Shahrbanu
[1] The majority of Shia sources state that Shahrbanu subsequently died shortly after giving birth to her son Ali[12][13] and was buried in the Jannat al-Baqi, alongside other members of Muhammad's family.
[1] Shahrbanu is viewed as a saintly figure by the Shia denominations and is especially revered in Iran, her importance being partly tied to the link she provides between pre-Islamic Persia and modern Shi'ism.
Muhammad ibn Ahmad Naysaburi cites a tradition that she was the daughter of Yazdegerd's father Prince Shahriyar, son of Khosrow II.
Yazdegerd is recorded to have had several wives and concubines,[15] with Al-Tabari and Ibn Khaldun making specific references to a marriage he had made to a woman in Merv.
[20] While it was historically recorded that her brothers had escaped to the Tang emperor of China,[20] Islamic traditions state that Shahrbanu's sisters were captured alongside her.
[24][14] The princess (possibly alongside her sisters)[21] was subsequently brought as a slave to Medina, where she was presented to the Caliph, who al-Kulayni identifies as being Umar ibn al-Khattab.
Once she caught sight of Umar inside the mosque, she covered her face and sighed: "Ah piruz badha hormoz" (Persian: May Hormuz be victorious).
In relation to this, historian Mary Boyce states that al-Qummi's account ignores that the conquest of Khorasan took place during the latter's reign, as well as the fact that Shahrbanu's supposed son, Ali, was not born until over a decade after Umar's death.
She states that as Zoroastrianism and the worship of Anahid became less predominant in the region, a link was probably formed between the site and Shahrbanu in order for the veneration of the Persian princess to take its place.
[30] While it was certainly within the influence of Husayn's father, Ali ibn Abi Talib, to have had him married to a captive daughter of Yazdegerd III,[31] contemporary sources make no mention of such an event.
Early histories regarding the invasion of Persia by authors such as Ibn Abd Rabbih and al-Tabari, often written with great attention to detail, do not establish any relationship between the Sassanid royal family and a wife of Husayn.
The same is true for a wide range of sources, such as the Hanafi judge Abu Yusuf in his treatise on taxation, the Kitab al-Kharaj, nor Ferdowsi in his epic, the Shahnameh.
They go on to claim that after the death of his father, Ali freed his mother and gave her in marriage to a client of Husayn's named Zuyaid, to whom she bore a son, Abdullah.
[1][32] Ya'qubi, who wrote around the same time as Ibn Qutaybah, was the first to suggest that Ali's mother was an enslaved daughter of Yazdegerd, stating that she was nicknamed Gazala by Husayn.
The Tarikh-i Qum and the Firaq al-Shi'a, both written around the 10th century, give a similar story, but state that she was originally called either Shahrbanu or Jahanshah and was later renamed Solafa.
Ali ibn Abi Talib plays an important role in this, with he and Shahrbanu conversing in Persian, him insisting on her freedom and nobility of rank as well as predicting the birth of the future Imam.
[35] Iranian scholar and politician Morteza Motahhari argued against this reasoning, stating that the Shia Imams' potential Sassanid ancestry would not have especially attracted Persians to Shi'ism.
In addition to this, Motahhari asserted that Shahrbanu is not venerated in Iran above the mothers of the other Imams, who came from a multitude of ethnic backgrounds, such as Narjis, who is believed to have been a Roman concubine.
