Dar al-Zahra was the first women's Shia seminary to be opened in Qom. It was established by grand ayatollah

Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari Sayyid Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari ( fa, محمد کاظم شریعتمداری), also spelled Shariat-Madari (5 January 1906 – 3 April 1986), was an Iranian Grand Ayatollah. He favoured the traditional Shiite practice of keeping clerics away ...

, who opened it in 1973 as a section of his hawza

Dar al-Tabligh The Dar al-Tabligh was a Shiite seminary in Qom. It was established in the mid-1960s by eminent grand ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari and soon emerged as one of the most popular hawza for Iranian and foreign students, with a prolific publis ...

. By 1975, Dar al-Zahra already counted 150 female students, taught by male teachers from behind a curtain. With the fall-out between

and Khomeini, the seminary was closed and Shariatmadari was placed under house arrest. Dar al-Zahra was run by Fatemeh Amini. After

was closed, she opened a number of other women's seminaries in Tehran.Azadeh Kian-Thiébaut, “Women’s Religious Seminaries in Iran”, ISIM Newsletter, No. 6, October 2000, p. 23.

References

Education in Iran Education in Qom Province Islamic schools {{Islam-stub