The Shia Seminary World of Qom

Qom, a city on the arid plateau south of Tehran, is the foremost centre of religious learning of Twelver Shia Islam, the branch of Islam followed by the great majority of Iranians and by large communities in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere; it is described here as a matter of historical record, in a library written from a Sunni perspective. The city is built around the shrine of Fatima Masumeh, with its gilded dome and tiled minarets, and around the shrine cluster the religious colleges that make up the hawza, the network of seminaries in which the scholars and jurists of the Shia tradition are trained over many years in Qur'an, hadith, jurisprudence, theology and the rational sciences. By the mid-twentieth century Qom had become, alongside Najaf in Iraq, the leading seat of Shia learning and the home of its most senior clerics, the marja' al-taqlid whom the faithful follow in religious matters. The year around 1963 was a turning point: the secular modernising programme of the shah, and his clashes with the clergy, provoked a confrontation in which a Qom-based cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, rose to prominence leading protests in 1963 that the state suppressed, the beginning of the path that would lead, sixteen years later, to the Iranian Revolution and a state governed by the Shia clergy. This scene depicts the seminary world of Qom around 1963, the gilded shrine, the college courtyards, the robed students at their books and the marks of Shia devotion.