike the soft-spoken and measured clerics. ‘The fight has now been fought between sons of Ali, grandsons of Yazid, and the Wahabi,’ he told us, using a pejorative term for the dominant Salafi school of thought in Saudi Arabia. ‘…during our pilgrimage to the shrine, we say to ourselves that we wish we had come to fight for Hussain. This is the power we bring into our hearts. This is what drives us today against ISIS,’ said Saduddin, who wore a suit and tie and sat behind a table full and racks at his marbled-walled and carpeted office.
Karbala’s spiritual resistance against ISIS reflects the enduring power of faith and unity in the face of violence. By rejecting sectarian narratives and insisting on Shia-Sunni-Christian solidarity, Karbalai and Iraq’s senior clergy reclaimed the moral and defensive struggle against terror. His words, rooted in Imam Hussain’s legacy and reinforced by Ayatollah Sistani’s call, continue to resonate far beyond Iraq’s shrines, reminding the world that the battle against extremism is not only military but also intellectual, ethical, and deeply human.
