A Historical Analysis of the Relation between Social Knowledge and the Changes of Missionary Works in the Islamic Seminary of Qom

Missionary work is one of the main duties of religious institutions in the Islamic society; and the Islamic Seminary - as a religious-scientific institution - has emphasized the importance of missionary work since its establishment. Missionary work is affected by people’s social needs and demands on the one hand, and develops according to the society’s rulers and the structure of the Islamic Seminary as external factors, on the other hand; which all requires historical studies. The Islamic Seminary of Qom has experienced the two periods of before-revelation and after-revolution of Iran since its establishment. In the pre-revolutionary period, there were some external factors, such as the Pahlavi approaches to modernize people’s social life, and thus the society’s new needs created some new requests from the Islamic Seminary during the era of Haj Sheikh Abdul-Karim Ha’eri and Mr. Borujerdi. This created the need for changes in its various parts, including missionary work. After the revolution, missionary work had another tremendous change due to the changes of the government structure and paying attention to people’s social needs in relation to religion – as an external factor - on the one hand, and accordingly the structure of the Islamic Seminary – an internal factor - on the other hand. Some of the results of these changes are the establishment of missionary institutions, updating missionary works and efforts for making it effective and responding to people's needs. In addition, knowing the social-political conditions of the society in order to change the different parts of the Islamic Seminary, ---- by social knowledge, that by knowing the social conditions, transformational activities were carried out. I have analyzed the above-mentioned relation(?) in this research, examining historical documents related to before and after the revolution of Iran and using the method of qualitative content analysis in order to examine the content of the description of the duties of missionary organizations.