Holy City Najaf

Najaf   


The Najaf area is located 30 km south of the ancient city of Babylon and 400 km north of the ancient Biblical city of Ur. The city itself was reputedly founded in 791 by the Abbasid Caliph Harūn ar-Rashīd, as a shrine to Ali ibn Abi Talib[kaw]

Ali ibn Abi Talib instructed that his burial place should remain a secret as he had many enemies and he feared that his body might be subjected to some indignity. According to legend the dead body of Ali was placed on a camel which was driven from Kufa. The camel stopped a few miles west of the city and here the body was secretly buried. No tomb was raised and nobody knew of the burial place except for a few trusted people.


It is narrated that more than a hundred years later the Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid, went deer hunting outside Kufa and the deer sought sanctuary at a place where the hounds would not pursue it. On inquiry as to why the place was a sanctuary Harūn ar-Rashīd was told that it was the burial place of Ali [kaw] Harūn ar-Rashīd ordered a mausoleum to be built on the spot and in due course the town of Najaf grew around the mausoleum.


Under the rule of the Ottoman Empire Najaf experienced severe difficulties as the result of repeated raids by Arab desert tribes and Persian army and acute water shortages caused by the lack of a reliable water supply. The number of inhabited houses in the city had plummeted from 3000 to just 30 by the start of the 16th century.


When the Portuguese traveller Pedro Texeira passed through Najaf in 1604, he found the city in ruins, inhabited by little more than 500 people.


The city was besieged by the Wahhabis in the late 18th century, which prompted the clergy of the city to arrange for the construction of a wall around the city and under-ground tunnels as a refuge for the women and children if the wall was over-run. These fortifications successfully repelled a Wahhabi siege later on. The water shortages were finally resolved in 1803 with the construction of the Hindiyya canal, following which the city's population rapidly doubled from 30,000 to 60,000.


The Ottomans were expelled in an uprising in 1915, following which the city fell under the rule of the British Empire. The sheikhs of Najaf rebelled in 1918, killing the British governor of the city by Sayed Mahdi Al-Awadi and cutting off grain supplies to the Anaza, a tribe allied with the British. In retaliation the British besieged the city and cut off its water supply. The rebellion was put down and the rule of the sheikhs was forcibly ended. A great number of the Shia ulema were expelled into Persia/Iran where they set the foundations for the rise of the city of Qom as the center of the Shia learning and authority in lieu of Najaf. Najaf lost its religious primacy to Qom and was not to regain it until the 21st century and the establishment of a Shia-majority government in Iraq


Najaf Al-Ashraf or Holy Najaf, 161 km south of Baghdad, is a site of great religious significance to Muslims being home of the sacred shrine of the 4th Caliph os Islam Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib (kaw), cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Mohammad (pbuh). Beside being the center of Islamic theological teaching as well as jurisprudence and literature studies.


The shrine of Imam Ali[kaw] is enclosed in a mosque in the city center named Al-Haidariya Shrine with resplendent golden dome made of 7,777 tiles of pure gold and two 35 meters high golden minarets each made of 40,000 gold tiles.






Great quantities of priceless objects, gifts of potentates and sultans, are treasured in the mosque which is visited by millions of pilgrims annually.


Historians say that the tomb of Imam Ali was first discovered around 750 AD (139 AH) by Dawood Bin Ali Al-Abbas, then built by Azod Eddowleh in 977; that it was burnt later and rebuilt by the Seljuk Malek Shah in 1086, and rebuilt yet again by Ismail Shah, the Safawid, in about 1500.


The tomb has the same style as those of Kerbala, Samarra and Kadhimain in Baghdad. It is a rectangular enclosure surrounding a two-storied sanctuary, containing the tomb, with a great dome over it.


The facade of Ali's tomb, seen from the main or northern gateway, is richly beautiful- the gold tiles have darkened handsomely with age. And through the doorway to the tomb itself you can see the glistening stalactite effect of mirrors and the harsh neon lights that are features of all the major shrines of Iraq.






Pink, blue and yellow patterns of birds and flowers bedeck the archways into the courtyard floored with marble brought from northern Iraq. Heavy wooden and gold doors lead in from the street opposite the covered suq (bazaar), where you can buy 'worry-beads' (sibhas), finely worked gold ornaments, and ankle-length cloaks for winter or summer, some hemmed with gold braid.


Perhaps the most extraordinary thing in Najaf is the graveyard. How many Muslims over the centuries have been brought here for burial from all parts of Islamic world? Surely millions. So Najaf is embraced by a vast semi-circle of graves- by an immense City of the Dead- and still, day after day, people bring their loved ones to be interred here. The cemetery is called Al-Wadi Essalaam, the Vale of Peace.