A young Fatima left her hometown of Medina in about 816 to visit her brother al-Rida in Merv, but fell ill along the way and died in Qom, located in modern-day Iran.
[1] When Musa died in 799 in the prison of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809), possibly poisoned,[2] a significant group of his followers accepted the imamate of his son Ali al-Rida, brother of Fatima.
[3] In 816, al-Rida was summoned to Khorasan by the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun (r. 813–833), who designated him as the heir apparent in 817, possibly to mitigate the frequent Shia revolts.
[5] Another account states that a local Shia figure by the name of Musa ibn Khazraj al-Ash'ari brought Fatima to Qom and hosted her during her final days.
[15] The Persian historian Hamdallah Mustawfi found the city in ruins in his visit in the fourteenth century,[6] but it reemerged during the Safavid period.
[12] Another phase of growth began with the arrival of Abdolkarim Haeri Yazdi (d. 1937) in 1921, who founded the present theological center (hawza-ye elmiyye).