Just one of Hussein’s ɹve sons had survived, but for
the Shia, that one was enough. He would be the fourth
of twelve Imams, the twelve seen on posters all over the
Shia world, seated in a V formation behind Ali at their
head. The imamate passed from father to son, each of
them endowed with divine knowledge and grace. And
after Karbala, each of them, the Shia believe, was
poisoned, ɹrst by order of the Umayyad Caliphs, then by
order of their successors, the Abbasids. Each, that is,
except the last, the twelfth Imam, the one whose face is
hidden in the posters. Where his face should be, there is
just a patch of white, as though the radiance of sanctity
would be too much for human eyes.
In fact the fourth, ɹfth, and sixth Imams—Hussein’s
one surviving son, his grandson, and his great-grandson
Jaafar al-Sadiq, who laid the foundation of Shia
theology—seem to have lived long lives in Medina.
Whether poison did indeed account for their deaths is
more a matter of faith than of record. But it is clear that
once the Abbasids came to power, the life expectancy of
the Shia Imams drastically decreased.
The Abbasids ousted the Umayyads just seventy years
after Karbala and brought the caliphate back from Syria
to Iraq. In 762 they built a magniɹcent new capital city
on the banks of the Tigris. Laid out in a perfect circle, it
was originally called Medinat as-Salaam—“City of
Peace”—though it quickly became better known as
Baghdad, from the Persian for “gift of paradise.”