More than 20 million Shia Muslim pilgrims gathered in the Iraqi city of Karbala this week for Arba’in, one of the largest annual gatherings of people anywhere in the world. This year the pilgrimage took place against the background of the war involving Iran, and Iranian participation was reported to be higher than usual.

Many pilgrims connected that increase to the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in airstrikes earlier in the conflict.

What Arba’in commemorates

Arba’in means “forty” in Arabic. It marks the end of the forty-day mourning period following Ashura, which commemorates the killing of Husayn ibn Ali — grandson of the Prophet Muhammad — at Karbala in the seventh century.

For Shia Muslims, that event is not simply a historical episode. It is understood as a refusal to submit to an unjust ruler, at the cost of the man’s life and those of his companions. The mourning is bound up with a moral claim about standing against injustice even when defeat is certain.

Karbala, where he was killed and is buried, is the destination. Many pilgrims walk there — some for days, from Najaf or further — and are fed and housed along the route by volunteers who set up stations on the roadside. That hospitality is a central part of the observance rather than an add-on to it.

The scale

Twenty million people is difficult to picture. It is larger than the population of many countries, converging on one city over a period of days, largely on foot, and largely organised by volunteers rather than by the state.

Gatherings on this scale receive a fraction of the international coverage given to far smaller events elsewhere. That imbalance is worth naming, because it shapes which parts of the world readers come to think of as significant.

Why war raised the numbers

It might seem that a war would reduce travel. Reports from this year suggest the opposite among Iranian pilgrims, and the explanation offered by participants is that the commemoration answers to the moment.

A ritual centred on a revered figure killed by a more powerful adversary acquires immediate meaning when a community has recently lost its own leading religious figure to an airstrike. Mourning for a seventh-century death and mourning for a present one become difficult to separate.

Whether that will translate into political consequences is a separate question, and one nobody can answer from a crowd figure. What can be said is that a religious observance is currently carrying a great deal of public feeling.

Reporting on faith

Coverage of Shia religious life in Western media tends to appear only when it intersects with conflict, which leaves an impression of a faith defined by politics. Arba’in is primarily an act of mourning and devotion. Twenty million people did not walk to Karbala to make a geopolitical statement.

Reporting it accurately means holding both things at once: an enormous religious observance with its own long history, taking place in a region at war, and inevitably coloured by it.

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Sources: NPR, 6 August 2026; Al-Monitor.