hew to belief in twelve Imams and, following their
example, focus more on religious devotion than on
opposition to the Sunni Caliphs.
After Hussein, all the Imams steered clear of political
involvement in favor of pure theology. But where it
seemed that the Umayyads could aʃord to ignore them
so long as they were safely distant in Medina, their
existence posed more of a threat to the Abbasids. Their
line of direct descent from Muhammad represented a
clear contradiction of the Abbasid claim to leadership.
The Imams, that is, were potential rallying points for
resistance and rebellion. So whereas the Umayyads had
apparently let them be in Medina, the Abbasids brought
them close. In fact, from the seventh Imam on, each one
was brought to Iraq and either imprisoned or kept under
house arrest. And it seems quite likely that each one was
indeed poisoned.
The gold-domed shrines so easily confused by
Westerners are built over the tombs of the Imams. The
shrines of Ali in Najaf and the twin shrines of Hussein
and his half brother Abbas in Karbala draw the largest
numbers of pilgrims, but the sanctity of the other shrines
is almost as great. The Khadhimiya shrine in Baghdad
contains the tombs of the seventh and ninth Imams; the
Imam Reza shrine in the Iranian city of Mashhad is built
over the tomb of the eighth Imam; and the tenth and
eleventh Imams are entombed in the Askariya shrine in
Samarra, on the Tigris River sixty miles north of