General Information About Qom

The city of Qom (also Qum), 92 miles (148 km) south of Tehran, is, after Mashhad (the burial place of the eighth Shiʿite imam, Ali Reza), the second most important shrine town in Iran. The sister of Imam Reza, Hazrat-e Fatima, is buried in Qom. The city was a winter capital as well as a royal mausoleum town during medieval times and was strongly patronized when the Shiʿite Safavids came to power during the sixteenth century. In 1920 a religious center of learning (hauzeh-ye ilmiyeh) was established in the city by Shaykh Abd al-Karim Ha’eri Yazdi. Through its madrasas (religious schools) Qom is one of the main centers of Islamic studies in Iran today. With the accession to power of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925 and the modernization reforms undertaken, the town soon became the scene of a struggle between the monarchy and the religious establishment. The first major episode of violence that precipitated the Iranian Revolution of 1979 occurred there. When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979 as the leader of the revolution, he established his headquarters in the Madrasa-y Faiziyeh in Qom.