INTRODUCTION

Qom, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, is the world's largest centre for Shici scholarship, and is also a popular site for pilgrimage. The city as a whole has a resident contingent of about 50,000 Iranian seminary students, including women, as well about 12,000 students from outside Iran. Most of the foreign students are studying at one of the seminaries belonging to al-Mustafa International University (MIU) (in Persian, Danishgah-i Bainul-milali-yi al-Mustafa; in Arabic, Jamicat al-Mustafa al-Alamiyya), an umbrella organisation that coordinates seminaries, schools and educational centres exclusively for non-Iranians, operating both inside and outside Iran. The growth of non-Iranian students studying at Iranian seminaries is a post-revolutionary phenomenon facilitated by the clerical leaders of the Islamic Republic, who were eager to promote their ideology overseas.

Though MIU itself was only recently founded, it has more than two decades’ previous history under the name of the International Centre for Islamic Studies (ICIS) (Markaz-i Jahani-yi cUlum-i Islami) and the Organisation for Overseas Seminaries and Schools (OOSS) (Sazman-i Hawza va Madaris-i cIlmiyya-yi Kharij az Khishvar). The former was established in 1986 as a supervisory organisation for non-Iranian students admitted to Iranian seminaries, and the latter was founded in 1991–2 to supervise the schools and seminaries established outside Iran for non-Iranian students. According to the MIU's official prospectus of 2009, it had about 18,000 non-Iranian students, 10,000 of whom were studying in Iran while the remaining 8,000 were housed in affiliated institutions across the world.

Despite the MIU's growing investment in the education of non-Iranians, its activities have not yet been the subject of scholarly examination. Although Iranian seminaries in the revolutionary period, including their management styles and curricula, have been the subjects of some outstanding studies by Western academics, and certain books in Persian have described the changes that took place in post-revolutionary domestic seminaries, recent works on the development of transnational Shici networks have not yet paid attention to the activities of MIU, including ICIS and OOSS. This chapter aims to fill this gap, and thereby to gain a better understanding of how clerical leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran have tried to make the Qom seminaries the world centre of Shici scholarship.