Historian Salman Hadi Al-Tu’ma shares six decades of documenting Karbala’s history

KARBALA — Renowned Karbala historian Salman Hadi Al-Tu’ma opened his private library to 964media, sharing his life’s work at the age of 89 and recounting his authorship of more than 130 books, both published and manuscripts, including 60 focused on the history and social life of Karbala .

Unlike many writers who concentrated on the city’s holy shrines, Al-Tu’ma said his interest lay in documenting Karbala’s neighborhoods, “its alleys, streets, mukhtars, press, and people.”

Born in 1936 into a literary family, Al-Tu’ma began writing poetry in 1953 and moved to authorship a decade later, publishing Heritage of Karbala  in 1963, which he still considers his most important book.

“It dealt with significant historical aspects, political events, intellectual life, and biographies of poets and writers,” he said.

His later works included Karbala in Memory, which detailed orators, clans, and popular traditions, alongside comprehensive accounts of Karbala’s alleys, and the city’s press from 1914 to the present.

Al-Tu’ma has published 83 books, with 50 more still in manuscript form. In 2010 he earned a master’s degree with a thesis on the Sufi interpretation of the Qur’an, and in 2023 completed a doctorate on Karbala’s religious seminary, covering 36 schools from the third to the 15th centuries AH.

He said his student, Sheikh Abdul Mahdi Al-Karbalai, representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, visited him recently and offered to publish his remaining manuscripts. “He told me, ‘I want to publish all of your works,’” Al-Tu’ma recalled.