Home Away from Home

The shrine isn’t just a place for Shias but rather a place for all to celebrate the life, accomplishments, and peace brought by the shrine and the person buried there. People from all parts of the world come to visit this shrine to feel peace again, and this shared peace within creates an atmosphere of love in the city of Najaf that is hard to find when visitors return home. 

Unfortunately, even in calm and serene places like this shrine, there are lots of sectarian tensions because of ideological differences—some petty and some major. Many Muslims have divided and turned to hate each other instead of living in peace and coexisting in areas like the shrine. Social media platforms have placed anti-Shia content on Shia users and anti-Sunni content on Sunni users. This is something I have personally experienced, especially with the way algorithms push divisive religious content based on what you interact with. It seems to operate on a cycle of profit: anger drives people to go on social media more, which means platforms expose them to more hateful content, which brings more anger, leading to more screen time and engagement. Not only have these social media platforms created hatred and directly targeted their users, but Muslim content creators themselves have created this division. They are the ones who think it is OK to create divisive content that harms the overall community. Unfortunately, I have lost and continue to lose friends to this subject matter who think that making fun of Shia traditions with deep cultural and religious meaning is acceptable. It is funny to think that we greet each other with “Salam Alaykum,” which means “Peace be upon you,” when we don’t mean it. This shrine is, as I described earlier, a place of peace, but people make fun of us who benefit from it—meaning those of us who actually go to the shrine to feel at peace—calling us worshippers of it and doing everything in their power to dishonor both us and our significant figures. People should enjoy the beauty, histories, and experiences of spirituality and joy behind symbolic places like this shrine before they shame us for our beliefs. In any situation, people should spend their effort unifying over common goals such as attaining peace instead of judging and humiliating each other for our differences.

My picture shows a calm, peaceful December night at the shrine where a woman is embracing the shrine, along with others praying around it. The story here is that this shrine should not be taken for the religious beliefs that we have, but rather for its beauty and the feelings we get from it of spirituality and joy. We should respect each other instead of judging.

Sunnis and Shias are both marginalized groups who continue to face problems like Islamophobic rhetoric and violence driven by white supremacist ideologies, with the Council on American-Islamic Relations receiving the highest volume of reports about Islamophobic incidents in 2023. The spike in reports in 2023 was largely due to the global protests for Palestine, which led to an increase in targeted hate and Islamophobic behavior in public, online, and institutional spaces. By judging each other, we are only helping fuel the status quo; when we’re divided, we’re easier for white supremacists to target. It’s time to stop dividing and start unifying. Shias and Sunnis must come together and start igniting a change within, whether by doing research or changing our mindsets to be open-minded toward one another. This division must come to an end. But it’s not only the Shias and Sunnis who must learn a lesson from this story. The world should recognize that any type of division among oppressed groups only helps keep tyrants in power. Even if we have different beliefs, our shared goal of being able to freely express our religious beliefs in peace and without violence must prevail.