Qom

Qom stands on the edge of the central Iranian desert beside the Qom River, a city that Arab settlers from the Ashari tribe turned into one of the earliest strongholds of Twelver Shiism. Its heart is the shrine of Fatima al-Masuma, sister of the eighth Imam, Ali al-Rida, who died in Qom in the early ninth century. Pilgrims came to pray at her tomb, and around it grew a town of seminaries, scholars and saints' mausoleums that drew the devout from across the Persian-speaking world.

Qom had to rebuild more than once. The Mongols levelled it in 1224, yet by 1284 an Ilkhanid vizier could take refuge in the sanctuary, and between 1301 and 1365 new tombs of saints rose beside it, even as a contemporary geographer called the city ruined. Timur's army plundered it again in the late fourteenth century. The Safavids made Qom a showpiece of the new state religion: by 1503 it was an important centre of Shiite theology, Shah Abbas I endowed the shrine and its lodgings for pilgrims and students, and several Safavid shahs were buried within the sanctuary. Afghan raiders and Nader Shah's wars brought damage in the eighteenth century, and in 1793 the Qajar ruler Agha Mohammad Khan took the city. His successor Fath Ali Shah repaired the shrine to fulfil a vow and was himself buried there in 1834.