A two-hour drive from Najaf, waiting at two airports for visa clearance and immigration, and a layover at Doha left us exhausted as we arrived in Karbala, one of Islam’s holiest cities, which attracts millions of pilgrims to the shrine of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussain, at the site of the Battle of Karbala annually for Ashura and Arbaeen. We retired immediately after a quick dinner at Medinat-ul-Zaireen (Pilgrims City), a sprawling complex of suites near Karbala University.
The following day, I got up a little early, by my standards, and took a stroll down the neatly paved, manicured, and landscaped premises of Pilgrims City. What immediately struck me was Karbala’s skyline. It was quite different from what I had imagined, heard about, and seen in its visual description in the media. The tomb of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussain, Karbala’s main attraction, no longer dominates the skyline. The skyline was getting crowded with high-rise buildings coming up across the city.
With cranes and construction machinery everywhere, Karbala, about 100 km (62 miles) southwest of Baghdad, was in the middle of a construction boom when I visited in 2016. It was something we did not expect to see in a terror-torn country. The landscape was dotted with building skeletons. The ground was being dug up at more and more places for foundations for hotels and hostels to accommodate pilgrims, who continued to visit Karbala annually, undeterred by ISIS’s onslaught.
Imam Hussain Shrine: Why Is Karbala Sacred?
Millions of pilgrims annually visit Karbala to pay homage to Imam Hussain, who laid down his life in the seventh century in the Battle of Karbala, resisting Umayyad ruler Yazid. Hussain’s refusal to legitimize Yazid triggered the Battle of 680, which ended with the massacre of Hussain and 72 of his companions and family members. Hussain went down fighting against a 30,000-strong force. His heroics on the battlefield fended off the enemy for 10 days, immortalizing him as the ultimate symbol of courage and commitment to the essence of Islam.
Hussain was on his way to Kufa in modern-day Iraq when Yazid sent his forces from Damascus to prevent them from reaching their destination and joining a rebellion. Yazid’s forces besieged Hussain and his followers from the first to the 10th of Muharram (Ashura), the first month in the Islamic calendar, in the desert plains of Karbala.
On the seventh day, Yazid’s soldiers blocked the Euphrates and cut off the supply of water, sealing the fate of Hussain and his companions and forcing them to fight in the open. They put up a valiant fight, but soon began to die painfully slow deaths of thirst. On the 10th day of the battle, an exhausted and wounded Hussain collapsed outside his tent, with an arrow stuck in his arm and a dart in his face.
Al-Mukhayyam Al-Husayni Mosque
Apart from the golden-domed tomb of Imam Hussain, Karbala has a series of pilgrimage sites. The al-Mukhayyam al Husayni mosque, over 400 metres away, stands at the place of Hussain and his family’s encampment, believed to have been spread over a five-kilometre area. There is an area marked inside the mosque where Hussain’s men would patrol to ensure Yazid’s forces were kept at bay. Enclosure-like structures made of marble have replaced the tents, where every corner, including the place where Hussain’s brother Abbas offered prayers, is revered. Hussain’s encampment is the locus of ritualised collective identity.
The al-Mukhayyam al Husayni mosque has two large blue-green domes above the position of the tents where Hussain, his family, and his followers lived upon their arrival in Karbala from Medina en route to Kufa at the invitation of the Kufan people. Yazid’s governor, Obaidullah Ibn Ziyad, prevented Hussain’s caravan from reaching Kufa, forcing them to pitch their tents near the Euphrates.
The mosque at the site of their encampment is seen as a symbolic space representing a larger area even as Hussain’s encampment was much vaster ‘spanning in a crescent-shape area.’ The exact encampment, an ephemeral place, is almost impossible to ascertain. The encampment also sheltered Umayyad deserters. The al-Mukhayyam al Husayni mosque was built there as a symbolic structure denoting the approximately five-kilometre space comprising the transient encampment.
How Karbala Transformed After Saddam Hussein
The new buildings dotting the Karbala landscape included a shopping mall and high-rise hotels. Signboards across the city advertised expensive real estate. Karbala had come a long way from the days of dictator Saddam Hussein, whose neglect reduced the city to an economic backwater. Its transformation was dramatic. The recently opened malls, theme parks, advanced theatres, play stations, cafeterias, and restaurants offered residents entertainment available until recently only in bigger cities such as Baghdad. The Al Kawthar shopping complex near Imam Hussain’s shrine offered the best collection of fashion accessories and Western clothing.
The number of devotees visiting the city continued to grow exponentially after 2003, when Saddam was ousted. During my visit, the Imam Hussain shrine was undergoing one of its biggest expansions, worth $600 million, to keep up with the rush. Iranian companies and engineers built multi-storey buildings to house a library, a museum, and expand amenities for pilgrims to boost religious tourism, Iraq’s second-largest earner of revenue after oil.
The large-scale constructions were expected to ease the rush, which meant over 20,000 people alone were employed to shepherd the pilgrims at the shrines of Hussain and his brother Abbas just across the road. Hussain’s shrine in Karbala has stood for centuries as a representation of foundational Islamic values of egalitarianism, justice, and equity, and a rallying point against tyranny. Karbala was fittingly the nerve centre of the war on ISIS when we visited the city.
Why Arbaeen Is the World’s Largest Annual Pilgrimage
Saddam restricted religious rituals centred around the tomb over his decades-long rule, when Karbala emerged as a bastion of resistance against him. He was not the only ruler to fear the symbolism attached to the shrine, which has been the city’s centrepiece and dominated its skyline for centuries, while rulers have come and gone.
The rush in Karbala peaks annually on Arbaeen when millions of people march through Iraq to reach the holy city to mark the end of Hussain’s 40-day mourning period. The march has, since Saddam’s ouster become one of the biggest pilgrimages globally and surpassed the Hajj. Shortly after Saddam’s fall, two million people wore black clothes and chanted an Arabic threnody for Hussain, as they gathered in Karbala to mark Arbaeen in the shadow of his shrine in April 2003.
They raised their hands in unison and thumped their chests in collective mourning for Hussain for the first time in a generation. Tens of thousands of Iranians were among them. They walked across the Iran-Iraq border, avoiding minefields, to make their way to Karbala, making the most of the ouster of Saddam, who had barred them for years.
Can Non-Muslims Visit Karbala?
There are no restrictions on non-Muslims from visiting Karbala, which is accommodating to all visitors. Tourists and travelers of different faiths are free to explore the shrines and come for cultural tourism. In 2018, British House of Lords member Maurice Glasman, who was raised Jewish, was among the Arbaeen marchers from Najaf to Karbala after his Iraqi friends encouraged him to join them to understand the country that defeated ISIS. Glasman called his visit politically, ethically, and spiritually ‘extremely elevated.’
The Arbaeen march has gone from strength to strength. In 2016, the number of marchers ranged from 17 million and 20 million over several days. The number was 17 million two years earlier, in 2014. It grew instead of going down when ISIS overran Iraq. More and more devotees joined it in defiance of the terror group, even when Karbala was particularly vulnerable, with ISIS occupying the neighbouring Anbar desert and using it to mount attacks. Jurf al-Sakhar, a town located 60 km from Karbala, was briefly under ISIS’s occupation until Iraqi forces liberated it in 2014.
ISIS’s presence in the neighbouring areas did little to dampen the spirits of the pilgrims, who take up to a fortnight to walk to the holy city for Arbaeen. The pilgrims carry flags, including those bearing the depiction of Hussain with blood on his brow, as they trek from places as far as Baghdad, 90 kilometres to the north, and Najaf, 70 kilometres away to the south. The visual representations of revered Islamic figures, including Imam Ali and Hussain, were ubiquitous across Iraq, something I had never seen before. They are an integral part of marches and festivals, public places, and adorn homes and shops. The Shia piety, unlike that of Sunnis, is steeped in a visual depiction.
