Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/445

 talented sister, Miss Ella C. Sykes, we owe a sketch of the life of the people and their surroundings in this holy city of the Eighth Imam.i Still, I may be allowed to venture upon a short account of Mashad as a phase in our journey, to accompany the photographs which I collected while I was there.

Mashad, which is now a town of perhaps sixty thousand in- habitants, and the capital of the province of Khurasan, is a city that has literally grown up around the tomb of Imam Riza within the last thousand years, and has entirely supplanted Tus, the ancient capital, which, as will be described in the next chapter, now lies in ruins some fifteen miles to the northwest, having never recovered from the Mongol ravages in the thir- teenth century. It is a city visited annually by thousands of pilgrims, who form the chief source of its revenue, and who are attracted to it by the sanctity of the tomb of Riza, the eighth of the twelve Imams in line of succession after Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law Ali, whose particular followers the Persians, as Shiites, are.^

Ali ar-Riza, son of the Imam Musa, was born in the year 770 A.D., and, on the death of his father, succeeded, at the age of thirty, to the office of Imam. This was under the caliphate of the renowned Harun ar-Rashid, near whose dust his body now reposes in the famous shrine. When that great caliph died in 809, his son Mamun, the next caliph, is said to have shown marked honors to Imam Riza, who visited him at Merv, by giving him his daughter in marriage and by appointing him to be his heir. But the story goes on to say that, having become jealous of the pious man, Mamun compassed his death by administering poison to him in a bunch of grapes, the golden dish on which the fatal fruit was handed being still preserved, it is claimed, and set in the wall of the shrine as a record of

1 See Ella C. Sykes, Persia and lis cut off') and the Ithnd^asharlyas People, pp. 88-105, London and New ('twelvers') — see Shahrastani, Be- York, 1910. ligionspartheien und Philosophen-

2 On the Shiite sub-sects connected schulen, tr. Haarbriicker, 1. 25, 192- with Riza — the Kata^iyas (' those who 199, Halle, 1850.

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