Najaf nearly died of thirst when the Euphrates wandered away
Najaf, a city of about 1.41 million in central Iraq, surrounds the tomb of Ali, revered by Shia Muslims as their first Imam. It also holds the world's largest cemetery and oldest Shia seminary. Yet around 1604 a visiting traveller found it in ruins with barely 500 inhabitants, because a river had changed course.
The city lies about 160 km south of Baghdad and 30 km south of ancient Babylon. Its name, according to the lexicographer Ibn Manzur, describes raised ground where water gathers without rising over it, and it usually carries the honorific al-Ashraf, the dignified, because of the man buried there. Tradition says Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, asked that his grave be kept secret because of his enemies; legend has his body carried out of Kufa on a camel and buried where the animal stopped. The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid founded the city around the shrine in 791 AD.
People lived here long before. Archaeology points to settlement by the 1st century BC and to large Christian burial grounds, and the vast Wadi-us-Salaam cemetery was once a holy burial place for Jews under the name Baniqia. In the early 14th century the traveller Ibn Battuta described a handsome, prosperous town of wealthy merchants, its shrine furnished with carpets and lamps of gold and silver.
Harder times followed. The Ottomans took Najaf in the 16th century, and Safavid Iran twice seized it during their war of 1623 to 1639 before losing it again in 1638. Desert raids and drought were ruinous: inhabited houses reportedly fell from 3,000 to just 30. The Euphrates had shifted east towards Hilla, leaving Najaf and nearby Kufa dry and killing their palm groves. Only in 1803 did the river return, the result of a century of Ottoman engineering aimed at draining the marshes where rebellious tribes sheltered.
In the 18th century Persian-speaking scholars from Iran dominated its learned life, and its seminary grew into a centre of Shia authority. Local sheikhs rose against British rule in 1918, and much of the old city was demolished for new streets from the 1950s, its wall replaced by a ring road in 1958. Pope Francis visited in March 2021 for an interfaith meeting with the senior cleric al-Sistani. Millions of pilgrims come every year, and the busiest moment, Arba'in, is reckoned the biggest recurring crowd anywhere in the world.
Source: Najaf
