Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Iran gathers five cities recording Twelver Shia Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Baha'i Faith, three traditions that rarely share a single country's list of holy places so evenly.

Qom grew around the tomb of Fatima al-Masuma into the largest center of Shia religious scholarship in the world, and in the twentieth century became the base from which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini developed the doctrine of direct clerical rule underlying the Islamic Republic. Nishapur was a great city of medieval Khurasan, home to the hadith collector Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj and the Sufi poet Farid al-Din Attar, and the birthplace and burial place of Omar Khayyam, before the Mongols destroyed it in 1221.

Yazd holds the largest surviving Zoroastrian community in Iran, its Atash Behram keeping a fire the community holds to have burned without interruption for centuries; the towers of silence outside the city were used for exposure of the dead until the 1970s, and pilgrimage sites in the surrounding desert still draw Zoroastrians from Iran and the diaspora.

Shiraz is where the Bab declared his mission in 1844, the event from which the Baha'i calendar counts, and the house where the declaration took place was destroyed after the 1979 revolution. Tehran, the Qajar capital and today the seat of the post-1979 clerical government, was the birthplace of Bahaullah, founder of the Baha'i Faith, in 1817, and the site of his imprisonment in the Siyah Chal in 1852, though Bahais remain unrecognized under Iranian law today.

Scholarship, fire and a persecuted new religion each found their own city, and two of the five, Qom and Tehran, now anchor the state that governs all of them.