KUWAIT: With the start of the new Islamic year and the holy month of Moharram, Kuwait's Shiite population is paying their respects to the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) , while marking the festival of Ashora. Shiite leaders have praised the Ministry of Interior for helping to organize the celebrations of the major annual religious festival by providing the help required to ease traffic congestion around local husseiniyas (Shiite mosques) this month.

The ministry has released details of its plans to deal with extra traffic around the husseiniyas across Kuwait during this period, with the help of deputy interior minister Khalil Al-Shammali and all the senior officials in Kuwait's governorates, with the husseiniya owners thanking the ministry for its efforts in helping them.

Aqil Moussa from Al-Rasool Husseiniya said that the husseiniyas are places for delivering sermons that rely on facts based in Shiite history without the aim of giving secular, political speeches, saying, "In such events, we don't separate between one category and another since that is not the aim of the teachings of Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him)." Moussa said that rumors accusing husseiniyas of being used to propagate such ideas were entirely false, citing a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: "I learnt from
Hussein how to be wronged and be a winner.

Moussa explained that the aim of husseiniyas during this sacred period is to deliver lessons on the tragedy of Ashora in order to emphasize the need to bring all Muslims together. "Political speeches have always been concerned with a specific period," he pointed out. "If the sermons given in husseiniyas were political in any way, they wouldn't have lasted over fourteen hundred years. - Kuwait Times