Across the street from the sprawling shrine to Fatima al-Masumeh, the revered sister of Imam Reza, the eighth Shiite imam, a group of campaign workers on a rooftop are busy unfurling wall-sized election posters for a conservative candidate in Iran's March parliamentary election. We're in downtown Qom, a city of 1 million about 100 miles southwest of Tehran. Qom is Iran's religious capital, the wellspring for a host of fundamentalist clerics who've ruled Iran since 1979, and it is an eerie place.