You should probably try to specify a time before 1948, since the Middle East has a long and complicated history that can't really be summarized in a Reddit post.

Before I answer (I have a pretty basic understanding of Middle Eastern history), I do have a few queries to make my answer more succinct.

What do you mean by conflictual? Anti-Western aggression? Civil wars? Violence towards non-Muslims in the region? Sunni/Shiite antagonism?

I'm assuming by Middle East, you're also including places such as North Africa. Is this an accurate assessment?

I guess I really just want you to clarify your question.

The tail end of the Qajar dynasty in Iran could be summarized as incredibly tumultuous. By the early twentieth century, the government lacked central authority over the country, giving way to the constitutional revolution in 1905. To be clear, the country was in such a dire state, it could not, among other things, actively protect its Northwestern borders in the face of spillover violence from the Armenian Genocide. Their rule ultimately came to a close with the coup and rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi (not to be confused with his son and successor, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi). In the decades to follow, leading up to 1948, the country fought against an Allied invasion and later fended off several attempts by the Soviet Union to absorb parts of Northwestern Iran.

With all that said, I'm not even really scratching the surface. There is a lot more to twentieth century Iran than my post lets on, but the general takeaway should be that-- at least in the context of modern Iran-- the region has had an incredibly rocky past.

Sorry, we don't allow throughout history questions. These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again.