Muharram rituals in Khorramabad

A huge burst of flame lights up a pre-dawn backstreet, silhouetting the young men caked from head to toe in brown mud, as chants for Iran’s most revered imam rend the air. Khorramabad, a city of around 400,000 sheltered among the Zagros mountains of southwestern Iran, has always done things a little differently on Ashura, the holiest day in Shiite Islam. Drawing on burial traditions in their native Lorestan province, the men cover themselves in mud as a sign of their grief over the death over 1,300 years ago of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad.