Serving athletes in the Arbaeen walk

Arba’in coincides with the twentieth of Safar, the second month of the Islamic calendar, and its commemoration is rooted in early Islamic funerary traditions. Shia Muslims annually observe the day through mourning gatherings, dramatic reenactments of Karbala narratives, and charitable acts. Arba’in is also a day of pilgrimage to the shrine of Husayn in Karbala, Iraq. Pilgrims arrive there in large numbers, often on foot, and many from the city of Najaf, some eighty kilometers away, home to the shrine of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the first Shia imam. The Arba’in pilgrimage, banned under the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, has grown after his deposal in 2003 from two million participants in that year to around twenty million in 2014. As with Ashura, Arba’in can be an occasion for Sunni violence against Shia Muslims.