The mosque of the last Imam in Hilla marks the place of his...

The mosque of the last Imam in Hilla marks the place of his expected reappearance, but the place of his disappearance is at Samarra. At Hilla, Ibn Batuta found that the mosque had an extended veil of silk stretched across its entrance, and it was a practice for the people “to come daily, armed to the number of a hundred, to the door of this mosque, bringing with them a beast saddled and bridled.

`Come forth, Lord of the Age, for tyranny and baseness now abounds; this then is the time for thy egress, that, by thy means, God may divide between truth and falsehood.' They wait till night and then return to their homes.” Samarra itself was at that time in ruins, though Ibn Batuta mentions that “there had been a…