From the Night of Ras-al-Bishah: The Beginning of Arbaeen
Words by Savino Carbone
The headlights of the car carrying me draw long, frightening shadows that dissolve into the night south of Basra. In the cones of light and dust, blurred and fleeting, appear the silhouettes of hundreds of silent figures marching along the sides of a highway too young to bear the weight of the trucks that thunder over it. We are headed to Ras-al-Bishah. La fata illa Ali. In the back seat, Ali, Mohammed, and Yusef let a nasheed flow from the speakers. My shirt clings to me, suffocating, reminding me that only an hour earlier I had left the noisy air conditioner of my room for a damp village marked on the maps somewhere near the Iranian border. Here, the Arbaeen begins.
The first was old Salih. Every year, halfway through the month of Muharram, this man from the al-Faw district would make his way to the waters of the Gulf. Hands adorned with a large haqiq lifted the hem of his black dishdasha, and he began the aspersion. Before him lay the 400 miles that separated him from the shrine of Hussein. No one knows why he chose to begin the long pilgrimage to Karbala from that narrow stretch of sea. Who can say what Salih thought, facing that expanse of mud and saltwater? At Ras-al-Bishah the horizon mirrors the ocean, where endings blur into beginnings, and the wind carries all the questions that haunt our solitude.
Many suns have set and many moons have risen since, and old Salih has become a story told to ward off the cruelty of Iraqi summers. At his death, the village community began honoring his devotion, gathering in the mud to set out toward the tomb of the Shiite saint. They call it the pilgrimage “from the sea to the neck.” Just before dawn, hundreds of men break through the military cordon and descend into the shallows—beggars, sayids, militiamen, children. The black garments of those who wade where the sea once was are stained with mud up to the waist, while banners above dance with the arrogance of lovers who know they are already defeated. For the Arbaeen walk recalls a tragic fall, the martyrdom of Islam’s great champion, Hussein, son of Ali, grandson of the Prophet, undone by his refusal to yield to a world too frail and human.
With Saddam gone, Iraq turned back to its oldest sources of meaning. Stripped of Baathist socialist pretensions, the martyrs of Ali and Hussein became the emblems of a fragile rebirth for a nation scarred by war since 1979. They were invoked in uprisings, called upon when wounds needed consolation. And the pilgrimage to Karbala began to resemble the collective march of a young people forced to wash away the shame of a past they had not chosen. In 2025, it is estimated that 25 million pilgrims reached the holy Iraqi city to commemorate Hussein. The hajj in Mecca counts barely two.
The people of Arbaeen carry the weight of the last two decades of Iraq’s history. After a century of Sunni minority rule, the Shiite community imposed its stories, inscribing them into the symbolic apparatus and geography of the country. From Salih’s Ras-al-Bishah to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, the Mesopotamian landscape is dotted with images of warrior saints—a subtle procession of icons leading to opulent shrines, reshaped and magnified by Iran’s vast contributions. The mausoleums of Ali, Hussein, and Abbas form the beating heart of a piety that, in Shiite Islam, is often praxis. In Najaf stands the most important and oldest religious seminary for Ali’s faithful: here were formed the key clerics of recent history—Fadlallah, Sistani, Sadr, even Khomeini. In humble rooms looking out toward the golden domes of Ali’s tomb, stories and laws that shape Shiite public life were born. In this hawza, clandestine leaflets were printed during the regime; from here issued fatwas of great consequence—from the call to take part in Iraq’s first democratic elections to the summons to arms against Daesh.
There is something immensely powerful in the image of millions who, for a few weeks, decide to abandon homes, work, and loved ones to walk into Iraq’s darkness. In recent years, the Islamic calendar has made Arbaeen fall in the summer, forcing pilgrims to march at night, shielded from the sun. From maghrib to fajr. Stop at one of the many mawakib along the road, and you will see men and women tending to bleeding feet while chanting laments for the martyrs of Karbala. In the evening, before resuming the journey, a group of men beat their chests, weeping for the heroes of yesterday and today—for Soleimani, for al-Muhandis, for Haniyeh, killed in Tehran in July 2024, just as the first pilgrims were leaving Basra.
For a long time, Arbaeen and the mourning for Hussein were seen as dangerous, subversive folklore. A large part of the umma still looks at Shiite grief with suspicion. Yet one wonders what else remains for the hungry, if not the consolation of an example. In a painting by Abbas Al-Musawi, amid the Babel of Karbala’s horrors, Hussein appears pleading with his enemies to give water to his infant son. The soldiers of the Umayyad army killed the child with a single arrow. It is along such tragically marked paths that the pleroma of History advances. Gilgamesh and Orpheus knew it. Hussein knew it. Salih knew it, as do the many who, in the suffocating night, make their way toward the lights of Ras-al-Bishah, ready to shed the skin of pitch.
Savino Carbone (b. 1991) is a filmmaker and photographer. Trained in philosophy, photojournalism, and documentary cinema, his work has appeared in British Journal of Photography, Nowness, Dazed, and National Geographic Italia. His debut film Libertà (2019) won the Milan MIX Festival jury prize and screened worldwide. He directed La frontiera the same year and has documented COVID-19’s social impact, agricultural exploitation in Southern Italy, and Iraq’s Shia political communities. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Aesthetics at the University of Bari.
