230 DESTINY DISRUPTED
kingdom, and Sunni neighbors such as the Uzbeks and the Afghans broke
into the kingdom to wreak terrible havoc.
When the smoke cleared the Safavids were gone. In their place, stood a
new family monarchy. Nominally, this so-called Qajar dynasty ruled the
shrinking country of Iran for the next 131 years. (It was still "Persia'' to Eu-
ropeans, but locals generally were calling the country Iran by this point, al-
though the name did not switch at any one moment: both names go back
to ancient times.) Under the Qajar kings, the disturbing trends of Safavid
times became the ordinary, accepted order of things. The national armies
were riddled with European advisers and officers. The ulama were chroni-
cally at odds with the throne. Repelled by foreign influences at court, these
ulama set themselves up as guardians of traditional Islamic culture, to
which the lower and middle classes were still wedded. The kings were gen-
erally lazy, rapacious, shortsighted, and weak. Europeans pulled the strings
that made these puppets jerk and squeak in a most lifelike manner.
Europeans never invaded Persia, never made concerted war on it. They
just came to sell, to buy, to work, to "help." But there they were when
things came apart. And like opportunistic viruses that lurk in the body un-
noticed but flourish into illness when the immune system breaks down,
the Europeans flowed into whatever cracks opened up in the fragmenting
society, growing ever more powerful as the cracks grew wider, until at last
they were in command.
Europeans pretty much failed to notice they were taking over Persia;
and that's partly because there was no "they." Westerners came to Persia
from various European countries, and Persians were not the enemy to
them but the backdrop. The enemy, for each group of Europeans, was an-
other group of Europeans. The British, the French, the Russians, the
Dutch and others kept moving into power vacuums in Persia not so much
to conquer Persia as to block other Europeans from conquering Persia. The
rivalry eventually boiled down to Russia versus Great Britain, and to un-
derstand this competition, one must factor in the thunderous events hap-
pening further east, in the last of those three big Islamic Empires, the land
of the Moghuls.
In the Moghul empire the core contradiction had always been Hindus ver-
sus Muslims. Akbar the Great had worked out a sort of accommodation,