Prologue

Abstract

Extract The midday sun struck the gilded dome built over the grave of Hussain, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, blinding anyone who dared to look up at it. It was the spring of 2019. I was sitting inside the shrine, located in the holy city of Karbala in Iraq, attending the ‘Spring Martyrdom’ Conference, intended to promote and celebrate Hussain as a universal figure. I was among a few dozen guests and hundreds of visitors, all gathered at a site which, over centuries, has been both a place of fervent worship and heavy fighting. Here took place the massacre of Hussain and his followers in the Battle of Karbala in the year 61 of the Islamic calendar (680 ad) at the hands of an army sent by the Umayyad Caliphate based in Damascus. The shrine was often contested between competing powers espousing Sunnism and Shiism. It was ransacked by Wahhabi zealots in 1802, and bombarded by Saddam Hussein’s tanks during the short-lived Shii uprising of 1991. (Plaques around the shrine commemorate the latter event, indicating the bullet holes still visible in the marble walls.) After the US-led invasion of 2003, it became a symbol of a new-found Shii self-consciousness, and when the so-called Islamic State (IS) declared a Caliphate in Northern Iraq and eastern Syria in 2014, it vowed to turn to rubble the ‘idolators’ and ‘tomb worshippers’ holy sites at Najaf and Karbala. In response, tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia, urged on by Iraq’s senior Shii cleric, took up arms to defeat IS. (As I entered the shrine, some of these Shii paramilitaries were still celebrating their victory in front of it.) Karbala is thus to many the birthplace of the Sunni–Shia split, and epitomises how Sunni and Shia have been at odds ever since.