A Caliphate's Capital, a Shia District

As seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, Baghdad carried the Sunni Muslim world's central claim to religious and political authority from 762 CE onward, the caliph holding a title understood as successor to the Prophet's leadership of the community. Real political power slipped from Abbasid hands well before the caliphate itself ended, first to Iranian Buyid governors and then to Seljuk Turkish sultans who ruled in the caliph's name, but Baghdad remained the office's symbolic seat until the Mongol conquest of 1258, when Hulagu Khan's forces sacked the city and executed the last Abbasid caliph, an event still remembered as one of the great catastrophes of Islamic history.

The city's northern Kadhimiya district holds its own, older Shia significance, home to the tombs of Musa al-Kadhim, the seventh of the Twelve Imams, and his grandson Muhammad al-Jawad, the ninth, and drawing pilgrims in numbers that make it one of the major Shia shrine sites of Iraq. Kadhimiya's religious life runs on its own track from the seminary cities of Najaf and Karbala further south: it is a shrine and pilgrimage center rather than a center of jurisprudential training, and its history as a Shia stronghold within a majority Sunni imperial capital reflects Baghdad's long-standing religious plurality.