South Asia Center Nonresident Senior Fellow Barbara Slavin writes for Al-Monitor on the recent visit to Washington by a delegation of Iranian women theological students:
As the United States and Iran sat down in Vienna to begin drafting a long-term nuclear agreement, an exchange of another kind was playing out in and around a pastoral university a couple of hours from Washington.
A delegation of Iranian women students from Jamiat al-Zahra, the world’s largest theological seminary for women, is in the United States for the first time to attend lectures at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The group of nine women — mostly postgraduate students in their 20s — from the Iranian theological center of Qom, also visited Washington and spent a weekend in the Amish country around Lancaster, Pennsylvania.