Shrine of Hazrat Ali, Two Tombs, One Tradition

The city of Mazar-i-Sharif takes its own name from the shrine at its centre: mazar-i-sharif means noble shrine, and the settlement grew up around a tomb tradition holding that Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and the fourth Sunni caliph and first Shia imam, is buried there. This sits alongside a separate and historically better attested tradition that Ali was buried at Najaf, in present-day Iraq, at the shrine and seminary complex known there as the Shrine of Imam Ali; most historical accounts treat Najaf as his actual burial place. The Mazar-i-Sharif tradition instead traces to a local account that his body was secretly moved there to protect it from desecration, and a shrine on the site is recorded from as early as the twelfth century, destroyed during the Mongol invasions and rebuilt in its present form in the fifteenth century under Sultan Husayn Bayqara. Whatever position a visitor takes on which tradition is historically accurate, the coexistence of the two shrines is itself a well documented feature of the wider devotional landscape: a number of sites across the Persianate and Central Asian world independently claim the same burial, and the Mazar-i-Sharif shrine has functioned for centuries as a major pilgrimage destination for Shia and Sunni visitors alike, its blue-tiled domes and courtyards giving the building its familiar name, the Blue Mosque, distinct from the better known Sultan Ahmed Mosque of the same nickname in Istanbul.