Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Iraq gathers eight cities spanning Mesopotamian, Jewish, Christian and Shia Muslim religious history, several of them still functioning as active pilgrimage centers today.

Babylon was religious and political capital of southern Mesopotamia under Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar II, its god Marduk raised to head of the pantheon in the Enuma Elish; the deportation of Judeans there after 586 BCE gave Judaism its exile, and the city became a byword in Jewish and Christian scripture alike. Nineveh, last capital of the Assyrian empire, held the library of Ashurbanipal, whose tablets preserved the Epic of Gilgamesh; its fall in 612 BCE is the subject of Nahum and Zephaniah, and its shrine on Nebi Yunus, venerated as Jonah's tomb, was destroyed in 2014.

Baghdad, founded in 762 as the Abbasid capital, became the intellectual center of the Islamic world through the House of Wisdom's translation movement, and its Kadhimiya district today holds the tombs of two Shia Imams. Basra, founded as a garrison city in the 630s, produced the ascetic Hasan al-Basri and the mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya. Kufa, capital of Ali ibn Abi Talib, was where Husayn was invited before his death at nearby Karbala, whose modern city grew entirely around his grave, now one of the largest pilgrimage economies in the world. Najaf, gathered around Ali's own tomb, holds a tradition of clerical distance from political power that stands in active contrast to Qom's fusion of religion and state across the border in Iran. Samarra's al-Askari shrine, over the graves of the tenth and eleventh Twelver imams, marks the site of the twelfth imam's occultation in 874.

From Babylon's exile to Karbala's pilgrimage economy, the eight cities carry four thousand years of the region's religious memory forward together.