This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
When Seljuk forces sacked the Shi'a quarter of Baghdad in 1056, Shaykh al-Tusi fled south to Najaf, a documented act of displacement distinct from a planned relocation undertaken on his own terms, and founded a seminary, a hawza, there. That seminary grew into the preeminent center of Twelver Shi'a scholarship, a documented standing the city of Najaf has held ever since, distinct from a temporary refuge that dissolved once conditions in Baghdad settled again.
That a scholarship center founded under the pressure of violent displacement became, and remained for roughly a millennium afterward, the leading seat of Twelver Shi'a learning is documented as evidence the hawza's founding was not merely defensive but built to last well beyond the crisis that produced it. Before the 1056 sack, al-Tusi had trained in Baghdad under al-Sharif al-Murtada and al-Shaykh al-Mufid, two of the leading Shi'a scholars of the age, whom he succeeded as the community's own leading jurist, a documented line of succession that the flight to Najaf then carried forward into an entirely new city.
That the community's own leading jurist, driven from Baghdad by an act of violence rather than by his own choice, founded in Najaf the seminary that has remained Twelver Shi'a scholarship's preeminent center ever since marks the hawza's origin as a documented case where a center of learning outlasted, by centuries, the specific catastrophe that forced its founding.