The shrine of Fatima al-Masuma at Qom is the tomb of a revered woman of the Prophet's family, and around it grew the city that is now the greatest centre of Shia scholarship in the world.
Fatima al-Masuma
Fatima, honoured with the title al-Masuma, "the immaculate", was the daughter of the seventh Imam, Musa al-Kadhim, and the sister of the eighth, Ali al-Rida. She died at Qom in 816 or 817 while travelling to join her brother in Khorasan. She is among the most venerated women in Shia Islam, and her shrine is a reminder that the tradition's holy dead are neither exclusively male nor exclusively the Imams themselves; devotion to the wider Ahl al-Bayt, the family of the Prophet, is central to Shia piety.
The seminary city
Qom developed as a stronghold of Shia Islam early, and the presence of the shrine drew scholars and students; over the centuries it became the foremost seminary city of the Shia world, its hawza rivalling and in some respects surpassing that of Najaf, and drawing students from Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Azerbaijan and beyond. In the modern era Qom has been the intellectual and political centre of the Iranian clerical establishment and the training ground of its senior figures.
A living shrine and school
The shrine, with its golden dome and tiled courtyards, receives large numbers of pilgrims, and the surrounding seminaries make Qom a working city of religious study rather than only a place of pilgrimage. It remains at once a focus of devotion to a beloved saint and the principal engine of Shia scholarship and clerical formation.