In the other Shiite holy city, of Karbala, some 2,000 students demonstrated Sunday against the decision of the Iraqi government to make Saturday a national day of weekly rest, along with Friday. The students were responding to a call by Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr, and they began at a Sadr political office and marched on the governor's office in the center of the city. When they got there they read out statements demanding the rescinding of this decree, calling on the religious authorities to speak out against it, and denouncing it as an attempt to please "the Zionists." (Saturday is the Jewish sabbath, whereas for Muslims the holiest day of the week is Friday.) They wanted the days of rest to be Thursday and Friday, not Friday and Saturday.

Protests had been held on Saturday elsewhere in the country. Having Thursday and Friday off is common in the Muslim world, including in the largest Arab country, of Egypt, and this is the way things are done in Iran, as well.

The major drawback of the Thursday-Friday weekend is that in most of the world, banks close on Saturdays and Sundays. So for both Thursday and Friday to be days off reduces the country's interface with international banking to only 3 days a week, which is undesirable. The religious fundamentalists in Iraq, such as the Shiite Sadrists and the Sunni Salafis, have focused on Saturday being the Jewish sabbath, and so are trying to rally against a Saturday day of rest as a Zionist plot. It has nothing to do with Zionism, of course, but it is true that a Saturday-Sunday weekend in most Western countries does reflect what is convenient for Christians and Jews. Traditional Islam, by the way, had no day of rest; people worked on Fridays, and just closed up shop to go to noon prayers and then came back and worked afterwards. So there is no tradition that should favor Thursday as a day off rather than Saturday, though the Sadrists seem to be trying to claim that there is.