As Soraya was brought up in Europe, Iran was a "strange" country to her, which the Iranian-American historian Abbas Milani argued explained her attitudes towards ordinary Iranians, which he called borderline racist. Europe was always the model for excellence in everything for her. Soraya described as Queen having to visit "hospitals, orphanages, charities, the people's quarters with their "djoubs" open to the sky, with streams of dirt water which supplied their dwellings, having first served washerwoman, tramps and dogs. Poverty and squalor. Children with rickets, ravaged women and starving old men, the filth of the alleyways where the houses are no longer houses, where poverty, real poverty prevailed".