Feyziyeh School

The Feyziyeh School is the best-known of the many seminaries of Qom, and it stands right beside the shrine of Fatima Masumeh, its courtyard opening onto the shrine's own. A madrasa is a college of religious learning, and Feyziyeh has for a century been the symbolic heart of the Qom hawza, the network of seminaries that has made the city one of the two great centres of Shia scholarship, alongside Najaf in Iraq.

A school stood here in Safavid times, and its name is usually linked with Mulla Mohsen Feyz Kashani, the seventeenth-century scholar and poet who is said to have studied and taught in Qom. The buildings seen today date largely from the reign of the Qajar king Fath-Ali Shah, who rebuilt the school around 1800. They follow the classic Iranian pattern: a rectangular courtyard with a pool and trees, ringed by two storeys of student cells behind pointed arches, with tiled iwans, great vaulted portals, at the centre of each side.

The modern importance of Qom as a centre of learning dates from 1922, when the cleric Abdolkarim Haeri Yazdi settled in the city and reorganised its seminaries. Feyziyeh became their meeting place, and generations of students lived in its cells and studied in its halls.

The school also has a place in Iran's twentieth-century political history. In March 1963 security forces entered Feyziyeh during a gathering and students were beaten and injured, and in June of that year Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gave a speech there criticising the government of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, shortly before his arrest. These events are remembered very differently by Iranians of different views, and the school today is both a working seminary and a place of memory.