Imam Husayn Shrine

The Imam Husayn Shrine in Karbala is one of the most spiritually significant religious sites in Shia Islam and one of the most visited pilgrimage destinations in the world. The shrine contains the tomb of Husayn ibn Ali — the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and the third of the Twelve Imams of Shia Islam — who was killed along with most of his family and companions at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE while resisting the rule of the Umayyad caliph Yazid I. The events of Karbala — the suffering, defiance and martyrdom of Husayn and his small band of followers against the vastly larger Umayyad army — are the central narrative of Shia Muslim religious memory and are commemorated annually during the first ten days of the Islamic month of Muharram, culminating on Ashura (the tenth day) with processions, lamentations and reenactments of the events. The shrine has been progressively destroyed and rebuilt many times over the centuries — most notoriously by the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 CE and during the 1801 Wahhabi raid on the city — and the present complex is the result of major Iranian-funded reconstruction. The Arba'een pilgrimage forty days after Ashura draws over twenty million pilgrims to Karbala from Iraq, Iran and the wider Shia world, making it one of the largest peaceful gatherings of human beings on earth in any year.