Qom is Iran's shrine city on the road south of Tehran
Qom, capital of its namesake Iranian province, ranks as the country's seventh-largest city and sits about one hundred forty kilometres south of Tehran on the Qom River. Shia pilgrims seek the Fatima Masumeh Shrine and Jamkaran Mosque, where crowds mark Mid-Sha'ban for the Mahdi's birth.
Petroleum pipelines and a lively industrial economy lean on proximity to Tehran, making the holy city also a distribution hub for fuel and gas. Older etymologies tie the name to Komiran—'Iran city'—or to koomeh, hut, for reed dwellings by the river ford in the medieval Tarikh-i Qum.
The site is far older than Islam. Digs at Tepe Sialk point to very early settlement, surveys have found large inhabited places south of the city from the 4th and 1st millennia BC, and in antiquity the region was a centre of devotion to Anahita, the Iranian fertility goddess, with a temple reported beside the river. The ruins of Khurha, about 70 kilometres to the southwest, survive from the Seleucid and Parthian eras, and four Parthian heads found nearby now sit in Tehran's National Museum.
Under the Sasanians, Qom was probably a small administrative unit of loosely linked villages such as Jamkaran, and Ardashir I fought his decisive battles nearby; the Qal'a-ye Dokhtar in the city, long assumed to be religious, now looks more like an administrative building. Abu Musa Ashaari made a first attempt at conquest in 644, but the real turning point came when Ashaari Arabs from Yemen settled, bought land and, after 733, displaced the local Persian nobility. In 825 to 826 the city rebelled when the caliph al-Ma'mun refused to cut its tax, a revolt crushed with harsh punishment.
Source: Qom
