Ali ibn Muhammad al-Baqir

Ali ibn Imam Muhammad al-Baqir belonged to the Husaynid Alid family. Shaykh al-Mufid lists a son named Ali among the seven children of Imam Muhammad al-Baqir in al-Irshad. A wording preserved from al-Tusi's Rijal also counts “Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Ali ibn al-Husayn” among the companions of Imam Jafar al-Sadiq. These notices are the basic evidence for his historical existence and his relationship to Imam al-Baqir.

According to al-Irshad, Ali and Zaynab were born to an unnamed umm walad. Reliable continuous information about his birth, education, transmissions, marriage, children and public activity is not available. The learning of his father or every detail attached to a later shrine tradition should therefore not automatically be transferred into Ali's personal biography.

The name and title require clarification. In the Mashhad-e Ardehal and Iranian devotional tradition, “Sultan Ali” or “Shahzadeh Sultan Ali” refers to this same Ali ibn Muhammad al-Baqir; there is no reason in that context to construct a second historical person. “Sultan,” however, was not his early personal name but a later Persian honorific used in popular reverence.

There is important medieval evidence for the Mashhad-e Ardehal attribution. Around the sixth century AH, Abd al-Jalil Qazwini al-Razi wrote in al-Naqd that the people of Kashan visited Ali ibn Muhammad al-Baqir, buried at Barikarsaf. In the same century, Sayyid Abu al-Rida al-Rawandi described the person buried there as Abu al-Hasan, a son of al-Baqir and a brother of Imam Jafar al-Sadiq. These witnesses prevent the attribution from being dismissed as a merely modern invention, although they were written roughly four centuries after the reported lifetime.

The fuller story of a delegation from Kashan, travel from Medina, arrival in 113 AH, three years of preaching, battle with a local governor, martyrdom in 116 AH and transport of the body in a carpet is not preserved in the earliest genealogical or general historical works. Its developed form appears in a local manuscript dated to the tenth century AH and in later retellings. It may therefore be presented respectfully as the local historical and devotional tradition of Kashan and Ardehal, but every detail should not be described as undisputed early history.

A second medieval attribution must also be noted. The Baghdadi historian Ibn al-Najjar is quoted as describing an old grave near al-Jafariyya in the district of al-Khalis whose stone named “al-Tahir Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Ali ibn al-Husayn.” This Baghdad attribution is also a later grave identification, and its present location and continuity are unclear. The available record gives Mashhad-e Ardehal the earlier, more continuous and living documented shrine tradition, but the coexistence of the two claims prevents an unqualified assertion of a certain burial place.