The development of the concept of religious tourism in the city of Karbala

Ahlam Hassan Jassim Abdul Karim
Supervised by Asst. Prof. Dr. Fawaz Hamdan Abboud

The city of Karbala is one of the Islamic cities of Iraq, which dates back to its establishment as an urban center after the Islamic conquest. Before that, it was nothing but a few agricultural lands and an environment with a harsh desert climate. It gradually became Egyptianized after the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in it, followed by the establishment of a shrine after the year 61 AH.
Despite the frequency of some news that its name goes back to the Babylonian civilization as it was a sacred religious place before Islam and that it belongs to the civilization of the Semitic peoples in Iraq, the word Karbala is derived from the Arabic word Kur Babylon, which means a group of ancient Babylonian villages.
Despite the multiplicity of opinions about the factors behind its establishment, today it represents an important religious presence in the modern and contemporary history of Iraq and is called by urban geographers (cities of shrines) or cities of pilgrimage, and it is the most distinguished among other local religious cities in terms of its rapid emergence and formation. Karbala has known the concept of tourism for a long time, but the caravans of visitors used to cross the deserts using primitive means of transportation such as carriages pulled by horses and mules, which developed into the use of river transportation and sailing ships in the waters of the Euphrates River to transport passengers and funerals together from distant places, and into the use of railways that passed south of the city of Karbala during the forties of the twentieth century. Modern means of transportation have developed and played an important role in activating the tourism movement in general to transport visitors from the provinces of Iraq and the neighboring Gulf states, Iran, Pakistan, India, Syria and others, as the concept of tourism has constituted an important economic resource that supports the Iraqi economic structure in general and the economies of Karbala more precisely through what it provides of materials and hard economic currencies to enter the scope of activating urban activities in a noticeable way. Religious tourism in the city is based on what it contains of holy religious shrines, Islamic shrines, heritage and archaeological sites, in addition to some natural geographical phenomena and tourist places such as Al-Ukhaydir Fort, Al-Qatar Caves, natural water springs and Al-Razzaza Lake within the Karbala Governorate, which has an area of (5043 km2) and this tourist structure that is dominated by the religious character represented by the famous Karbala incident and what it represents in the thought of Muslims in terms of moral and human concepts and what is associated with it in terms of certain religious practices and rituals, which has had positive effects on the tourism reality.