Of all the cities within Iran, Qum has the curious distinction of being the favored resting place of shahs between the 17th-19th century. Early in his reign, Fath ‘Ali Shah cultivated a self-image as a Shi‘i patron of shrine cities, not only by paying for shrine renovations in Najaf and Karbala, but also in Mashhad and especially in Qum. By choosing the shrine of Fatimah Ma‘sumah in Qum as the site of his own resting place before his death, he further solidified the association between the shrine, the city, and the emerging Qajar Empire. In this paper, I use the shrine city of Qum as a vector through which to reconsider the relationship between the Qajar empire and law between the 1860s-1890s. In studies of Qajar-era law, the overall scholarly tendency has been to stress the role of the Shi’i mujtahids as the main legal actors. The imperial court and the government are typically either cast as executors of shari‘ah or as implementors of customary law (‘urf). Studies of petitions to the Qajar shah come closest to situating the Qajars within Islamicate imperial traditions of legal redress (mazalim). Building on this scholarship, I argue that the shrine of Fatimah Ma‘sumah, as a place of refuge (bast), was a space through which imperial law was articulated locally. I begin by considering the claim that the Shah was the ultimate guardian (mutivalli) of all shrines in Iran as having juridical import since this authority was understood to supersede that of the powerful head shrine guardian (mutivallibashi). I then shift focus to the efforts of local governors to sharply delineate the borders of Qum’s bast zone after a period in which this zone had ballooned to encompass half of the city. Since the bast zone functioned as a limit to imperial sovereignty, these efforts involved a clash between competing understandings of shari‘ah on the question of crime: should the implementation of shari‘ah punishments take precedence or respect for the sanctity of the shrine as an inviolable bast zone? Through a careful examination of Persian letters, reports, telegrams, and diaries, I examine actual cases involving those accused of theft, violence, and murder to tease out the overlapping and contested modes of imperial and shari‘ah rationales for allowing refugees to remain in asylum or forcing them out to face punishment.