About Imam Hussein TV

Imam Hussein TV

Imam Hussein TV is the satellite television network of the Imam Hussein Media Group, a Shia religious broadcaster headquartered in the holy city of Karbala, Iraq. Established in 2009 on the recommendation of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Sadiq al-Husseini al-Shirazi, the network began in Persian, added an Arabic service in 2012 and an English service — Imam Hussein TV 3 — in 2013, and later extended to Urdu and, through the Al-Zahra network, Turkish. Broadcasting around the clock by satellite and online, it carries live coverage from the shrines of Karbala, religious teaching, lectures and call-in programmes devoted to the Qur'an, the Prophet Muhammad and the Ahlul-Bayt, with the commemoration of Imam Hussein's martyrdom at Karbala at the centre of its year. Academic research on its Muharram programming has described it as by far the most popular Shia religious channel of its kind, and its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic — when it rebuilt its flagship mourning programme so that viewers who could not travel could take part in a televised majlis from home — has made it a case study in how satellite television sustains a global devotional community. It is distinct from Karbala TV, the separate channel operated by the Imam Husayn Shrine administration itself.

Origins and founding

The Imam Hussein Media Group was created after Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Sadiq al-Hosseini al-Shirazi advised a group of Shia media activists to establish, as soon as possible, a television service bearing the name of Imam Hussain, in order to uphold the teachings of the Ahlul-Bayt and spread them internationally. Shirazi and his late brother, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad al-Hosseini al-Shirazi, had long emphasised media work, and their followers had already launched Salam TV in Persian and Al-Anwar TV in Arabic before the Imam Hussein project was organised as a dedicated media group. After round-the-clock work by the founding team, the group's first channel began broadcasting in Persian on the birth anniversary of Imam Hussain, the third of Sha'ban 1430 AH, corresponding to 26 July 2009. The choice of date was deliberate: the network's life began on one of the most joyful days of the Shia calendar, even though its best-known programming would come to centre on the mourning months of Muharram and Safar.

Expansion across languages

From its Persian beginning, the group expanded language by language in response to audience demand. Imam Hussein Arabic TV started operating on 25 May 2012, bringing the network to the language of its home city of Karbala and of the largest part of the Shia world. Imam Hussein English TV followed on 27 March 2013 — the service known as Imam Hussein TV 3 — launched, in the group's own launch announcement, alongside its Arabic and Farsi sisters to answer countless requests from believers in different countries and to serve as an international pulpit for the teachings of the Ahlul-Bayt and the rituals of Imam Hussein. The Turkish-language Al-Zahra Global Network was handed over to the group on 20 January 2016, after a year in which its activities had been suspended, and Imam Hussein Urdu TV began on 4 August 2017, completing a five-language structure of Persian, Arabic, English, Turkish and Urdu services. The group also built beyond television channels: on 5 July 2012 it established the Shia News Agency, SHIAWAVES, described as the first independent Shia news agency, publishing in Persian, Arabic and English on shrines and holy places, religious authorities, Qur'anic activities, Shia institutions and Husseini rituals, and it later created Imam Hussein Live, an internet-based channel providing continuous live coverage of the holy shrines through its website, mobile applications and internet television platforms.

Headquarters in Karbala

The network is headquartered in Karbala, the Iraqi city that holds the shrines of Imam Husayn and of Hazrat Abbas and that receives millions of pilgrims each year for Ashura and Arbaeen. Locating the media group in Karbala is fundamental to what it broadcasts: its cameras can carry the rituals at the shrines live, its studios sit within the devotional geography its viewers long to visit, and its English service presents itself to viewers abroad under the theme of being a gateway to Karbala. The Karbala base also defines the network's independence from the shrine administration. Karbala is home to more than one Shia broadcaster, and Imam Hussein TV should not be confused with Karbala TV, founded in 2008 as the official television of the Imam Husayn Shrine, working with the support of the Shia Endowment Bureau and the guidance of the religious authority headed by Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani. Imam Hussein TV, by contrast, is the media group directed from the office of Grand Ayatollah al-Shirazi — a different religious authority — and funded by his followers, a distinction that matters in the plural landscape of Shia religious broadcasting.

Direction and funding

The group operates under the direction of the office of Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Sadiq al-Husseini al-Shirazi, whose recommendation created it and whose teaching defines its mission of reviving the traditions and heritage of the Ahlul-Bayt. Its slogan, "A Hussainiya beyond the Galaxy," expresses the ambition to make the mourning assembly — the Hussainiya — available anywhere on earth through satellite and internet distribution. Unusually for a satellite network of its size, the group states that it has no interest in commercial investment and does not fund itself through advertising businesses. Its costs are met entirely by Shia merchants and benefactors, by its viewers and by what it calls Hosseini helpers, in the form of Sharia-defined religious taxes including Khums and the Imam's share, gifts, votive offerings, endowments and the one-third of an estate that a believer may direct by will. Grand Ayatollah al-Shirazi and other authorities of emulation have issued permission for such religious taxes to be spent on the media group's activities, and its English service actively invites viewers to sponsor programmes — the call to prayer from Najaf and Karbala, Arbaeen coverage or Muharram lectures — in the name of departed loved ones. The model makes the audience itself the network's financial base and ties its survival directly to the devotion of its viewers.

Programming

The network's output combines live ritual coverage with recorded teaching, family and discussion formats. Across its language services, recurring programmes listed for the Arabic service include religious instruction and devotional series such as Back to Basic, Making a House a Home, The Greatest Woman, Ethics of the 14, Moral in Minutes and Treatise of Rights, alongside Welcome to Karbala, Guests of Paradise and an Arbaeen Show built around the pilgrimage. The group has carried question-and-answer sessions and lectures with well-known English-language Shia speakers including Dr Sayed Ammar Nakshawani, together with documentary clips and nasheeds. The English service, Imam Hussein TV 3, publishes Quranic reflection and ethics programming — recent series titles include The Reassured Soul on Surah Al-Fajr, Seeking Divine Knowledge on Surah Fatir and Time and Loss on Surah Al-Asr — and mixes live religious coverage with recorded teaching for English-speaking viewers seeking Shia religious education and a connection to Karbala. Across all services the orientation is the same: the Qur'an, the Prophet and the Ahlul-Bayt, presented as instruction, commemoration and community news rather than general entertainment.

The devotional calendar: Muharram and Arbaeen

The network's year is organised around the Shia devotional calendar, and above all around Muharram, the month of mourning for Imam Hussein, killed at Karbala in 680 CE. Since the network's founding in 2009, Ashura has been televised: the pilgrimage to Karbala, the processions and the rituals of mourning are captured and broadcast to an international audience. The English service describes the lowering of the red flag above the shrine of Imam Hussain and its replacement with a black flag as the moment its most important programming of the year begins, followed by ten nights of special content, live streaming from the shrine itself and lectures from scholars in London examining the relevance of Imam Hussain's stand today. Arbaeen, the fortieth day after Ashura, when pilgrims walk from Najaf to Karbala in one of the largest annual gatherings in the world, receives similarly intensive treatment: the channel presents itself as a leading broadcaster of twenty-four-hour coverage of the walkway between Najaf and Karbala and of live majlis gatherings during the Arbaeen nights, so that those who cannot make the walk can follow it continuously from home.

Welcome to Karbala and #IAMHUSSEINI

The network's best-documented innovation is its call-in mourning programming, studied in detail by the scholar Vivienne Sparey in the journal Religion. To preserve the communal character of the majlis — the gathering of mourners — when mourning moved onto television, the channel established Welcome to Karbala in 2016, a call-in talk show dedicated to shared devotion among Twelver Shia viewers, broadcast from a set saturated with red, evoking the blood shed by Hussein, before a glass panorama revealing his tomb and the lights of Karbala. Its hosts promised to pray for the viewers who rang in. In 2020 the follow-up programme #IAMHUSSEINI displaced it as the channel's primetime priority during the Covid-19 pandemic, when lockdowns and travel restrictions kept mourners away from Karbala. The new show's host wore traditional mourning attire rather than a suit, callers' names were written on a flag of Hussein so that they were visibly incorporated into a televised majlis, and the programme addressed the pandemic directly, presenting the precautions of those who did reach Karbala — masks, face shields and sanitisation — as part of the devotion itself. Sparey's study argues that, executed successfully, the format allowed Imam Hussein TV to reach a larger audience than ever by offering a mediated form of communal mourning to viewers bereft of the physical gathering, and it treats the channel as the outstanding example of its kind in Shia religious television.

Distribution and platforms

Imam Hussein TV distributes its services by satellite and across the internet. Its language channels have been carried on major satellite positions serving the Middle East, Europe and beyond — the Arabic service, for example, has been distributed on Nilesat — and the group streams its programmes live through its websites and maintains dedicated presences on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (now X), Instagram, Telegram and other platforms, with reception also available through many internet television services and its own mobile applications. Imam Hussein Live extends that model to continuous, round-the-clock coverage of the holy shrines as a purely internet-based channel. The English service maintains its own site and sponsorship and donation channels directed at viewers in the United Kingdom and the wider Anglophone diaspora. This multi-platform structure means the network's Karbala coverage is available simultaneously to a satellite household in Iraq, a pilgrim following Arbaeen on a phone, and a diaspora family in London watching the English service's Muharram lectures.

Audience and significance

Imam Hussein TV's significance lies in the combination of its scale, its funding model and its place within Shia religious life. It grew from a single Persian channel launched in 2009 into a five-language media group with a news agency and a live shrine channel, without commercial advertising, financed by the religious giving of its own audience under the authority of a single marja, Grand Ayatollah al-Shirazi. For its viewers it functions less like a conventional television station than like a permanent, mediated Hussainiya: a place to watch the rituals of Karbala live, to hear lectures and Qur'anic teaching in one's own language, to have one's name carried into the mourning gathering by telephone, and to sponsor devotion in memory of the dead. Its televised Ashura coverage since 2009, its Arbaeen broadcasting and its pandemic-era reinvention of the call-in majlis have made it, in the assessment of academic research on the channel, by far the most popular Shia religious channel of its kind — and a standing demonstration of how satellite and internet television have changed the geography of Shia devotion, gathering a community that is physically scattered across Iraq, Iran, the Gulf, South Asia, Europe and North America around the shrines of one Iraqi city.