Thirty million pilgrims a year to Imam Reza’s city
Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city, lies about 740 km east of Tehran in the northeast. The Imam Reza Shrine—burial place of the eighth Twelver Imam Ali al-Rida—draws nearly thirty million visitors yearly, among Shia Islam’s holiest sites and the largest mosque after the two great mosques of Mecca and Medina.
Ferdowsi, author of the Shahnameh and a native of nearby Tus, gives his name to many local institutions. The city prospered under the Mongols, and from 1736 to 1796 it served as Iran's capital under the Afsharid dynasty. It is also a leading centre of Shia scholarship, with many seminaries and libraries, and Timurid, Safavid, Afsharid and Qajar rulers all poured money into the shrine.
It was once a small town called Sanabad, 24 kilometres from Tus, with a summer palace of the Khurasan governor Humayd ibn Qahtaba. The caliph Harun al-Rashid died there in 808 and was buried in that palace, and Imam Reza was later buried beside him. The name Mashhad, Arabic for a place of martyrdom or shrine, first appears in al-Maqdisi's writing in the late tenth century and was adopted officially under the Safavids.
Greek sources say Alexander the Great passed through a place called Susia here in 330 BC, and the Parthian town of Patigrabanâ named in Darius the Great's Behistun inscription of 520 BC may have stood on the site. By the end of the ninth century a dome rose over the Imam's grave, surrounded by bazaars, and it has been destroyed and rebuilt several times since. The Seljuks took the city in 1161 but spared the shrine.
Mashhad gained as Tus declined; Timur's son Miran Shah ruined Tus for good in 1389. Under the Timurid Shahrukh Mirza it became a leading city, and in 1418 his wife Goharshad paid for the great mosque beside the shrine that still bears her name. In the sixteenth century Uzbek raids battered the town, and in 1796 Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar conquered Khorasan, ending the Afsharid hold.
Source: Mashhad
