Qom

Qom grew on the road between the plateau and the desert, in a place where the river allowed farming and caravans could water. Settlement here is ancient, and the area was populated in Sasanian times, but the town's character was set in the eighth and ninth centuries, when Arab families of the Ash'ari clan, strongly attached to the family of the Prophet, settled in it. Qom became known as a Shia town in a country that was then mostly Sunni, and was sacked more than once for its loyalties.

Its central event came in 816, when Fatima Masumeh, sister of the eighth imam Ali al-Rida, fell ill on the road to Khorasan and died in Qom. Her grave became a place of pilgrimage, and successive dynasties enlarged the sanctuary around it; Safavid and Qajar rulers added courtyards, gilding and minarets, and several shahs chose to be buried in its precincts. Mongol invasion and later warfare damaged the town repeatedly, but the shrine always drew it back.

The modern city dates from the 1920s, when Sheikh Abdul-Karim Haeri Yazdi moved here from Arak and revived the seminaries, making Qom the principal centre of Shia learning in Iran after a century of decline. Ayatollah Khomeini taught at the Feyziyeh school, where his speech against the Shah in 1963 was followed by a raid in which the Shah's guards killed students; the demonstrations by Qom's seminary students in January 1978 were a turning point on the road to the revolution of 1979. Since then Qom has grown fast as a provincial capital of well over a million people, with industry, universities and a motorway corridor to Tehran alongside its religious institutions.

Qom's life turns on religion. Tens of thousands of seminary students live here, many of them from Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and further afield, and the sight of young men in robes and turbans and of women in black chadors is ordinary on every street. The city produces a large share of Iran's religious publishing, from Quranic commentary to scholarly journals, and its libraries and research institutes draw scholars from across the Shia world.

Pilgrimage sets the rhythm. Coaches arrive day and night, visitors circle the shrine, pray in its courtyards and leave with boxes of sohan; Tuesday evenings bring crowds to Jamkaran on the edge of town. Muharram, Ramadan and the great anniversaries of the imams fill the streets with black banners, processions, recitation and free food distributed by neighbourhood associations.

Manners are more formal and public behaviour more restrained than in most Iranian cities. Dress codes are observed closely, and the mixing of unrelated men and women in public is discreet. At the same time the hospitality is real, and foreign visitors, who are unusual here, are often greeted with curiosity and invited to tea. Beyond religion, Qom is known for its hand-knotted silk carpets, taken up in the city in the mid-20th century and now one of Iran's main centres of town weaving.

Well over a million people live in Qom, which makes it one of Iran's larger cities. Alongside the Persian majority are long-standing Azerbaijani and Arab communities and many families from Iraq and Afghanistan, drawn by the seminaries or by work.

The religious economy is the city's foundation: seminaries and their staff, publishing, endowments, and the hotels, restaurants and shops that live on pilgrimage. Around that has grown a second, industrial Qom, with factories and workshops on the motorway corridor, salt and mineral extraction from the desert nearby, and carpet weaving in homes and workshops. Farming on the plain is limited by salt and by water.

Water and air are the everyday problems. The Qom river is seasonal and heavily drawn on, groundwater is saline in places, and dust blows in from the salt flats. Summer forces life into the early morning and the evening, when the shrine courtyards fill with families sitting on carpets. Housing has spread quickly over the plain, traffic on the ring roads is heavy, and many residents commute to Tehran, close enough for the two cities' economies to be intertwined.

Qom is famous across Iran for one thing above all: sohan, a crisp toffee of sprouted wheat, flour, butter, sugar, saffron and cardamom, poured into flat discs and covered with slivered pistachio and almond. It is sold in decorated tins by shops around the shrine, and no Iranian leaves the city without a box for relatives. The same shops sell saffron and cardamom sweets, nougat and halva.

Everyday food is the plain, substantial cooking of a pilgrimage city. Chelow kabab — grilled lamb or minced kubideh with saffron-buttered rice, grilled tomato and raw onion — is the standard meal, and dizi, the lamb and chickpea stew mashed in its stone pot and eaten with torn flatbread, is the classic lunch. Stews such as ghormeh sabzi, gheimeh and fesenjan appear in family kitchens, and haleem, a thick wheat and lamb porridge, is eaten at breakfast, especially in Ramadan.

Religious occasions bring their own food. Nazri, meals cooked in huge pots and given away free, are distributed in the streets during Muharram, usually gheimeh or a rice dish, and sholeh zard, a saffron rice pudding decorated with cinnamon, is made as a votive dish. Dates from the south, dried limes and nuts fill the bazaar, and tea is drunk constantly, dark and sweet in small glasses.