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.”