Muharram runs ten days of majalis — gatherings where the events at Karbala are recited, often by a professional, until the room is weeping — and then processions with chest-beating, and in some communities self-flagellation with chains or blades, which many senior Shia jurists including Sistani and Khamenei have discouraged or forbidden in favour of blood donation drives instead. Forty days later comes Arbaeen. Pilgrims walk to Karbala, most commonly the eighty kilometres from Najaf, over about three days, and the entire route is lined with mawakib — volunteer stations giving away food, tea, foot massages, medical care and floor space to sleep on, funded by ordinary households. Attendance was around two million in 2003, roughly twenty million by 2014, and recent official Iraqi counts have exceeded twenty-one million, which makes it one of the largest annual human gatherings anywhere. Shia readings give it two meanings at once: sharing Husayn's suffering to gain his intercession, and mourning as continuous political protest against unjust power — a reading that Iranian revolutionaries in 1978 and Iraqi Shia under Saddam both used, and which is why the pilgrimage was banned for decades.