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The modern city of
Samarra is situated on the bank of the river Tigris
some sixty miles from the city of
Baghdad
.
The city is of outstanding importance because of its two shrines. The
golden dome on one shrine was presented by Nasr al-Din Shah and completed
under Muzaffar al-Din Shah in the year 1905 A.D. Beneath the golden dome
are four graves, those of Imam Ali al-Naqi (10th Imam) and his son, Imam
Hasan al-Askari (11th Imam). The other two are of Hakimah Khatoon, the
sister of Imam Ali al-Naqi who has related at length the circumstances of
the birth of Imam al-Mahdi and the fourth grave is of Nargis Khatoon, the
mother of Imam al-Mahdi, peace be upon him. The second shrine marks the
place where Imam al-Mahdi went into concealment. It has a dome that is
distinguished for the soft delicate design that is worked in blue tiles,
and beneath it is the Sardab (cellar) where the Imam is said to have
disappeared. Visitors may enter this Sardab by a flight of stairs.
In the year A.D. 836, after two years experience with factional strife in
Baghdad , the Caliph Mu'tasim departed with
his Turkish army to
Samarra
,
"Which he founded and made his residence and military camp."
There eight caliphs lived in the short period of fifty-six years. The
distance of
Samarra from
Baghdad
is sixty miles. This name,
Surra man ra'a (He who sees it, rejoices), is said to have been given by
Mu'tasim himself, when, for approximately £2,000, he purchased as a site
for his new city a garden that had been developed by a Christian
monastery.The Caliph's happy Arabic pun was based on the Aramaic name,
Samarra, which was a town in the immediate vicinity from the times before
the Arab conquest. The general district, however, was known as Tirhan.
Thus the site chosen was an attractive garden spot in a fertile valley of
the
Tigris , and there the Caliph built
his new capital, which became known as "the second city of the
Caliphs of the Bani Hashim." A main avenue, with many residences,
ran along the river bank. In the garden of the monastery he built his
royal palace, known as the Daru'l Amma, and the monastery
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itself became his
treasury. A Friday Mosque, was built by Mu'tasim very close to the
quarter of the city that was set aside for the army.
Mustawfi informs us
further that "he built a Minaret for the Mosque. 17=ells (about 19
metres) in height, with a gangway (to ascend it, that went up) outside,
and no Minaret after this fashion was ever built by anyone before his
time."4
This Minaret, was so large that a man on horseback is said to be able to
ascend its so-called gangway. The same thing is claimed for the similar
minaret in the Mosque of Tulun, which may have been modelled after it.
But the Turkish
mercenaries, on whom Mu'tasim and his sons and grandsons relied, soon
became the true masters of the situation. While they cherished their
position as guardians of the caliphs, whom they permitted to live in
luxury and security, nevertheless they so exploited their own
opportunities - for gain, through cruelty and oppression, that in matters
of internal administration the authority of the Muslim Empire sank to a
low ebb. This was at a time, however, according to Dinawari, when there
were more victories, for the troops than during any preceding caliphate.
In
Samarra
the caliphs busied themselves
building palace after palace, on both sides of the river, and at a cost
that Yakut estimated as 204 million Dinars, which would not be less than
eight million sterling. A great cypress tree is celebrated in the Shah
Nameh as having sprung from a branch brought by Zoroaster from
Paradise. It is said to have stood at the
village of
Kishmar
, near Turshiz, and to have
been planted by Zoroaster in memory of the conversion of King Gushtasp to
the Magian religion. Such too was its power that earthquakes, which
frequently devastated all the neighbouring districts, never did any harm
in Kishmar. According to Kazvini, the caliph Mutawakkil in 247 A.H. (861
A.D.) caused this mighty cypress to be felled, and then transported it
across all
Persia, in
places carried on camels, to be used for beams in his new palace at
Samarra
. This was
done inspite of the grief and the protests of all the Guebres, but when
the cypress arrived on the banks of the Tigris, Mutawakkil was dead,
having been murdered by his son.Mustawfi who wrote in the fourteenth
century, takes pain to mention with sympathy how the Caliph Mutawakkil
enlarged Samarra, and in particular, how "he built a magnificent
Kiosk, greater than which never existed in the lands of Iran, and gave it
the title of the Ja'fariyyah (his name being Ja'far). But evil fortune
brought down on him in that he had laid in ruins the tomb of Imam Husain,
at
Karbala
,
and furthermore he had prevented people from making their visitation to
the same - decreed. that, shortly after his death, his Kiosk should be
demolished, so that no trace of it now remains. Indeed, of
Samarra
itself, at
the present time, only a restricted portion is inhabited."
The restricted
portion that was still occupied in the fourteenth century was
approximately the same as the modern
Samarra
, and was part of the "Camp
of Mu'tasim." Here the Imams, Ali al-Naqi and his son, Hasan
al-Askari were imprisoned and poisoned and hence they were called the
Askariyan, or the "Dwellers in the Camp." It was here also that
both of them were buried. The modern
Samarra
is only a few paces removed
from the walls of the old Friday Mosque, which agrees with Mustawfi's
observation that "in front of the mosque stands the tomb of the Imam
Ali al-Naqi, grandson of the Imam Ali al-Ridha; and also of his son, the
Imam Hasan al-Askari." That the city of the Caliphs was much more
extensive is indicated by the modern observation that "the ground
plan of the many barracks, palaces and gardens can be very plainly seen
by anyone flying over the site in an aeroplane." The historical
topography of the ephemeral capitol of the Caliphs as outlined by the
Arab geographers, Ya'kubi and Yakut, has been investigated recently by
archaeologists, so that the location of the principal streets and of the
many of the palaces has been determined. Also the findings have proved to
be of special value to students of Muslim art, for they are
representatives of the period when the civilization of the Abbasid
caliphate was "shedding its lustre over the world."
It was in this part
of
Samarra
that still remains that the Imam Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Askari disappeared
from human sight. Mustawfi says this happened in 264 A.H. (878 A.D.) at
Samarra
. The fact
that the Shia community was permitted to have its headquarters after the
fall of the Buyids in the nearby city of Hilla, from which place they
conducted their negotiations at the time of the invasion of Khulagu Khan,
gave rise to the tradition that the Hidden Imam would reappear in that
town. This accounts for the confusion of the traveller, Ibn Batuta (A.D.
1355), who found shrines dedicated to the last Imam, both in Hilla and
Samarra
. The mosque
of the last Imam in Hilla marks the place of his expected reappearance,
but the place of his disappearance is at
Samarra
. At Hilla, Ibn Batuta found
that the mosque had an extended veil of silk stretched across its
entrance, and it was a practice for the people "to come daily, armed
to the number of a hundred, to the door of this mosque, bringing with
them a beast saddled and bridled. `Come forth, Lord of the Age, for
tyranny and baseness now abounds; this then is the time for thy egress,
that, by thy means, God may divide between truth and falsehood.' They
wait till night and then return to their homes."
Samarra
itself was at that time in
ruins, though Ibn Batuta mentions that "there had been a mashhad in
it, dedicated to the last Imam by the Shias." It may have been owing
to the fact that the place was in ruins that pains were not taken to
ascertain that the mashhad was the "place of witness" in memory
of the Imams, Ali al-Naqi and Hasan al-Askari, and that a different spot
nearby was highly regarded as the place where the last Imam disappeared.
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