Baghdad.
The name of the Askariya shrine encodes the fate of
the two Imams buried there. It comes from the word for
a military garrison or camp, and this is what Samarra
was—the Pentagon, as it were, of the Abbasid dynasty.
The tenth and eleventh Imams were kept under house
arrest there, making them literally askariya, “the ones
kept in camp.”
But the Askariya shrine has even greater signiɹcance
in Shiism, for the Samarra garrison is where the Shia
say the twelfth Imam was born—the last and ultimate
inheritor of the pure bloodline of Muhammad through
Fatima and Ali, and the central messianic ɹgure of
mainstream Shiism.
His birthday is celebrated each year in what might be
seen as the Shia equivalent of Christmas Eve, a joyful
counterpoint to Ashura. “The Night of Wishes and
Prayers,” it is called, a night when homes are hung with
balloons and strings of colored lights, when people drum
and sing and dance, when confetti and candies are
strewn in the streets and ɹreworks light up the sky. A
night, it seems, when wishes and prayers really could
come true, which is why on this night the Shia faithful
make their way not to Samarra, where the twelfth Imam
was born, but to Karbala, where it is believed he will
return, followed by Hussein on one side and Jesus on the
other.