BasraPrayer Times in Basra, Al Basrah

Basra was founded as a garrison town in 636 CE on the Shatt al-Arab and grew into one of the great early Islamic cities — a port linking the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean and a center of the rationalist Mu'tazila theological school, the early Sufi tradition of Hasan al-Basri, and Arabic philology under figures such as al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, who composed the first Arabic dictionary. Basra was also the home of the female mystic Rabi'a al-Adawiyya, an early articulator of disinterested love of God whose example shaped subsequent Sufi devotional vocabulary across the Muslim world. The city's Imam Ali Mosque and the broader fabric of historic mosques and shrines along its older quarters preserve fragments of this layered history despite the heavy damage of the twentieth-century wars. Today Basra remains a predominantly Shia city with a long Sunni and Christian presence, and its mosques host active congregations and Muharram processions.