Shah Abdol-Azim Shrine

Listen first. Slippers shuffle across cool marble. A child laughs somewhere behind a pillar. Pigeons lift off the courtyard all at once, and their wings sound like pages turning. Then you look up and see the gold. The dome of Shah Abdol-Azim holds the light of the Ray sky. Below it, thousands of small mirror pieces wait inside to catch every lamp and every candle. You are standing in one of the oldest sacred places in the Tehran region.

Ray is older than Tehran by a very long way. For centuries it was one of the great cities of the Iranian plateau. Tehran was only a village on its northern edge. Today the capital has spread south and swallowed it, so the old city feels like a southern district of the metropolis. But this shrine was here long before the high-rises and the motorways. In many ways, the neighbourhood grew around it.

So who is buried here? Shah Abdol-Azim al-Hasani was a ninth-century scholar and a descendant of Imam Hasan, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. He is respected in Shia tradition as a learned man and a trusted transmitter of religious teachings. He lived in a dangerous time. The Abbasid caliphs, the rulers in Baghdad, watched the Prophet's descendants closely, and many of them faced persecution.

According to the traditional account, he left Iraq and travelled east in secret. He reached Ray and lived quietly, almost hidden, in the house of a local supporter. People say he fasted by day and prayed by night. Only a small circle knew who he really was. After his death, the people of Ray discovered his identity, and his grave became a place of visit. The story of the hidden scholar is still told to pilgrims today.

Here is the first thing many visitors do not know. A tradition attributed to one of the later Imams says that visiting this grave carries a reward like visiting the tomb of Imam Husayn in Karbala, in Iraq. For centuries, many Iranians could not easily make the long journey to Iraq. This shrine, close to home, gave them a sacred destination within reach. That helps explain the steady crowds you see around you.

Shah Abdol-Azim does not rest alone. The complex also holds the tomb of Imamzadeh Hamzeh, a son of the seventh Shia Imam. An imamzadeh is a descendant of one of the Imams, honoured with a shrine of their own. Nearby lies Imamzadeh Taher as well. So as you walk, you are moving between several holy graves joined by courtyards and corridors. The building is less one structure and more a small city of devotion.

Look at the surfaces as you move. Much of the decoration you see comes from the Qajar era, the dynasty that ruled Iran through the nineteenth century, with many later additions. Inside, the mirror work covers walls and ceilings in tiny facets. It turns a single lamp into a field of stars. Outside, glazed tiles in blues, yellows and greens cover the portals. The doors and the grille around the tomb are worked in silver and gold.

Now the second surprise. In 1896, the Qajar king Naser al-Din Shah came here to pray. He had ruled Iran for almost fifty years. Inside the shrine, a man named Mirza Reza Kermani stepped forward with a revolver and shot him. The king died soon after. He was buried within this complex. His carved marble tombstone, showing the king in full royal dress, was later moved and is now displayed at the Golestan Palace in central Tehran.

The shrine also played a role in politics in another way. In Iran, a holy shrine was traditionally a place of sanctuary, called bast. People could take refuge there, and the authorities would hesitate to remove them. In 1905, a group of senior clerics and their followers withdrew to this shrine in protest against the government. That protest became one of the early steps of the Constitutional Revolution, which led to Iran's first parliament.

The shrine even shaped the story of travel in Iran. In the late nineteenth century, the country's first railway line was built from Tehran to this shrine. It was short, and it carried pilgrims and day-trippers south to Ray. People in Tehran gave the little steam train a nickname that meant something like the smoke machine. Today you can still arrive by rail, but the modern way is the Tehran Metro, which stops close to the old town.

In the twentieth century, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah, was also buried in a large mausoleum near the shrine. After the 1979 revolution, that mausoleum was demolished. So the ground around you carries traces of kings, clerics, protesters and pilgrims, one layer on top of another. Few places in Iran hold so many turns of national history so close together.

But most people here are not thinking about history at all. Watch them. Families sit on carpets and share tea. An older man rests his forehead against the silver grille and speaks very quietly. Women in chadors hold a hand on the shrine and stay still for a long moment. Outside the gates, the bazaar of Ray sells prayer beads, sweets, and small souvenirs. Pilgrims often carry a little bag home for relatives.

Before you leave, stand in the courtyard once more. Let your eyes travel from the worn marble under your feet up to the tiled portal and then to the gold of the dome. Notice the pigeons, the murmur of prayer, the traffic of the city just beyond the walls. People have walked to this spot for more than a thousand years. As you step back into the streets of Ray, you join that long line of visitors.