Fatima Masumeh Shrine

The mausoleum of Fatima bint Musa, known as Fatima Masumeh, in Qom, Iran — daughter of the seventh Imam Musa al-Kadhim and sister of the eighth Imam Ali al-Rida. She died in Qom around 816 CE while traveling to join her brother in Khorasan, after the caravan she was in was attacked by Abbasid agents; she reportedly fell ill after being poisoned and asked to be brought to Qom, where she was buried on her host's land. Millions of pilgrims travel to Qom each year to honor her and seek her intercession, and her shrine helped establish Qom as one of Shia Islam's great centers of religious learning. Her tomb was first covered by a simple canopy, replaced roughly fifty years later by a domed structure at the request of Sayyida Zaynab, a daughter of the ninth Imam. The shrine reached its present form in stages — a golden iwan and two minarets added in 1519 under the Safavid Shah Ismail I's wife Tajlu Khanum, a large new courtyard under Qajar patronage around 1795, and further expansions under Ayatollah Khomeini, who studied and lived in Qom and used the shrine's image widely during the 1979 revolution.

Photographs

Bottom view of the iwan at one of the entrances of Fatima Masumeh Shrine, Qom, Iran. A Wikimedia Commons Featured Picture and Quality Image.

Photo by Amir Pashaei, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons