Daryoush Mohammad Poor is an Associate Professor at The Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS) in London. A scholar whose intellectual range spans international relations, contemporary political theory, political philosophy, Islamic studies, and Middle East politics, he brings both academic rigour and lived experience to his writing on Iran.

Born in Mashhad, Iran, Mohammad Poor studied mathematics at Ferdowsi University before pursuing his graduate studies at the University of Westminster, where he earned an MA in International Relations and Contemporary Political Theory (2004) and a PhD in Political and Social Studies (2012). He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (King’s College London) and serves as editor of the Ismaili Heritage Series.

His published works include Authority without Territory: The Aga Khan Development Network and the Ismaili Imamate (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Command and Creation: A Shi’i Cosmological Treatise (Bloomsbury, 2021), and The First Aga Khan: Memoirs of the 46th Ismaili Imam (I.B. Tauris, 2018, co-edited with Daniel Beben). He has also translated significant works into Persian, including Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights and Ann Elizabeth Mayer’s Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics.

In March 2026, as war engulfed Iran and its political landscape fractured along old and new fault lines, Mohammad Poor began writing a series of urgent political essays — published on LinkedIn and his long-running Malakut blog (blog.malakut.org) — that sought to hold a mirror to both the Iranian regime and the diaspora opposition. Written in the heat of crisis yet with the measured voice of a scholar who refuses to surrender nuance to outrage, these essays constitute the collection you now hold.

He lives and works in London.