Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Pilgrimage gathered on a dated festival

This page groups sacred sites by how active they still are as pilgrimage destinations. Wikipedia notes that Santiago de Compostela "remains a significant pilgrimage site, with around 200,000 pilgrims, both secular and Christian, completing the numerous pilgrimage routes to the cathedral in 2012 alone." Browsing this way lets a visitor tell a heavily visited pilgrimage site apart from one now visited only rarely.

Facts
Overview
What Defines This Grouping
The shrines of the Imams and of the Prophet's family, and the cities that grew around them. This group is not a geographic subset of the Islamic one but a distinct claim: these places are holy because of who is buried there and what authority that descent carries, which is the substance of the Sunni-Shia division rather than an incident of it. Collapsing the two groups would erase the point. 2
Size of the Traditional Set
Four: the Atabat, the "thresholds" - the shrine cities of Najaf, Karbala, Kadhimiya and Samarra in Iraq. Mashhad and Qom in Iran are major centres of pilgrimage and learning but are counted outside that set. 3
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Category
Sacred Sites 1
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Shia Islamic Sacred Sites

This group holds sacred sites of particular importance to Shia Islam, above all the shrines of the Imams and members of the Prophet's family, which are major centres of pilgrimage and devotion. The shrine cities of Iraq and Iran hold the tombs of the Imams and figures such as Husayn.

The browser will find the shrines and holy places central to Shia devotion. The entries describe each site's association with the Ahl al-Bayt and the Imams and its place in Shia pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage gathered on a dated festival
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Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. An Introduction to Shi'i Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shi'ism
Moojan Momen, Yale University Press, 1985View the Source
3. The Shi'is of Iraq
Yitzhak Nakash, Princeton University Press, 1994
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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