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By Root 296 0

in reverse, and war still littered our way: stray cluster bombs, blasted craters, and burned-out cars framed the road. Nobody cared. They were going to Karbala, not slinking or sneaking, but proclaiming themselves all down the country’s main highway. After the U.S. invasion, this was the first move Iraq’s Shiites made: they marched en masse to Karbala, to the tomb of Imam Hussein, the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. They marched because the time had come in their religious calendar, because tradition and faith demanded it. They also marched because, for the first time in recent memory, they could. They had woken up to find themselves the unfettered majority. Saddam Hussein, tormentor of the Shiites, was gone. Now every Shiite wanted a taste of a pilgrimage that had been outlawed under Saddam, and so they walked those country roads, roaring out all that had been suppressed. Not just marching, but announcing themselves, showing the Sunnis, showing the Americans, showing the world—we are here. In its free-wheeling ecstasy, the outsized worship of a saintly man, the pilgrimage was closer to a Catholic procession in Mexico than anything I’d seen the Sunnis do in Afghanistan or Gaza. The saucer-eyed portrait of Imam Hussein hung everywhere, pasted on car windshields and hoisted in thick frames. His face against a flaming sky; his body punched by infidels’ arrows, burning eyes on a field of green. Hussein died on the plains of Karbala in AD 680, and Shiites have punished themselves ever since for abandoning him to his enemies. Every year, his martyrdom is mourned for forty days; afterward, Shiites march to his tomb and deliver themselves back to life through torments of the flesh.

In the churn of pilgrims we poured into town, blasting past the warrens of shabby shops and through the maze of the market. The crowd pushed and skipped and tripped, the smack of fists on chests rang like the stomp of soldiers’ boots. Caked with sweat and blood from cutting themselves, the pilgrims pushed forward. One million souls jammed the hot, bright streets and more were coming all the while, as if the river of bodies would never be dammed, as if all of Iraq were suddenly Shiite and taking to the roads.

“Where is the reckless Saddam? The oppressor of the pilgrims to Karbala?” taunted the crowds. “There is only Hussein now.”

In the shadow of the shrine the crowd drew into itself. A moon-faced old woman jabbered angrily and poked at my forehead with a dirty finger—a strand of hair had slipped from my scarf.

Everywhere there was a face, and every face was packed with some enormous emotion: the dumb, slack-jawed visage of sleepwalking worship; the knowledge of bloody secrets; pride tangled with rage. Men had whipped their own backs with chains and slashed themselves with swords, and blood mixed with their sweat. Wild sunlight painted everything a crazy yellow, and the ghostly eyes of Hussein burned the crowds. His story had been whispered for years, until the secrecy under Saddam became a parable of martyrdom in its own right. Now all those layers of righteousness and death spilled into naked light.

The pilgrims stumbled down the steps to the shrine, weeping and shouting and kissing the tiled walls. The women touched the doors as if they were talismans, and as their fingers found wood, their bodies swooned toward the dirt. A dense sea of worshippers swirled and seethed in a courtyard under an open sky. The walls rang with prayer and with the clapping of hands on hundreds of breasts. One by one, as the pilgrims set foot on the holy ground, they surrendered themselves to worship and disappeared into the crowd.

The shrine’s lush gardens smelled of sweat and rosewater; slumbering pilgrims smothered the grass. Peddlers hawked chunks of dirt because, just maybe, the earth of Karbala might contain a trace of the martyr’s blood. “They are telling the story of Hussein’s death,” Raheem murmured. The women wailed and wept and beat their faces as if the message had just arrived, as if this were news and not history.

A small, older woman squatted