SAEDNEWS: In this photo, you can see one of the classrooms of Dar al-Fonun, located in the heart of the Naser Khosrow neighborhood.
According to the History and Culture Service of Saed News, let’s imagine we’ve traveled back in time—about a hundred years ago, just after the end of World War I. A group of teenagers sits in a classroom at Dar al-Funun, Iran’s first modern higher education school, which Amir Kabir had founded more than half a century earlier with the dream of bringing new sciences to the country. They are absorbed in learning. The teacher stands before them, delivering a lesson—perhaps in mathematics, medicine, engineering, or history. Above them hangs a large portrait of Ahmad Shah Qajar.
Despite the terrible famine that had only recently passed, despite the political turmoil leading up to the coup of 1920 and the imminent end of the Qajar dynasty, despite the hunger and insecurity that spared few families, these students listen with such focus and precision that it is as if the world beyond the classroom walls is completely calm, safe, and prosperous. As if no wars had been fought, no famine had brought people to their knees, and no conspiracies were brewing behind palace doors.
Let’s imagine it this way: sometimes it’s better to know less, ask less, and live more freely. In these turbulent times, ignorance—or at least closing one’s eyes to some truths—can be the only way to breathe, study, laugh, and keep hope alive.
(Circa 1920–1921, Tehran – Dar al-Funun classroom)
