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Nasir al-Din Shah and the Dar al-Funun: The Evolution of an Institution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Maryam Ekhtiar
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Extract

Nasir al-Din Shah uttered the following words in the presence of his trusted physician, Dr. Jakob Eduard Polak.

“If only no European had ever set foot in my country, we would have been spared all of these tortures. But since these aliens have penetrated, I intend to take as good and as much advantage of them as possible.”

Such words of despair reflect the court's ambivalent attitude toward European reform as well as the underlying motives for founding the Dar al-Funun, Iran's first modern European-style institution of higher learning (figs. 1 and 2).

The driving force behind the creation of the Dar al-Funun was Nasir al-Din Shah's first premier, Mirza Muhammad Taqi Khan Farahani, better known as Amir Kabir. He founded the institution with the intention of ensuring that a new generation of Iranian youth, primarily military officers, was trained in the “useful sciences.”

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 1-4: Qajar Art and Society , 2001 , pp. 153 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2001

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References

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