Arba'een Pilgrimage
The Arba'een Pilgrimage is one of the world's largest annual Shia Muslims gathering that is held every year in Karbala, Iraq at the end of the 40-day mourning period following Ashura, the religious ritual for the commemoration of the martyrdom of the grandson of Prophet Mohammad and the third Shia Muslim Imam, Husayn ibn Ali's in 680.
Tradition demands that Shiites walk to Karbala in a re-enactment of the journey taken by Imam Hussein’s family when they brought his head to the city for burial. the pilgrimage walk about 50 miles from Najaf to Karbala is marked with 1,400 poles, corresponding with the number of years that have passed since the Karbala events.
People joining the march proudly are from Iran, Lebanon, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, India, Turkey, Syria, Indonesia, and some European countries.
For one week before Arba'een, every day tens of thousands begin the walk, including women, children, and the elderly. They walk seamlessly and untiringly from one city to another, day and night, in an exhibition of extraordinary resolve to uphold the objectives of the walk.
The pilgrimage, known in Arabic as the Ziara, was suppressed by Saddam Hussein, Iraq's former leader, who persecuted the Shia Muslims. After his overthrow in 2003, Arba'een was revived and now attracts many millions every year, including pilgrims from Iran and India. The massive rise in visitor numbers in 2014 onwards, partly attributed to the easing of visa requirements for Iranians.
This year’s Arba'een ceremonies took place amid widespread anger in Iraq’s Shiite south over the government’s heavy crackdown on protests that erupted earlier October against unemployment, corruption and government mismanagement. The demonstrations raged across Iraq for seven days and continue to do so, and most prominent among the protesters were young Shiites, unleashing their frustration with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad.
Khamenei's direct representative in Iran's hardliner Kayhan daily, Hossein Shariatmadari, had also made similar accusations. He claimed that the protests in Iraq were instigated "by America and other foreign elements," and urged Iraqis to "occupy the U.S. embassy in Baghdad like the Iranians did in 1979, in Tehran."
However, the ceremony was held with the predictions of security issues from both Iraq and Iran, so that in the first week of Iranian pilgrims, compared to last year, it has increased by 5,000 people, and despite three common borders with Iraq, only one border to The reasons for the security issues was the possibility of traffic with Iraq.
Also, I, as an Iranian photographer and pilgrim, I started and narrated this ceremony by my photographs from Iran to the land border route of both countries and the cities of Hillah, Najaf, and Karbala, in Iraq and its return to the Mehran border of Iran, where Iranians gather in this route to begin the pilgrimage.
