By Azza Karam*
KARBALA, Iraq | 10 August 2026 (IDN) —There are pilgrimages, and then there is Arbaeen.
Each year, millions of people converge on the Iraqi city of Karbala in one of the largest annual religious gatherings anywhere in the world. This year, according to the Governor of Karbala, more than 22 million pilgrims entered the city, including some five million from outside Iraq. Many travelled enormous distances; countless thousands made the final journey on foot. They came to commemorate a death that occurred almost fourteen centuries ago—and to affirm that what that death represented remains profoundly relevant today.
The Moral Legacy of Karbala
“Arbaeen” means forty in Arabic. It falls on the twentieth day of Safar in the Islamic calendar, forty days after Ashura, which commemorates the martyrdom of Hussayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE.
On 10 Muharram 61 AH, Hussayn and a small group of his family members and companions were confronted by the forces of the Umayyad ruler Yazid ibn Mu’awiya. Hussayn had refused to pledge allegiance to a ruler whose legitimacy and conduct he could not accept. In words attributed to him in historical accounts, Hussayn asked: “Do you not see that truth is not acted upon, and falsehood is not refrained from?”
Hussayn and almost all his male companions were killed. The women and children who survived were taken captive.
For Shi’a Muslims, Karbala became one of the defining events of religious history. But its meaning cannot be understood solely through the prism of Sunni-Shi’a differences. At the heart of Hussayn’s story lies a profoundly human moral choice: he could preserve his life through submission, or risk it by refusing to legitimise what he considered injustice. He chose the latter.
This is why the moral language of Karbala has endured: justice against tyranny; conscience against expediency; human dignity against submission; truth in the face of overwhelming power.
In this sense, Arbaeen has come to embody both resistance and resilience: resistance to the normalisation of injustice, and the resilience required to carry memory, moral conviction and communal solidarity from one generation to the next. It is not simply the remembrance of an act of defiance fourteen centuries ago; it is the annual renewal of a commitment not to become accustomed to injustice.
A Collective Heartbeat
Forty days after Ashura, Hussayn is remembered through Arbaeen. Pilgrims travel towards his shrine in Karbala, many walking the approximately 80 kilometres from Najaf. They come from different classes, nationalities, tribes, regions, and generations. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi joined the pilgrimage this year. Hundreds, if not thousands, came in wheelchairs. There were babies only weeks old, and older men and women who could barely stand. All were moving towards the same place.
In that extraordinary sea of spiritual seekers, something happened as we came closer to the shrine.
I began to sense my own heartbeat not simply as something contained within my body, but as part of a collective heartbeat around me. And unlike the Hajj, whose sacred sites are restricted to Muslims, the Arbaeen pilgrimage welcomes people of other and no faiths. That openness matters.
I discovered, quite literally, that I was a “Sunni” only after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It had never been a descriptor of particular significance when I was growing up in Egypt. In the post-2003 world, however, Western audiences increasingly asked whether one was “Shia or Sunni.” Even within the supposedly faith-based and interfaith world, the question is frequently directed at me.
I find it curious, and frankly rather rude. I do not make a point of asking every Christian I meet what kind of Christian they are, or every Jew which stream of Judaism they belong to. Why should I be required to qualify my Islam?
I am a Muslim. Clear and simple. And it was as a Muslim that I attended Arbaeen this year.
Being here fulfilled a desire I had carried ever since I first learned how the Prophet’s grandson was killed. I could not understand then—and still cannot—how the grandson of our beloved Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), the man whom God addresses in the Qur’an with the words, “And truly, you are of an exalted moral character” (Qur’an 68:4), could be killed at the hands of fellow Muslims.
Part of me seethes at the story. Another part is anguished by it.
Nor, for me, is Karbala safely confined to history. What a United Nations Commission of Inquiry has concluded constitutes genocide in Gaza. The war launched by Israel and the United States against Iran speaks to me of the same enduring human dilemma: what happens when those exercising enormous power, ostensibly in the name of security or the common good, become themselves agents of injustice—or when others see injustice being committed and choose accommodation, silence or complicity?
So when an invitation came from the Karbala Centre for Studies and Research, it felt like an answer to a prayer: an opportunity to visit the place where a member of the Prophet’s family stood against tyranny, and whose murder became an enduring indictment of what happens when human decency and solidarity fail.
When Remembrance Becomes Service
Yet walking through the searing, blistering heat towards the shrine of Imam Hussayn in Karbala tells only half the story.
Along the roads, thousands of mawakib—voluntary service stations established by families, communities and organisations—offer pilgrims food, water, tea, medical care and places to rest and sleep. Everything is given freely. The cooking, feeding, caring and cleaning are all forms of service. Iraqi families open their homes to strangers. People who possess relatively little spend days feeding people they have never met.
This culture of generosity is so distinctive that UNESCO inscribed the “provision of services and hospitality during the Arba’in visitation” on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2019, describing it as an immense expression of charity, volunteering and social mobilisation.
Perhaps therein lies the deeper meaning of Arbaeen.
Arbaeen is not simply something millions of people believe. It is something millions collectively do. Hussayn’s martyrdom embodies sacrifice in resistance to injustice; Arbaeen transforms the memory of that sacrifice into service to others. Resilience, here, is therefore not passive endurance. It is the capacity to turn grief into service, memory into moral action, and suffering into solidarity.
Our conference group had the privilege of an audience with His Eminence Sheikh Abdul-Mahdi Al-Karbalaei, representative of the Supreme Religious Authority and legal custodian of the Imam Hussayn Holy Shrine. I was deeply moved by his message, not least because it articulated what I have long believed should lie at the moral heart of interreligious work—an imperative we remain painfully far from realising. Essentially, despair at injustice and inequality must be translated into action through service to others.
But Sheikh Al-Karbalaei also reminded us that genuine service comes at a cost. We must be prepared to pay that cost ourselves. Service is not simply giving away what we can spare. Sometimes it means giving from what we need.
I had wrestled with this very idea before. Writing about what I called a “poetics of solidarity” two years ago, I argued that genuine solidarity may require us to “let go of something valuable to us – and to give, in service, instead.” I believed it then. On the road to Karbala, I saw it being lived.
That insight is visible everywhere along the road to Hussayn. Those serving the millions of pilgrims are not merely affluent individuals spending a pleasant summer afternoon doing charitable work. The temperatures approach 50 degrees Celsius—122 Fahrenheit. Yet people stand for hours hosting, feeding, cooking, cleaning, distributing water and even massaging the exhausted feet of passing strangers. Many have saved throughout the year precisely so that they can afford to give during Arbaeen.
Service Without Labels
I could not help contrasting this with my own experience.
When I established the Multi-Religious Humanitarian Fund during my service as Secretary General of Religions for Peace, I begged and pleaded with large religious institutions to contribute to an instrument designed to enable multi-religious service to anyone in need during humanitarian emergencies.
The excuses I received from some large multinational religious NGOs and religious leaders almost made me lose faith.
The problem was not always a lack of resources. Many of the organisations I approached already distribute assistance to millions of people caught in humanitarian emergencies. But institutional identity mattered. Logos mattered. Attribution mattered. Where the money had come from needed to be visible; service to those in need could ultimately be traced back to—and credited to—the organisation providing it.
On the road to Karbala, I witnessed something radically different.
Among the millions walking and the millions serving them, food, water, shelter, care and simple human kindness were given freely—often from people’s own savings, and without asking who the recipient was.
The services came free of labels.
What Arbaeen Asks of Us
Perhaps this is what Arbaeen has to teach those of us who speak so often about humanitarianism, cooperation, solidarity and justice.
Resistance is not only what we stand against. It is also what we are prepared to sacrifice for. Resilience is not merely our capacity to survive injustice, but our determination not to allow injustice to determine who we become. Solidarity is not something we declare. It is something that costs us. And service becomes most profoundly human when neither the identity of the giver nor that of the recipient determines whether it is offered.
Nearly fourteen centuries after Karbala, millions are still walking towards Hussayn, while millions of others serve them along the way.
The question for the rest of us is no longer simply whether we, too, will stand against injustice.
It is whether we are prepared to walk—and to serve—for what Imam Hussayn stood for.
*Azza Karam is President of Lead Integrity, and Director of Occidental College’s Kahane UN Program in New York. [IDN-InDepthNews]