Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution

4. Qum: Arena of Conflict

4 Qum: Arena 0/ Conflict There are a number of things which kings should learn. One is digging with a shovel and earning his bread, so that he will not lightly take the bread from the hands of others; another is for him to suffer the pains of torture so that he will not without good reason order anybody tortured; another is that he should experience hunger so that he will give to the hungry; and another is that he should know the toil of traveling on foot so that he will no longer make people go on foot to where he goes. - Darabnameh Q UM IS THE RELIGIOUS HEART of Shi'ite Iran; what happens in Qum has national importance. Insofar as Iran has a fairly centralized political structure, the social pressures operating in Qum are not very different from those operating elsewhere. In these two senses Qum's unique characteristics provide both a kind of local color to patterns observable elsewhere in Iran and a special access to the religious aspects of those patterns. The task now is to place Qum and the religious personnel of the madrasa system in the context of a modernizing, nondemocratic state: to show how the provincial town of Qum as a unit of the state has been transformed; to show where and how in that transformation the freedom of maneuver (power, leadership, control) of the religious personnel has been circumscribed, and to indicate how in the transformation classes differentiate themselves in religious idiom. Qum has a peculiar set of reputations in Iran. Foreigners and even many Westernized Iranians avoid it as a hotbed of fanaticism. The hagiographies of the town portray it from its earliest Islamic days as a Shi'ite refuge and stubborn stronghold. For shrine goers, only Mecca, the 'atabat (the shrine towns of southern Iraq), and Mashhad surpass Qum as a site of experiential intensity. In the popular folklore of character types Qummis are bad gens (bad types, clever, scheming, twofaced ). Despite the census claims that Qum has a population of over 200,000 people, it is a small town with practically no industry. It is still a very traditional town based on farming, weaving, some herding, some carpentry , brick making, selling to pilgrims (garrish pottery, prayer beads, souvenirs), and services to the sizable madrasa and shrine population. 104 , Tehran .-Arak Isfahan / Figure 4.1 Qum location map Kashan \ Key: Major mosques A A ~zam (Borujerdl) BImam C Jum'a Madrasas 1 Faydiyya 2 Dar al-Shija 3 Hujjatiyya 4 Dar al-Tabligh Other major institutions S Shrine (Hadrat-i Ma~suma) R Dar Rah-i Haqq L Mar~ashi Library M Maktab-i Islam K Mobarakabad •••• Bazaar 5 Imam Amir al-Mu'minin 6 Golpayegani 7 Mar~ashi 8 Khan 9 Kirmani 10 Razaviyya 11 Mu'minin 12 Haqqani 13 Jani Khan 106 Qum: Arena of Conflict Opium and prostitutes (primarily the former) are still the major forms of male entertainment, rather than alcohol and cinemas. Although Qum has a long madrasa tradition - traced back to the third century A.H. - the current set of madrasas are only some fifty years old. Their growth and social power has had a decided effect in making the town more puritan, more conservative, less amenable to change than it would otherwise be; the effect is by no means appreciated by all Qummis and was perhaps intensified unintentionally by the Pahlavi government's anticlericalism. During the sixties and seventies, government efforts to introduce changes in social welfare (education, health care), physical planning (parks, modern buildings, roads, diversified economic opportunities ), and civic administration (price control and political party maneuvers) gathered momentum, making the madrasa system increasingly a backwater. Evolution of the Shrine Town: Shi'ite and Royal Qum's historians revel in its reputation as an obstreperous Shi'ite center, tracing this posture back to the early Shi'ite resistance to the Umayyads. Abu Musa Ash'ari, the ineffective and somewhat stupid representative of 'Ali,l visited Qum in A.H. 23, but Qum remained Zoroastrian and paid jizya (the tax on protected minorities). Indeed the great Sassanian ritual fire in the nearby village of Mazdijan was extinguished only in A.H. 288 by Bayram Turk, the governor of Qum. Nonetheless, Qum and Kashan became refuges for opponents of the Umayyads. After Mutraf ibn Mughira's revolt against the governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf Thaqafi, failed (66-67/685-687...