JNN 5th July, 2026 ,KARACHI / KARBALA — Millions of mourners across Pakistan, South Asia, commemorated Arbaeen (Chehlum) on Tuesday, 4th August 2026, as well as in Iran ,Iraq & Rest of the World it was commemorated on the same day marking the 40th day after the martyrdom of Imam Hussain (AS) and his 72 companions at the Battle of Karbala in 61 Hijri.
The occasion, observed with profound religious devotion, saw the world’s largest annual peaceful gathering unfold in Iraq, while in Karachi, a massive procession drew tens of thousands of participants under a strict security framework.
In Karachi, the central mourning event stood out as a massive display of community solidarity and profound grief. The main procession commenced from Imambargah Shah Najaf , Martin Road , which on Arrival at Nishtar Park followed by a central majlis addressed by prominent scholars, and culminated safely at the Hussainia Iranian Imambargah in Kharadar.
Mourners of all ages walked the streets reciting elegies (nohas) and performing chest-beating (matam), Zuljanah ( Replicas of the horse of Imam Hussain) and Alams (symbolic Flags), Taboot ( Coffins ) were paraded through the traditional routes. Local volunteers set up numerous Sabeels (water and food stalls) and medical aid camps to serve the massive crowds.
To safeguard the tens of thousands of participants, local authorities implemented an unprecedented security deployment. Over 11,000 police officers, Rangers, and security personnel monitored the venue and accompanying routes. The main shipping container blockades sealed off feeding streets, and bomb disposal units swept the paths prior to the procession. All public and private schools were closed for the day to minimize traffic flow and ensure citizen safety. And due to Massive Safety arrangements , no untoward incident was reported . As Reported by the Local Correspondent the Head count must be some where around a Million in Karachi itself only.
Worldwide, millions of pilgrims converged on the holy city of Karbala, Iraq, on foot , by Air to complete the iconic Arbaeen Walk from Najaf, making it one of the largest annual peaceful gatherings on Earth. Devotees from Iran, Lebanon, and across the international diaspora organized massive street processions and mourning assemblies to honor the sacrifice of the Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) grandson.
Every year, in the weeks that follow the tenth of Muharram, a road opens in the deserts of Iraq—a road that no government built for this purpose and no advertisement summons anyone to walk. And yet, on foot, in flip-flops and wheelchairs, with infants on shoulders and grandmothers on canes, more people gather on this road than at any other single human event on Earth.
Arbaeen (الأربعين) is the Arabic word for “forty.” In the Shia Islamic calendar, it marks the fortieth day after the martyrdom of Imam Husayn ibn Ali (a.s.), the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.), who was killed along with seventy-two companions and family members at the Battle of Karbala on the 10th of Muharram, 61 AH (680 CE).
Attendance is tracked electronically by the administrations of the Imam Husayn Shrine and the Al-Abbas Holy Shrine in Karbala, using entry-counting systems installed at the city’s main approaches. The numbers tell a story of steady, remarkable growth. In 2016, approximately 11.2 million pilgrims walked to Karbala. By 2019, that figure had risen to 15.2 million. The COVID-19 pandemic saw a slight dip to 14.5 million in 2020, but the numbers rebounded dramatically—to 16.3 million in 2021, then surging to 21.6 million in 2022. In 2023, the shrine authorities recorded 22,019,146 pilgrims, and in 2024, 22.1 million. The 2025 gathering reached 22,354,578 pilgrims, and the 2026 pilgrimage saw the number climb even higher, though final figures were still being verified at the time of writing.
In short, Arbaeen has grown by roughly fifty percent since 2020 alone, cementing its status as the largest annual human gathering on Earth—sustained almost entirely by volunteer labour rather than state or commercial infrastructure.
At its physical core, Arbaeen is a walk: a trek of roughly eighty kilometres from the shrine city of Najaf, where Imam Husayn’s father Imam Ali (a.s.) is buried, to Karbala, where Imam Husayn (a.s.) himself rests. Pilgrims—men, women, children, the elderly, and the disabled—cover this distance over three to five days, though many travel for this walk from much farther away: from India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, and across Iraq itself.
Along every stretch of the route are mawkibs—volunteer-run camps offering free food, water, medical care, foot massages, shelter, and even laundry service, entirely without charge. Many locals also open their homes to pilgrims, offering rest and hospitality to the za’ir (visitors) of Imam Husayn (a.s.). This is why the pilgrimage is so often described not merely as the largest gathering in the world, but as the largest free one.
For the vast majority of pilgrims, the walk is a renewal of loyalty—a bodily reaffirmation of allegiance to the principle Husayn (a.s.) Martyred defending: that truth cannot be legislated out of existence, and that a person of conscience does not simply “go along” with injustice because it wears the robes of power. Grief, love, service, and remembrance are inseparable in this walk. It is undertaken by Twelver Shia Muslims overwhelmingly, but not exclusively—Sunni Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and people of no religious affiliation at all have walked the route and volunteered in its mawkibs, drawn by a message its participants insist belongs to no single sect.
To understand Arbaeen, one has to understand that it did not begin as a pilgrimage. It began as a wound that would not close. Karbala is not just a mere tragedy—it was a revolution, and it was carried forward by those who refused to let its message die.
Sayyida Zaynab (s.a.): Carrying the Mission Forward
After Imam Husayn (a.s.) was Martyred at Karbala on Ashura, his surviving family—mostly women, children, and his ill son Ali ibn Husayn (a.s.) (later known as Imam Zain al-Abidin a.s.)—were taken captive and marched first to Kufa, then to the Umayyad court in Damascus. Leadership of this broken caravan fell to the Next Imam inline Imam Husayn’s son Imam Zain al Abideen (a.s.), while her elder Aunty ( Father’s sister ) Zaynab bint Ali (s.a.) fully supported him in all his Journey , and gave the speeches, which set the Principle in Islamic History. Islamic historical sources are explicit that this was not a passive or symbolic role.
In the aftermath of Karbala, Bi Bi Zaynab (s.a.) was taking care of the caravan of survivors first to Kufa and then to the Umayyad capital of Damascus as captives of Yazid’s army, and throughout the journey she never relinquished her dignity. In Yazid’s own palace, she delivered a sermon denouncing his rule in front of hundreds of people—a Bold & Courageous speech preserved in early Islamic sources as testimony to her eloquence and moral clarity, one that moved audiences to tears and stirred opposition to Yazid’s government. She Proved that the Family of the Last Prophet ,whether a Child or an elder , they are the Beacon of light in the darkness, She was practical as much as symbolic: during the illness of Imam Zain al-Abidin a.s., she took personal responsibility for his safety and for the wellbeing of the entire caravan, safeguarding both the family and the continuity of the Imamate itself.
It was Sayyida Zaynab (s.a.) who took responsibility for conveying the message of Imam Husayn (a.s.) after Karbala—transforming what could have been a forgotten massacre into an enduring moral indictment of tyranny.
Jabir ibn Abdullah al-Ansari: The First Pilgrim
The other central figure of the first Arbaeen is Jabir ibn Abdullah al-Ansari—an elderly companion of Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.). Jabir al-Ansari is remembered in Islamic History sources as the very first person to perform ziyarah (pilgrimage-visitation) at Imam Husayn’s grave, and his visit on the 20th of Safar is the traditional origin point of the Arbaeen pilgrimage itself.
Shaykh al-Tusi writes in his work Misbah al-Mutahajjid that the 20th of Safar is the day Jabir ibn Abdullah al-Ansari arrived from Medina at Karbala to pay homage at Imam Husayn’s grave—and that he was the very first person to perform this visitation. Atiyyah, his companion, later recounted: “I traveled with Jabir ibn Abdullah al-Ansari and on Safar 20th we arrived in Karbala; upon our arrival, he performed ghusl in the Euphrates, wore clean clothes which he had with him, and then he asked me: ‘Do you have any perfume with you?’ I gave him some perfume which he wore on his head, face, and body, and then he took off his shoes and walked on till he came up to Imam Husayn’s tomb.”
The Spiritual and Ideological Lens: Safar-e-Ishq
Numbers can be counted. Roads can be measured in kilometres. But nothing about Arbaeen is actually explained by logistics—because what moves twenty-two million people to walk in fifty-degree heat, sleep on pavements, and serve strangers without payment is not infrastructure. It is something far deeper: a conviction that this walk is a response to a call that transcends time.
On the road to Karbala, ishq ( Love ) stops being a word poets reach for and becomes something else entirely. Arbaeen does not ask a pilgrim how far they walked. It asks what they were willing to become smaller for. The ego does not survive eighty kilometres of shared bread and borrowed shade; it is worn down, gently and repeatedly, until what remains is service and surrender. Karbala becomes, in this sense, a school—not one that teaches love as a private feeling kept in the chest, but one that teaches love as loyalty to truth even when truth costs everything.
This is why the number forty carries so much weight in this tradition. Forty is never treated as a mere calendar mark in Islamic memory—it recurs at the threshold of transformation. It is said to be the age at which Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.) was commanded by God, through His angel, Gabriel, to declare His Oneness to the idolaters and polytheists of the whole world. Noah’s flood is remembered in association with forty. Moses spent forty nights upon the mount before receiving the Tablets. Forty, across this symbolic lexicon, is the number of ripening—the interval in which grief matures into orientation, and private mourning matures into public witness. Arbaeen is not simply “the fortieth day.” It is the day mourning stops being only sorrow and becomes a stance.
And that stance is, at its core, a peaceful protest against injustice—perhaps the largest and longest-running one in human history. Imam Husayn (a.s.) did not raise an army capable of victory at Karbala; he raised a refusal. He refused to legitimise a corrupt leader like Yazid ibn Mu’awiyah, who sought to distort the foundations of Islam. He knew it would cost him his life and the lives of his family. What Arbaeen commemorates is the conviction that truth, even when it is outnumbered, tortured, and buried in the desert, does not stay buried. It resurfaces.
This is why Arbaeen is not mourned by Shia Muslims alone. It has drawn Muslims from all over the world who see in Husayn (a.s.) a model of principled resistance, Christians and Hindus who have walked the route and hosted mawkibs of their own, and observers of no faith at all who recognise in it something universally human: the refusal to let cruelty have the final word.
It is also, uniquely among the world’s pilgrimages, a journey stripped of transaction. There is no entry fee to Karbala, no toll for a meal, no invoice for a bed along the eighty kilometres. Everything—food, shelter, medical care, even foot massages for the blistered—is given freely by volunteers who ask nothing back. This is not incidental to the pilgrimage; it is its argument made physical. That is why this walk has earned its most tender name among those who undertake it: Safar-e-Ishq—the journey of love—because ishq, in this tradition, is held to be the highest and most demanding form of love: love that rejuvenates the soul and lets go of the ego.
Iqbal writes in Rumuz-e-Bekhudi, setting the cosmic conflict in a single line:
موسی و فرعون و شبیر و یزید ایں دو قوت از حیات آید
پدید زندہ حق از قوتِ شبیری است باطل آخر داغ حسرت میری است
“Mūsā wa Fir’awn wa Shabbīr wa Yazīd — īn dū quwwat az ḥayāt āyad padīd / Khūn-i ū tafsīr-i īn asrār kard — millat-i khwābdīda rā bīdār kard”
(Moses and Pharaoh, Shabbir [Husayn] and Yazid — from Life spring these conflicting potencies. His blood interpreted this mystery, and awakened a sleeping nation.)
This is the same claim Arbaeen makes every year with its feet rather than its words: that love, at its highest register, is not sentiment but sacrifice; not comfort but service; not a private ache but a public refusal to let injustice go unanswered.
Conclusion: The Largest Gathering, The Deepest Message
Arbaeen is often described, accurately, as the largest annual gathering of human beings on Earth. But the scale is not the story—it is the evidence of the story. Over twenty-two million people do not walk eighty kilometres in brutal heat, serve one another without charge, and weep at the same grave every year because of momentum or habit. They do it in remembrance of the greatest revolution that took place on this planet.
Between Zaynab’s sermons and Jabir’s footsteps, mourning became a mission—and that mission is still, every year, on the road from Najaf to Karbala, calling for the same thing it always has: that truth, however outnumbered, does not stay buried, and that love, at its most demanding, looks like service.