The talk is an exploration of how early-nineteenth-century Iranian travelers interpreted European "progress" and its constituent requirements for a given society. It demonstrates that for the early-nineteenth-century Iranian traveler-observers, certain sociopolitical developments in Europe had resulted in advances in technology, education, and military for European monarchs. Without promoting a dichotomy between a "superior" European civilization and an "inferior" Iranian or Islamic civilization, these Iranians tried to understand how some of the European advances could also be achieved in Iran and the Islamic lands. They called these advances “taraqqi” (progress) and presented this progress within an Islamic and Iranian interpretative framework to promote the feasibility of adopting certain social, political, and technological developments of Europe in Iran and the Islamic lands as well. In this way, the paper challenges assumptions that Middle Eastern or Iranian intellectuals believed in an inherent lack or inferiority between their own civilization and that of Europe, and moreover, it examines the intellectual legacy of early-nineteenth-century Iranian travel writers, a topic that has not been attended to adequately by the current scholarship.