ABSTRACT
Those Iranians who came to have some knowledge of the West had little admiration for the Tranks’. True, the Franks were masters at casting cannon, an art the Iranians hastened to learn; they were good at making pistols, watches, and pocket-knives and sailing the seas. However, this did not make them superior in the eyes of the Iranians, who knew that the Franks could contain the Turks in Central Europe only through coalitions, while Iran withstood them alone. The Franks were Christian, and no Iranian would agree that Christianity was superior to Islam. Thus the West failed to make an
impression upon a society which until the second quarter of the eighteenth century was relatively prosperous, reasonably well ordered, and united by a devotion to Shiism and by that peculiar cultural cohesion which is the distinguishing mark of Iranian civilization.
