The hawza ilmiyya is the seminary system of Twelver Shia Islam, a network of teaching circles and colleges rather than a single campus, training students in jurisprudence, the principles of jurisprudence, theology and related disciplines needed to interpret law and doctrine. Najaf in Iraq, home to the shrine of Ali and a center of Shia learning since the medieval period, has long stood alongside the Iranian city of Qom as one of the two great poles of hawza education, and a student's choice of which city to study in has historically carried real intellectual and, at times, political weight.
Qom's modern prominence dates substantially to the early twentieth century, when the scholar Abdul Karim Ha'eri Yazdi reorganized teaching there into a more structured seminary in the 1920s, and Qom's importance grew further after 1979, when proximity to the new Islamic Republic gave it institutional advantages Najaf, under a hostile Iraqi state for much of the following decades, did not enjoy. The two cities have never simply duplicated each other; each developed its own scholarly emphases and its own relationship to political authority, a difference discussed at length in Momen's survey of Twelver Shiism.