Sacred Sites

Kadhimiya

Shia Islamic Sites

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Kadhimiya." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://divinity.interactivelion.com/sacred-sites/kadhimiya.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Kadhimiya. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://divinity.interactivelion.com/sacred-sites/kadhimiya

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-kadhimiya,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Kadhimiya},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://divinity.interactivelion.com/sacred-sites/kadhimiya},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Origin Built over the graves of the seventh and ninth Imams, who died in 799 and 835 CE

A shrine and the district built around it in northern Baghdad, holding the tombs of two of the Twelve Imams of Shia Islam: Musa al-Kadhim, the seventh, and his grandson Muhammad al-Jawad, the ninth. The two are named together as al-Kazimayn, "the two who restrain their anger," and the district and its great mosque take their name from them. Twin gilded domes and four minarets rise over a courtyard that fills with mourners on the anniversaries of the imams' deaths. It is among the principal Shia pilgrimage destinations of Iraq, alongside Najaf, Karbala and Samarra, and a place of devotion and lament rather than sightseeing.

Facts

Site

Type of Site

Tomb or grave of a holy figure 1

Type of Site Detailthe subject's own account

On 31 August 2005, a rumour of a suicide bomber among the enormous crowd crossing the Al-Aimmah bridge toward the shrine during a major pilgrimage set off a stampede that killed more than six hundred people, most by drowning or crushing, making it one of the deadliest single incidents in the shrine's modern history and a tragedy still marked on the anniversary of the imams' deaths alongside the older grief the pilgrimage itself commemorates. 2

Pilgrimage

One of a named, enumerated set of pilgrimage places 1

One of the four Atabat

Geography

Latitude

33.4 degrees north 4

Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; this marks the site's general location for a map, not a survey-grade or precise boundary measurement.

Longitude

44.3 degrees east 4

Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; this marks the site's general location for a map, not a survey-grade or precise boundary measurement.

Attributions

Tradition

Shia Islamic 1

Origins

Origin Period

Built over the graves of the seventh and ninth Imams, who died in 799 and 835 CE 1

Origin Period

The shrine in its present form is largely Safavid 1

Country

Iraq 1

Region

Mesopotamia 1

Status

Status Today

In active religious use 1

UNESCO World Heritage

Not Inscribed 3

Confirmed absent from Iraq's 6 inscribed World Heritage sites and 15 tentative-list entries, verified live 2026-08-06.

Location

Learn More

The Twin-Domed Shrine of the Two Who Restrained Their Anger

Kadhimiya, a shrine and the district built around it in northern Baghdad, holds the tombs of two of the Twelve Imams of Shia Islam and is among the principal Shia pilgrimage destinations of Iraq.

The two Imams

The shrine contains the graves of Musa al-Kadhim, the seventh Imam, who died in 799 after long imprisonment by the Abbasid caliph, and his grandson Muhammad al-Jawad, the ninth. The two are named together as al-Kazimayn, "the two who restrain their anger", from the title of the seventh Imam, and the district and its great mosque take their name from them. The tombs became a focus of Shia devotion under the Abbasid caliphate whose capital surrounded them.

The shrine

Twin gilded domes and four minarets rise over a courtyard, the whole enriched by centuries of patronage from Shia rulers and pilgrims. The shrine is a place of devotion and lament rather than sightseeing, filling with mourners on the anniversaries of the Imams' deaths, when the rituals of Shia grief, elegy, procession and the recollection of the sufferings of the Prophet's family, are performed.

Pilgrimage and its dangers

Kadhimiya stands with Najaf, Karbala and Samarra among the great Shia shrine sites of Iraq, and enormous crowds converge on it during the commemorations of the religious calendar. That very scale has brought tragedy: in 2005 a rumour of a suicide bomber among pilgrims crossing the bridge to the shrine caused a crush in which close to a thousand people died. The shrine remains a heavily attended, living centre of Iraqi Shia devotion.

A Rumour, Not an Attack

A pilgrimage bridge crossing near Kadhimiya became the site of one of the deadliest single-day disasters in modern Iraqi history, when a rumour, not an attack, triggered a fatal stampede.

A shrine built up across centuries

The shrine's twin golden domes and minarets, honouring Imam Musa al-Kadhim and his grandson Imam Muhammad al-Jawad, developed and were expanded over many centuries into the elaborate complex now standing in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad, a major destination for Shia pilgrims within Iraq and from abroad.

The 2005 bridge stampede

In August 2005, a false rumour of a suicide bomber among a crowd of pilgrims crossing the al-Aimmah bridge near Kadhimiya during a religious commemoration triggered a mass stampede, and the resulting crush and, in many cases, drowning in the Tigris River below killed close to a thousand people, one of the deadliest crowd disasters recorded anywhere in the twenty-first century, caused entirely by panic rather than by any actual attack.

As this entry's companion article covers

The meaning of the epithet al-Kadhim, "the one who restrains anger," attributed to the elder of the two Imams honoured at the shrine, is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.

Cross-Tradition Connections