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Iraq / Karbala / The City

Karbala is a city in Southern Iraq which houses the tomb of the best-loved martyr, Abbas, who died here with Hussain ibn Ali in the Karbala massacre of AD 680. Karbala is not only the Mecca and Medina, as it were of Iraq, but also the scene of possibly the most moving incident in Islamic religious history.

The death in AD 680 of Hussain ibn Ali and seventy-two companions in battle with the four thousand archers and cavalrymen of the Ommayad Caliph, Yezid, shook the Muslim world with reverberations that can still be felt after fourteen hundred years. That battle followed the murder nineteen years earlier of Hussain's father, Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, in the doorway of his recently completed mosque at the new Muslim city, Kufa. So, from the moment the roadway turns into sight of Karbala you are moving within a region haunted by the ghosts of the religious martyrs who lie buried here and who for millions of Muslims have sanctified it forever with their blood. It is a region in which anyone, especially non-Muslims, would do well to tread softly.

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