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Updated: May 9, 2025
Kerbela and Nejef are the great places of burial for the faithful, and among the common sights of the plains of Mesopotamia are endless caravans of corpses from the Persian hills or from the distant north.
When Ali in turn became the fourth caliph, he was the mark for jealousy, intrigue, and at length assassination; his sons, the grandsons of the Prophet, were excluded from the succession; his family were cruelly persecuted by their successful rivals, the Ommiad usurpers; and the tragedy of Kerbela and the murder of Hoseyn set the seal of martyrdom on the holy family and stirred a passionate enthusiasm which still rouses intense excitement in the annual representations of the Persian passion play.
Besides this general belief, which, though not a positive dogma of their faith, is common to all Mussulmans, the Shiites, always prone to exaggerate and embellish, maintain that the Móhdy's duty is not limited to teaching, guiding, and purifying the law, but also that he shall revenge the blood unjustly shed of the Imams; and they cite in support of this a tradition of Ali ibn Abu Taleb, who thus addressed his son, Huseyn, the same who was afterwards martyred at Kerbela, "I swear to thee, O my son," he said, "I swear by my soul, and by my offspring, and by Kerbela, and by its temple, that the day shall come in which our beards shall be dyed with blood.
Further up the Persian Gulf missionaries have long been established on the islands of Bahrein, which are under British protection. Continuing our journey eastward, we can dismiss the Shiahs of Persia as outside our pan-Islamic calculations, for their pilgrim-centre is at Kerbela, some twenty odd miles west of the Euphrates and the site of ancient Babylon.
I have met with Cairo newspapers in Bagdad, Teheran, and Peshawar; Constantinople newspapers in Basra and Bombay; Calcutta newspapers in Mohammerah, Kerbela, and Port Said."
If so, one of two suppositions must be correct, either firstly, that the Phoenicians originally lived here before they migrated to the Mediterranean, and that this was the land of Punt from which the Puni got their name, a land of palms like the Syrian coast from which the race got their distorted Greek appellation of Phoenicians; or secondly, that these islands were looked upon by them as a sacred spot for the burial of their dead, as the Hindoo looks upon the Ganges, and the Persian regards the shrines of Kerbela and Meshed.
Before the Kerbela gates is to be seen the little mosque Esshems, which contains the remains of the prophet Joshua. It completely resembles the sepulchre of the Queen Zobiede near Baghdad. Towards evening the family of my obliging host, together with some other women and children, paid me a visit.
Kerbela and Nejef, in the quality of great Shiah shrines, had never been particularly friendly to the Turks, who were Sunnis but the desert tribes are almost invariably Sunnis, and this coupled with their natural instinct for raiding and plundering made them eager to take advantage of any interregnum of authority.
At eventide, when he spreads his praying-carpet and places the little oblong tablet from Kerbela in its customary position, preparatory to commencing his last prayers for the day, it is furthermore ascertained by the compass that he has been pretty accurate in his daily prostrations toward Mecca.
There were a fair number of Indians living in Kerbela before the war, for devout Shiahs are anxious to be buried near the martyred sons of Ali, and when they are unable to move to Kerbela in their lifetime they frequently make provisions that their remains may be transported thither.
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