Ali al-Hadi

Born in Medina around March 828, Ali ibn Muhammad succeeded his father Muhammad al-Jawad as Imam in 835 while still a child - Twelver sources invoke the Quranic story of young Jesus to explain his exceptional knowledge at that age. He kept out of politics until around 848, when the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil summoned him from Medina to the capital Samarra and placed him under close surveillance. For the next twenty years he lived under watch, enduring alleged house searches, brief imprisonments, and murder plots, yet he managed to run an underground network of representatives who handled the financial and religious affairs of the Shia community. He died in June 868 at roughly forty years old during the reign of caliph al-Mu'tazz; most Shia sources blame the Abbasids for poisoning him. After his death the majority of followers accepted his son Hasan al-Askari as the eleventh Imam, though a splinter group followed another son, Ja'far, before eventually rejoining the mainstream. Both al-Hadi and al-Askari are entombed at the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra, Iraq - a pilgrimage site bombed by ISIS militants as recently as 2007.