Walking to Karbala, Where You Cannot Pay — Epoche B1
Walking to Karbala In the weeks around Arbaeen — the fortieth day after Ashura — millions of pilgrims converge on Karbala in Iraq, and most walkers take the road from Najaf, eighty-odd kilometres. I walked it in three days. The first thing you learn on that road is that you cannot spend money. The whole way is lined with mawkibs — tents and stalls set up by families, villages and mosques — and everything in them is free. Rice and stew at noon, tea at every hour, water pressed on you whether you look thirsty or not, a mat and a blanket at night, medical tents, phone charging, and men whose whole station is shoe repair. I offered to pay twice on the first day, and both times the host looked genuinely hurt. By the second day I had stopped. The insisting is the point. At dusk a teenager stood in the middle of the road, almost begging walkers to sleep at his family's mawkib rather than the one further on: being accepted is the honour, and a full tent is a successful year. Families save through the year to serve for these two weeks, and the guest who takes nothing takes something from them. The road even has its own address system. The electricity poles along it are numbered, and everything arranges itself by them — friends agree to meet at a pole, a lost bag is announced by a pole number. My feet gave out somewhere in the nine hundreds, and it did not matter: the next mawkib was, as always, already in sight. Karbala at the end was a sea of people. But what I keep is the road: three days of being hosted by strangers who treated my acceptance as the favour. References The Qur'an (Chapter 14, Verse 24). Lewis, B. (2001). The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. Simon & Schuster.