# The Twin Wisdoms

> Critical Observations


## Posts

- [Breaking the Mirror](https://twinwisdoms.org/breaking-the-mirror/): A Verse, and a Warning Nizami Ganjavi wrote, in the Makhzan al-Asrar eight centuries ago, that when the mirror has shown your reflection true, you should break yourself, for breaking the mirror is the mistake.[1] Dariush Eghbali opened the note accompanying his new song with that couplet, then did more or less what it asks. He did not accuse the Islamic Republic of anything it has not already been accused of many times over. He turned the mirror on the society that opposes it, including the part of that society now sitting in exile, and asked whether some of what it […]
- [In Memoriam: Dr Jalal Badakhchani (1941–2026)](https://twinwisdoms.org/n-memoriam-jalal-badakhchani/): Dr Jalal Badakhchani – in full, Sayyid Jalal Hosseini Badakhchani – passed away peacefully in London on the morning of 11 August 2026, aged 85. He was the foremost scholar of the Persian Ismaili literature of the Alamūt period, and it is primarily through his editions and translations that the writings of the Ismaili da‘i Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 1274 CE) became legible to the modern reader. (First published on the IIS website) Early life and education Dr Badakhchani came from a family that has served the Ismaili Imamat for generations: his father, Sayyid Sulayman Shah Hosseini Badakhchani, was the official and most learned religious […]
- [Neither Rogue Nor Obedient](https://twinwisdoms.org/neither-rogue-nor-obedient/): Two positions on artificial intelligence, and the question both leave standing In Brief The alarm has hold of something the reassurance waves away. Artificial intelligence is an invention rather than a discovery, and the opacity is real. That is a reason to bind the makers, and it is no evidence that nobody is in control: nature cannot be held to account, whereas a firm can. The reassurance is right that there is no volition and no malice here. It is wrong to say that these systems merely follow programming direction. Nobody wrote sycophancy; it emerged from optimising for human approval, and […]
- [The Middle Nobody Counts](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-middle-nobody-counts/): On Radio Farda’s Pārāgrāf-i Avval, the Madani–Bayat correspondence, and the part of Iran that no one has counted Radio Farda’s programme Pārāgrāf-i Avval, presented by Muhammad Zarghami, put the correspondence between Saeed Madani and Asef Bayat to Jalal Idjadi and to me. The exchange has run in Naqd-i Iqtiṣād-i Siyāsī since Urdībihisht 1403, begun while Madani was held in Evin. Madani calls the present condition a national trauma. He sets the memory of the Dey killings beside inflation, poverty, unemployment, and the erosion of the middle class. He cites at least 10,538 people detained, most of them between eighteen and thirty, […]
- [Islam or Muslims?](https://twinwisdoms.org/islam-or-muslims/): Image: folio from a manuscript of the Quran, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto An argument is circulating, and it deserves a straight answer. It runs like this. A Muslim intellectual, pressed about the crimes of the Islamic Republic, replies that there is no such thing as Islam, only Muslims. His interlocutor finds the reply evasive and comes back in three moves. First, the distinction is incoherent: if there is no Islam, there can be no Muslims either, since a Muslim is by definition a follower of Islam. Second, the historical record is full of crimes committed by Muslims, and the young men […]
- [Who Holds the Rope](https://twinwisdoms.org/who-holds-the-rope/): On capital punishment in Iran, the argument the opposition will not make, and the one the Muslim tradition already supplies An iron scaffold went up in Alikhani Square in Isfahan on Monday night. People gathered. There were scuffles with the guards. In the early hours of Tuesday, Amirhossein Safari and Abolfazl Sepahi were hanged in public, and by breakfast the clip was everywhere.[1] I want to start somewhere less comfortable than the timelines. Capital punishment did exist before the revolution. Capital punishment was not invented by the Islamic Republic. Iran’s first penal code dates to 1926, a secondary code with no […]
- [The Rock and the Library](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-rock-and-the-library/): Date: 13/09/2003 | Photo: Mohammad Mahmoudi |Copyright: © ACHB  On the inscription of Alamut, and the inheritance the citation does and does not name The item took a few minutes. On Sunday, in Busan, the World Heritage Committee inscribed Alamut Castle and six associated fortifications – Lambesar, Navizaršāh, Šams Kelāyeh, Qosṭinlār, Širkūh and Ilān – on the World Heritage List. It is Iran’s thirtieth cultural property. The nomination file runs to volumes and the citation runs to a paragraph, and the paragraph contains a sentence that eight centuries of writing about that rock has declined to write. From the late […]
- [Three Thousand Five Hundred](https://twinwisdoms.org/three-thousand-five-hundred/): On 25 July 2026, Morad Vaisi published a number. Vaisi is senior Iran analyst at Iran International and host of its flagship politics programme. Since January he has been collecting the names of the dead and reading them aloud, live, hour after hour. It is honourable work. He has done it under pressure, and he says he will carry on. The number is 3,500. Set it beside what his own network broadcast in January: more than 30,000 killed in two days. That figure crossed the world in an afternoon. It was quoted in op-eds and in parliaments, by people demanding that […]
- [The Love of the Microphone](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-love-of-the-microphone/): On Masih Alinejad’s theatre of grief, the platforms that reward it, and the war she now says she never wanted. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the Partido Popular, greets Masih Alinejad before the ‘Mujeres libres’ session at the Congreso de los Diputados, Madrid, 5 March 2026. Credit: EFE / Borja Sánchez-Trillo, via Infobae. On 21 July the mayor of New York conceded on video what his lawyers had told him: the city has no independent authority to execute the International Criminal Court’s warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu, should he arrive for the General Assembly in September. The next day Masih Alinejad answered […]
- [Somebody Else’s 1945](https://twinwisdoms.org/somebody-elses-1945/): On the Nazi analogy, the Iranians who reach for it from abroad, and the state that made it plausible Aftermath of overnight US strikes on a bridge in Bandar Khamir county, near the Strait of Hormuz, 17 July 2026. Screengrab from footage broadcast by Iran’s IRINN state television, made available via AFPTV. Credit: AFP / IRINN, via Al Jazeera. The strikes resumed on 6 July. Bridges in Hormozgan. A pumping station at Jask, and twenty villages left without water. By Sunday it was the ninth consecutive night. And across my timeline, from Toronto and Stockholm and Los Angeles, one sentence keeps […]
- [Nobody Wants to Go to War](https://twinwisdoms.org/nobody-wants-to-go-to-war/): On a corridor interview of 21 July 2026, and the verb that carries a war A journalist puts one question to three United States senators: the President has formally told Congress that the war with Iran has resumed. What do you make of it? The exchange, filmed by Marzia Hussaini and posted to X on 21 July 2026, runs to about two minutes. Three answers; three different objects of attention. Cory Booker answers with cost and strategy – a failed war doubled down on, an upended economy, billions spent without objectives. Ruben Gallego answers with law. The war never stopped, he […]
- [The Table and the Ledger](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-table-and-the-ledger/): On Sada Cumber’s ‘Iran at the Crossroads’ (National Security Institute), and what would tell us the turn is real A crossroads implies a traveller. Somebody walked to get there, at a price, and somebody now has to choose a road. Sada Cumber has the right image for this moment, and I want to take it at its word. On the substance we are close. Iran’s durable asset is its people, and a policy organised around the nuclear file will win the argument it is having while losing the one that matters. When Sada writes that ‘governments negotiate agreements, but societies determine […]
- [The Ledger of Ali Khamenei](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-ledger-of-ali-khamenei/): Ali Khamenei held the office of Supreme Leader for thirty-six years. He inherited a republic that was bruised, broke, and at war, and he left behind a state whose legitimacy had been hollowed from within – by his own hand, and often against his own stated interests. The record is long enough to sort. He began by surviving. Khomeini had filled the office by force of personality; Khamenei, a mid-ranking cleric with a thin scholarly reputation, could only fill it by institutional manoeuvre. He built a network of appointees across the judiciary, the Guardian Council, the security apparatus, and the Friday […]
- [Nobody Is Free to Stay](https://twinwisdoms.org/nobody-is-free-to-stay/): The programme opens in Istanbul, at a reading of the Shahnameh. Fifty thousand couplets, a thousand years old, recited aloud by Iranians far from home. Within two minutes the frame is set: this, we are told, is where Iranians go now, as disillusionment with Islam takes hold. ‘War, God and the Islamic Republic’, an edition of Heart and Soul presented by Emily Wither, broadcast on the BBC World Service on 18 June 2026 and released as a podcast the following day, then spends half an hour with four anonymous voices inside Iran, describing what decades of state religion have done to […]
- [The Grief You Can Afford](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-grief-you-can-afford/): On Reza Pahlavi’s sudden mourning for the conscripts of Bampour, and the children of Minab he was willing to call a price This week you asked Iran’s soldiers not to die for the Islamic Republic. You mourned the conscripts killed at the Bampour garrison. You told their parents to keep their sons at home. You thanked the people of Iranshahr and Zahedan who queued to give blood for the wounded. And you said the regime imposed this war on the nation, so the blood is on the regime’s hands. Some of that is true. The Islamic Republic does hide its commanders […]
- [Bargaining by Fire](https://twinwisdoms.org/bargaining-by-fire/): The funeral has ended, the firing has resumed, and the next fortnight will decide whether the June understanding can be rebuilt. It can, and it probably will be. Ayatollah Khamenei was buried in Mashhad today, at the close of a six-day procession through Tehran, Qom, Najaf and Karbala that his state mounted, at great cost, as a demonstration of survival. The same week produced the sharpest exchange of fire since the June memorandum: shooting around tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, two nights of American strikes on Bandar Abbas, Bushehr and the Qeshm coast, Revolutionary Guard missiles against American bases in […]
- [The Flag in the Stands: On the Monarchist Abuse of the Lion and Sun](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-flag-in-the-stands-on-the-monarchist-abuse-of-the-lion-and-sun/): The Lion and Sun has been systematically claimed by Iran’s monarchist restoration movement, which deploys it as a pre-Islamic or anti-Islamic identity marker — a visual shorthand for the proposition that authentic Iranian identity is secular and fundamentally in tension with Shi’i Islam. This is not an interpretation of history; it is a confiscation of it. The emblem’s most consequential chapter is precisely Shi’i: from the Seljuq tribal banners where the lion first appeared, through the Safavid state that made Shi’ism Iran’s official religion and placed the Lion and Sun at the centre of its sovereignty, to its formal ratification by […]
- [A Proxy for Thought](https://twinwisdoms.org/a-proxy-for-thought/): The word arrives early and does its work quickly. In almost every account of the latest exchange of fire between Iran and Israel, “proxy” appears within the first breath — Iran’s proxy forces, its proxy militias, its proxy war waged through others while its own people go neglected. The word is meant to settle the matter. A state that fights through surrogates, the reasoning runs, is a state that cares nothing for its citizens and everything for its foreign clients; it is therefore irresponsible, illegitimate, and ripe for removal. The conclusion is delivered the moment the word is spoken. This is […]
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- [Not by the Back Door](https://twinwisdoms.org/not-by-the-back-door/):   Pluralism, universalism, and the difference that both relativism and perennialism would erase When I argued recently that pluralism is not relativism, a reader replied with a smile: “Unless you bring in universalism through the back door.” The objection is sharp, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one. If pluralism holds that some readings are better than others, that a claim can simply be wrong, that a line runs between truth and falsehood — then it must be appealing to a standard. And a standard that binds across traditions looks like nothing so much as a universal. […]
- [Pluralism Is Not Relativism](https://twinwisdoms.org/pluralism-is-not-relativism/): Sada Cumber is right that Magnifica Humanitas is “a strategic signal,” and right again that “societies cannot be secured by capability alone.” Where I want to press him is on the post-fact ground he names so well. He warns that AI-generated disinformation “attacks the social fabric,” that it “corrodes trust, fractures shared reality.” True. But the most dangerous machine in a post-truth world is not the one that lies to us. It is the one that agrees with us. The systems we now use are built to satisfy. They mirror the vocabulary and the framework of whoever sits in front of […]
- [Trading in Pain, After the Ceasefire](https://twinwisdoms.org/trading-in-pain-after-the-ceasefire/): Revisiting the Moral Market Where I Started In March, before the ceasefire, I argued that the gap between Iranians inside the country and those abroad isn’t really a political disagreement. It’s a clash of two lives that don’t translate into each other. What I called the “moral market” was the result: a place where pain becomes a kind of currency, and recognising the other side’s pain feels like losing some of your own. The cure I offered was simple — try to see the other reality without giving up your own. I still think the picture was mostly right. The cure […]
- [Whose Infrastructure, Whose Celebration?](https://twinwisdoms.org/whose-infrastructure-whose-celebration/): On Reza Pahlavi’s Odesa narrative and the laundering of a war’s human cost In Odesa last week — at a forum convened on the principle that bombing a nation’s grid, ports and apartment blocks is a crime against that nation — Reza Pahlavi reportedly told his hosts that the Iranian people celebrated when “the regime’s infrastructure” was struck by the United States and Israel. Three innocuous words are made to carry an enormous burden. They deserve to be unpacked, because beneath them sits a documented record that international bodies, human-rights organisations and Western newspapers — not the Islamic Republic’s propagandists — […]
- [Tools Don’t Flatter](https://twinwisdoms.org/tools-dont-flatter/): Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical and the Regulation of AI’s Makers Presenting his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, Pope Leo XIV called for artificial intelligence to be “disarmed” — a word, he conceded, that was strong, but deliberately chosen to awaken consciences and to release the technology from the mentality of armed competition that has shaped its development.[1] That call names something real: a technological order driven more by rivalry than by care for the human person. And the encyclical does not stop at metaphor: it rejects outright any view of the […]
- [Dead Air: A Throne on Subscription](https://twinwisdoms.org/dead-air-a-throne-on-subscription/):  Manoto, Foreign Money, and the Constituency That Was Never There When Manoto television ceased satellite broadcasting on 31 January 2024, the event was widely read as a financial failure, and the channel’s subsequent history did little to dislodge that reading. A diminished online operation followed; then, in February 2026, even live programming was suspended after the channel was evicted from its London premises — its landlord having been warned by UK counter-terrorism police of a credible threat. These two events have distinct proximate causes — one commercial, one a security eviction — and an honest account must keep them apart. […]
- [‌Built from Scratch](https://twinwisdoms.org/built-from-scratch/):  On the Equation That Turns a Nation Into Acceptable Rubble Do we distinguish between Iran and the Islamic Republic? Are they one and the same? It sounds like a pedant’s quarrel, a hotspot for social media. It is not. And you may be surprised which side of it you find yourself on. Begin with the historical fact, because it settles less than it seems to. To say Iran is the same as the Islamic Republic is chronologically incoherent. Iran — as a country, a nation, an idea — existed long before 1979. The Islamic Republic is a model of governance, […]
- [The Abdication of Critical Thinking: Why Scholars Abandon Rigour in Politics](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-abdication-of-critical-thinking-why-scholars-abandon-rigour-in-politics/):  A paradox haunts contemporary intellectual life, one that demands we examine ourselves with uncomfortable honesty. Here stands a senior scholar in the humanities—trained in textual analysis, ethics, even mysticism—whose political views are so flawed, so deeply troubling, that we find ourselves asking: where did the critical thinking go? And more disturbingly: how did these very people convince themselves they are more rigorous, more radical, more intellectually honest than those who disagree with them? The pattern is consistent and observable. In seminars on epistemology, these figures demonstrate relentless criticality. They deconstruct texts, interrogate assumptions, demand proof for every claim. But turn […]
- [The Architecture of Cruelty](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-architecture-of-cruelty/): SAVAK, State Torture, and the Dangerous Nostalgia of Forgetting In cities across the West—Los Angeles, London, Munich, Regensburg—a strange phenomenon has taken root. At demonstrations ostensibly calling for a free Iran, young men and women don SAVAK T-shirts, wave the emblem of the Shah’s secret police, and chant slogans glorifying a security apparatus that tortured, disappeared, and destroyed tens of thousands of their own countrymen. Most of these demonstrators were not born during the Pahlavi era. They have no memory of the screams that echoed through Evin and Komiteh. Their nostalgia is not for something they experienced but for a fantasy […]
- [The Thesis Without a Scaffold](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-thesis-without-a-scaffold/): A Critique of the Iran Ledger’s “Sanctions as Market Control” I have spent the better part of a decade building an analytical framework that demands one thing above all else: that claims earn their keep. Every concept I deploy—the emergency mind, the occupation myth, the algorithmic militia—is coined, defined, stress-tested against counter-examples, and offered up for falsification. This is not stylistic preference; it is methodological discipline. It is the difference between analysis and assertion, between scholarship and commentary. When I encounter work that fails to meet this standard, I say so—not out of hostility, but out of respect for the questions […]
- [When Language Fails: Vulgarity, Silence and the Unfinished Conversation](https://twinwisdoms.org/when-language-fails-vulgarity-silence-and-the-unfinished-conversation/): I was there—present online—when Dr. Fatemeh Sadeghi and Hossein Hamdieh, speaking from London and Tehran respectively during Iran’s internet blackout, began discussing something that has haunted me for months. An interrogator assigned to question young protesters arrested during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising had confessed his bewilderment. He could not understand what they were saying. Not their demands—those were simple enough. He meant something more unsettling: their words, spoken in Persian, had become incomprehensible to him. The language itself had fractured. Sadeghi crystallised what this meant. When the shared medium of language collapses, politics becomes impossible. What remains is not debate […]
- [Signal Through the Blackout](https://twinwisdoms.org/signal-through-the-blackout/): In a recent ninety-minute conversation with Sobhan Yahyaei for the Farsi Panorama podcast — the inaugural episode of a season titled Life in a Time of War — I tried to think aloud about the trilateral confrontation involving Iran, the United States and Israel, the predicament of the Iranian diaspora, and the cultural sediment from which a future Iran might be reassembled. What follows is a written distillation of that conversation, sharpened where the medium of speech compelled compression, and folded into the longer arc of arguments I have been pursuing in The Twin Wisdoms. A Cold Spring It was the […]
- [Finding Light in the Darkness](https://twinwisdoms.org/finding-light-in-the-darkness/): The following is the full text of my talk delivered at the 13th Annual Iftar at Alyth Synagogue in North London on 8th March. It was offered in the moments before Jewish, Christian, and Muslim guests broke bread together at Iftar — an occasion made particularly poignant by a broader climate in which conflict had created an atmosphere of suspicion and unease. I endeavoured to speak candidly, while remaining true to my humanist sensibilities. Altyh Iftar Event | 8 March 2026 Bismiallah-ir Rahman-ir Rahim Rabbi Colin Eimer, My fellow brothers and sisters in humanity and in faith, Thank you for inviting […]
- [Our Future Is Not Their Past](https://twinwisdoms.org/our-future-is-not-their-past/): Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, MS arabe 5847, folio 1v. Illuminator: Yaḥyā ibn Maḥmūd al-Wāsiṭī. Baghdad, 634 AH / 1237 CE. On a Pluralist, Non-Eurocentric Modernity A Sentence That Carries the Argument There is one sentence that has come to carry the whole of my argument about modernity, and I want to put it down at the outset rather than build up to it. Our future is not their past. Our future is the intelligent use of our past and of anybody else’s past, the responsible and critical creation and invention in the present, and the intelligent prediction of […]
- [Beyond the Pause](https://twinwisdoms.org/beyond-the-pause/): Image: Delegates during the Islamabad talks on the US–Iran track, April 2026. Credit: Reuters.  A Dialogue with Ambassador Sada Cumber Ambassador Sada Cumber’s recent essay for the National Security Institute, “Dialogue to Truce: Pakistan’s Role in Reshaping the Regional Structure,” reads, at its best, as a quiet warning. He argues that what we are witnessing across West Asia is not stability but a pause — a breathing space purchased by pressure, not produced by structure. Ceasefires hold for a season; chokepoints remain latent; dialogue dissipates unless it accumulates into institutions. The core proposition — that durable outcomes require continuity, coordination and […]
- [Voice to What End?](https://twinwisdoms.org/voice-to-what-end/): The placard is simple, humane, and emotionally irresistible: “Be their voice.” At first glance, who could object? If people are censored, jailed, beaten, or killed, should they not be heard? Of course they should. But politics begins precisely where sentiment ends. The real question is not whether Iranians should be heard. The real question is this: heard by whom, for what end, and translated into what programme of action? This is where the slogan begins to darken. Too often, in the online activism of a segment of the Iranian diaspora, “be their voice” does not mean careful solidarity, disciplined witness, or […]
- [The Iranian Abroad: A Shift the Diaspora Has Not Registered](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-iranian-abroad-a-shift-the-diaspora-has-not-registered/): A pro-monarchy demonstrator in Glasgow holds a placard that includes a reference to SAVAK. The event, on February 28, 2026, was a rally celebrating US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Over the past year, the global perception of Iranians has shifted in a direction that neither passport indices nor the slogan-politics of a loud exilic faction can register. Under sanctions, bombardment and the machinery of media caricature, ordinary Iranians have conducted themselves with a composure that Europeans and North Americans have begun, quietly, to notice. This essay argues that the shift is real; that the myth of a lost universal esteem — that […]
- [The Normalcy We Must Defend](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-normalcy-we-must-defend/): Hazrati Alley in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, April 2011—captured just before the most stringent international sanctions were imposed. The image shows the bustling daily commerce and the civilian economic fabric whose protection is at the heart of the argument that follows. On Sanctions, the Temptation of a War Economy, and the Quiet Labour of Breaking the Cycle A reflection on a conversation between Hossein Hamdieh and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj in the Borj series. The sanctions doctrine rests on a falsified premise. For a century, economic coercion has been justified to Western publics as an alternative to military conflict. The empirical record shows the […]
- [The Algorithmic Militia](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-algorithmic-militia/): Photo: Getty Images / CNN How Curated Certainty Replaces Political Consciousness in the Digital Diaspora A message arrived recently on social media—the kind that has become ordinary in certain corners of the Iranian diaspora. It was a response to someone questioning an unverified claim about alleged government infiltration. The reply was swift and uncompromising: first, the accusation of being a “regime stooge,” then the counter-charge that anyone defending due process must themselves be “working for the government.” No evidence was offered. No space for disagreement was acknowledged. The logic was binary and absolute: if you are not amplifying our narrative with […]
- [Authority Without Territory](https://twinwisdoms.org/authority-without-territory/): Source: Originally published in The Ismaili UK, July 2015. | View at The Institute of Ismaili Studies Author: Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Interim Head of the Constituency Studies Unit and Associate Professor at The Institute of Ismaili Studies. Abstract: This article explores the concept of authority without territory as embodied by the Ismaili Imamat. Shi’a Imami Ismaili Muslims recognize the authority of the Imams descended from the Prophet Muhammad’s household (ahl al-bayt), through Hazrat Bibi Fatimah and Hazrat Imam Ali. The doctrine of Imamat is central to the community’s identity, emphasizing the Imam’s role as the spiritual leader and interpreter of […]
- [Nizārī Ismailis: History, Geography, and Beliefs](https://twinwisdoms.org/nizari-ismailis-history-geography-beliefs/): Source: Illinois Geographer, Vol. 65 (Fall/Spring 2023, No. 1-2) Abstract: This article examines the history, geographical distribution, and doctrinal evolution of the Nizārī Ismāʿīlī community, tracing their succession through Ismāʿīl ibn Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and the establishment of the Fatimid Caliphate. The study explores key historical periods including the Alamūt era under Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ, the Mongol invasion, and the community’s subsequent dispersal and transformation. Download PDF Key Topics Covered Historical timeline: Fatimid Imam-Caliphs and Nizārī Imams of Alamūt The fortress period at Alamūt under Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ (1090-1256 CE) Doctrinal evolution: Taʿlīm, Tawḥīd, Qiyāmat proclamation Transition from Neo-Platonic cosmology to Sufi-influenced thought Global […]
- [The Occupation Myth](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-occupation-myth/): Credit: Haidar Mohammed Ali / Anadolu via Reuters Connect [Note: The Reuters Connect page itself says the asset is provided by Anadolu Agency and that Reuters Connect “has not verified or endorsed the material.”] One of the lazier slogans in recent Iranian political discourse is the claim that Iran has been “occupied” because the Islamic Republic has relied on Afghan, Iraqi, Lebanese and other aligned forces beyond its borders, and at times appears to have drawn on some of these networks closer to home. The slogan is emotionally potent, especially in parts of the diaspora. It converts anger into clarity. It […]
- [Pakistan Between Riyadh and Tehran: Military Ally, Peacemaker](https://twinwisdoms.org/pakistan-between-riyadh-and-tehran-military-ally-peacemaker/): Source: PBS NewsHour / Reuters An Assessment of Strategic Contradictions and Diplomatic Opportunities The Dual-Role Paradox Pakistan’s deployment of 13,000 troops and fighter jets to Saudi Arabia on April 11, 2026—executed under the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA) signed in September 2025—has thrust Islamabad into the centre of the Iran conflict with a fundamental contradiction. Pakistan now simultaneously serves as a military guarantor of Saudi security and positions itself as a potential mediator between Riyadh and Tehran. This duality, while diplomatically precarious, reflects a strategic logic rooted in Pakistan’s unique regional position. Pakistan’s Mediating Capital Few states possess Pakistan’s combination of […]
- [The Manufactured Mirror and the Curated Outrage](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-manufactured-mirror-and-the-curated-outrage/): Members of the Iranian diaspora in Perth, Australia, holding a solidarity rally on 10 January 2026 against the Islamic Republic | Source: Wikimedia Commons | Credit: Gnangarra Listen to this essay: I have watched the Iranian diaspora move deeper into an information war that rewards certainty over truth. In that war, social media does not merely transmit opinion; it manufactures moral weather. Anger is packaged as analysis, repetition as evidence, and algorithmic virality as legitimacy. The result is a predictable compression of political judgment: every event is forced into a binary script where one camp speaks for freedom and the other […]
- [Iran's Unfinished Reckoning](https://twinwisdoms.org/droplets-seeking-a-river-shared-humanity-and-the-unfinished-project-of-iran/): Photographer: Parastoo Maleki – Unsplash A narrative essay drawn from a dialogue between Hossein Hamdieh and Daryoush Mohammad Poor The Polarised Mirror In the spring of 2026, Iran and the United States were engaged in careful, tentative diplomatic contacts—first talks in Islamabad, Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir travelling to Tehran, a fragile ceasefire still holding. That was the larger backdrop. In a quieter register, a different kind of conversation was taking place: scholars and young researchers working inside Iran—people who invite such exchanges at genuine personal risk—had arranged a dialogue with those of us in the diaspora, and they deserve full […]
- [The Ordinary Apocalypse](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-ordinary-apocalypse/): On Crossing Borders, Hearing Bombs, and the Stubborn Normality of a Nation at War Based on a first-hand wartime account from Iran by Kazeroun (@mkazeroun) on X “The evidence for a nation’s endurance is not found in its monuments but in the behaviour of its people when the monuments are burning.” The Decision to Go I travelled to Iran in the middle of a war. I returned almost exactly as a temporary ceasefire was announced. What follows is an attempt to set down what I saw, heard, and understood—written primarily for the Iranian diaspora in the West, with the frank admission […]
- [Without the Adjectives: What the Evidence Reveals About Pahlavi's Political Project](https://twinwisdoms.org/without-the-adjectives-what-the-evidence-reveals-about-pahlavis-political-project/): Introduction In my previous assessments of Reza Pahlavi’s political project, published on this blog during the 2026 US–Iran conflict, I employed polemical and emotionally charged language—characterizing Pahlavi as driven by a personal “vendetta with a flag” and deploying the postcolonial epithet “comprador intellectual” to describe his supporters. An independent methodological review of my work found that these critiques, while intellectually sophisticated in their theoretical apparatus, suffered from systematic source omissions, rhetorical overreach, and unfalsifiable framing, arguing that some aspects of my assessment are compromised unless they can be revisited rigorously. As a critical rationalist, my commitment is to constantly subject my […]
- [The Zwartboek Mirror](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-zwartboek-mirror/): On Dutch Collaboration, Iranian Compradors, and the Price of Borrowed Salvation Still from Black Book (Zwartboek, 2006), dir. Paul Verhoeven. Rachel Stein, a Jewish resistance operative, navigates a world where collaborators and liberators wear indistinguishable faces. Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (2006) opens a wound the Dutch spent sixty years bandaging. Set in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, it follows Rachel Stein—a Jewish woman who infiltrates the Gestapo for the resistance—only to be betrayed by the very patriots she served. When liberation arrives, the crowd does not distinguish between genuine collaborators and the falsely accused. Rachel is stripped, doused in excrement, forced to sing […]
- [War Unseen, War Unleashed](https://twinwisdoms.org/war-unseen-war-unleashed/): Photographer/Creator: Levi Meir Clancy / Source: Unsplash The loudest war drums in the diaspora are often beaten by people with no skin in the game at all. No mother in Tehran waiting through blackouts. No brother in Isfahan tracking sirens. No daughter in Shiraz sleeping under glass that could shatter at dawn. Yet they speak with theatrical certainty, as if missiles are aimed at their own roof. This is not courage. It is performance. What we are watching is shameful hypocrisy: political cosplay disguised as principle. Some commentators have long ago moved every intimate tie out of Iran, but still speak […]
- [The House Slave at the Microphone](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-house-slave-at-the-microphone/): Credit: © ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Live News On the Comprador Character in the Iranian Diaspora and the Collapse of Borrowed Salvation A Character Type, Not a Person Every imperial project produces its own native chorus—voices from the colonised world who sing the coloniser’s hymn in an accent the metropole finds authentic and therefore useful. Hamid Dabashi, in Brown Skin, White Masks (2011), calls them comprador intellectuals: a structurally produced character type whose function is to provide ideological cover for the power dismantling her homeland. Malcolm X named the same figure with greater economy: the house slave who, when the […]
- [A Vendetta with a Flag](https://twinwisdoms.org/a-vendetta-with-a-flag/): Alain ROLLAND © European Union 2023, Licensed under CC BY 4.0 Reza Pahlavi wants his throne back, and he is willing to see Iran broken to get it. For more than four decades, from the safety of American exile, the last scion of the Pahlavi dynasty has waged a campaign of dynastic restoration disguised as democratic liberation — courting Washington hawks, cheering on sanctions that gut Iranian livelihoods, and lending his name to military scenarios that would reduce the country his grandfather built to rubble. In recent months he has called for “humanitarian intervention” to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, declared that […]
- [The Copernican Revolution of the Iranian Mind](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-copernican-revolution-of-the-iranian-mind/): Hamid Dabashi on Sovereignty, Selfhood, and the End of Western Validation Based on a conversation between Hossein Hamdieh and Hamid Dabashi The Day After the Ceasefire On the Wednesday after the ceasefire was announced, Hossein Hamdieh sat in a repurposed factory near Azadi Square in Tehran—a building that had once housed industrial machinery and now served as a hub for young entrepreneurs and start-up founders. The irony was not lost on him. For weeks, the skies over the Iranian capital had rained ordnance. Inside, the instruments of a fragile future hummed on. Across the Atlantic, in New York, the Columbia University […]
- [Wounded, Not Defeated: On the Endurance of a People and the Failure of Shortcuts](https://twinwisdoms.org/wounded-not-defeated-on-the-endurance-of-a-people-and-the-failure-of-shortcuts/): Chah Kouran Caravanserai, a Qajar era brick building visible from the road while driving. This is a response to a comment by Kayvan Hosseini, a brilliant and intelligent journalist at BBC Persian, whose interventions are generally sharp, disciplined, and to the point. Precisely for that reason, his recent formulation merits serious engagement. In this instance, however, I find his conclusion too unrealistic. It compresses history, underestimates structural constraints, and implicitly searches for an easy and rapid political resolution to a problem that has never admitted such solutions. Iran’s crises were not born overnight, and they will not be resolved through the […]
- [The Man With No Alternative](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-man-with-no-alternative/): AP Photo / via The Intercept On Reza Pahlavi, the Monarchist Fallacy, and the Corruption of Logic A ceasefire has come into effect between the United States, Israel, and Iran. For most rational observers, this is a moment of cautious relief—a pause in a war that has already claimed nearly two thousand lives and wounded tens of thousands more. But for one man and his devoted followers, the ceasefire is an inconvenience. At CPAC in Texas barely ten days ago, Reza Pahlavi urged America to “stay the course” in its bombardment of his own country. He wants the war to continue. […]
- [Je Me Souviens: After Mahshahr](https://twinwisdoms.org/je-me-souviens-after-mahshahr/): Photo by Jerry “Woody” / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 The Iranian diaspora keeps sending its people to the barricades. The people at the barricades keep dying. The diaspora keeps forgetting. In Quebec, every licence plate bears three words: Je me souviens—I remember. Not celebration, but defiance against erasure. Quebec remembers conquest, linguistic suppression, systematic subordination. The motto declares that historical suffering, honestly remembered, becomes resistance—and forgetting is the final capitulation. The Iranian diaspora needs its own licence plate. Not because circumstances are identical, but because the pathology is: promised liberation, betrayal, catastrophe, then insistence that the next promise will […]
- [Iran's Digital Dead End: Why Internet Shutdowns Guarantee Strategic Obsolescence](https://twinwisdoms.org/irans-digital-dead-end-why-internet-shutdowns-guarantee-strategic-obsolescence/): Credit: Georgia Tech Internet Intelligence Lab – IODA (Internet Outage Detection and Analysis), Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis Iran’s internet shutdowns during the 2025-2026 conflict have been the longest on record—38 consecutive days of near-total digital darkness. The opposition narrative is predictable: this is pure authoritarianism, full stop. The regime’s counter-narrative is equally rehearsed: national security imperatives during war. Both are dangerously incomplete. Let’s dispense with the comfortable fictions. Yes, Iran faces genuine cyber threats. When Israel demonstrates the capability to detonate pagers remotely and the United States can sabotage North Korean missile launches through cyber operations, Tehran’s paranoia has […]
- [Stone Age-ism](https://twinwisdoms.org/stone-age-ism/): The severed B1 Bridge — the tallest in the Middle East — after US-Israeli airstrikes, April 2, 2026. (Photo: NBC News) Lapis Aetatem Complicitatis — The Complicity of Wishing a Nation into Rubble One of the enduring arguments of a segment of the Iranian diaspora in favour of the illegal invasion of Iran has always been a single question: what could be worse than what is already there? They peddled it for years — reciting the Islamic Republic’s executions, its repressions, its failures — as though listing the crimes of a government were the same as consenting to the annihilation of […]
- [Why Reza Pahlavi Still Matters](https://twinwisdoms.org/why-reza-pahlavi-still-matters/): Supporters of Iran’s last crown prince, now key opposition figure, Reza Pahlavi hold a banner reading “He is coming – Make Iran Great Again” and depicting a portrait of Reza Pahlavi during a march for Iran in Paris on March 7, 2026, amid the ongoing war in the Middle East. (Photo by Lou BENOIST / AFP via Getty Images) Not as a solution for Iran, but as a symptom of a deeper political failure Reza Pahlavi remains important in Iranian political life — but not for the reasons his supporters imagine. He is important not because he represents a serious path […]
- [Observations from Inside the War](https://twinwisdoms.org/observations-from-inside-the-war/): Image credit: Photo by Iranian Red Crescent / UPI A Witness Account from the Interior of a Nation at War By Ali Abdi, revised narrative by Daryoush Mohammad Poor “The truth is that the beginning of this path lies not outside us, but within us.” — Ali Abdi ◆ ◆ ◆ I. The Landscape of the First Days It is the first days of Farvardin, the opening of the Iranian new year, the season that ought to carry with it the promise of renewal, and I have come to Tehran to buy a book. What I find is apocalyptic. The streets […]
- [At the Threshold of Surrender](https://twinwisdoms.org/at-the-threshold-of-surrender/): Image credit: Source: Unsplash On Disillusionment and the Refusal to Close the Door This piece is the product of my reflections on a voice message from a friend, a friend undergoing cancer treatment. But it captures something of what we are all going through—a particular species of exhaustion that transcends any single struggle, any single nation. What began as a meditation on one person’s pain became a window into a broader crisis of hope, one that many of us, in different ways and different contexts, are navigating. I have concluded with some observations that I hope might offer, if not answers, […]
- [Why the Case for Ceasefire Stands](https://twinwisdoms.org/why-the-case-for-ceasefire-stands/): UN Secretary-General António Guterres receives the Ataturk International Peace Prize from President Erdogan of Türkiye in Ankara. Responding to Critics with Analysis, Not Ideology The critics demand evidence, baselines, cost accounting, enforcement mechanisms. Fair enough. Here are the direct answers that prove the ceasefire argument stands on analysis, not wishful thinking. What would invalidate this position? Documented collapse of 25% of Iranian command architecture. Confirmed destruction of 40% of missile production facilities. Verifiable IRGC leadership defections. Iranian proxy forces showing 50% operational degradation. Intelligence intercepts of regime capitulation discussions. Bank runs and bread riots in major Iranian cities. None of this […]
- [Every Additional Week of Conflict Benefits Iran Strategically](https://twinwisdoms.org/every-additional-week-of-conflict-benefits-iran-strategically/): Image credit: Majid Asgaripour / WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS Why an Immediate Ceasefire Is the Only Viable Option The most plausible trajectory of the US-Israel war with Iran is not rapid victory but a grinding stalemate with growing escalation risks. Early expectations in Washington assumed that superior air power, intelligence coordination, and technological dominance would quickly break Iranian resistance. Instead, the conflict is moving in the opposite direction: costs are rising, objectives are blurring, and neither Washington nor Jerusalem can point to clear progress. The war is entering the classic danger zone where military superiority fails to translate […]
- [The Depth Illusion: How Philosophical Scaffolding Disguises the Banality of War Apologism](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-depth-illusion-how-philosophical-scaffolding-disguises-the-banality-of-war-apologism/): Image credit: Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash A Diagnostic Framework for Identifying Logical Fallacies in the Rhetoric of Humanitarian Intervention For S. S. and M. M. who steered the direction of this essay into a more constructive one. Introduction There is a genre of argumentation—increasingly prominent in debates over military intervention—that demands sustained critical scrutiny. It presents itself as philosophy: formally precise, elegantly structured, and burdened with the apparent rigour of analytic ethics. Yet beneath the technical scaffolding lies one of the most effective forms of war apologism available to educated discourse. Its danger resides not in crude […]
- [The Elegy They Earned](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-elegy-they-earned/): On the Destruction of Humanities in Iran — First by the Republic, Now by Those Who Claim to Oppose It One of the defining legacies of Ali Khamenei — the second supreme leader of the Islamic Republic — was his obsessive, decades-long campaign against the humanities and social sciences. Much of this is recorded in the social history of post-revolutionary Iran, particularly in the turbulent years following Ayatollah Khomeini’s death. The details are extensive and documented elsewhere. What matters here is the structural consequence: scholars of the humanities and social sciences came under incessant fire the moment Khamenei branded their disciplines […]
- [The Pen Against the Bomb](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-pen-against-the-bomb/): Hacking War with the Only Weapon We Have Left For S. S. who planted the seed of this essay in my mind. The Ominous Timing of War It is ominous—and it should unsettle every thinking person—that both times Iran came under invasion, Iran and the United States were in the midst of diplomatic negotiations. The Omani mediator Badr al-Busaidi had expressed optimism just one day before the war broke out, noting tangible progress toward an agreement. Diplomacy was moving. Then it was murdered. In both instances, the norms of negotiation were dishonoured by the invading party. Israel was never a direct […]
- [The Aryan Ghost: What the War on Iran Should Teach the Arab World](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-aryan-ghost-what-the-war-on-iran-should-teach-the-arab-world/): The Slogan That Should Alarm Everyone There is a slogan circulating with increasing confidence among a visible segment of the Iranian monarchist diaspora — chanted at rallies, printed on banners, amplified across social media with the fervour of a creed: “We are Aryans, not Arabs.” It is not a whisper. It is a declaration. And it should be heard — clearly, and with alarm — not only by Iranians but by every Arab government, every Muslim-majority society, and every observer of the global far right’s metastasising reach. The slogan is not incidental. It is foundational. It tells you, with remarkable economy, […]
- [Civilisational Katharsis or Resurgence of Fascism](https://twinwisdoms.org/civilisational-katharsis-or-resurgence-of-fascism/): It is now pretty established that the most dominant voice on the social media belongs to an increasingly visible faction of the supports of monarchy restoration. They most prominent quality is vulgarity in language, speech, behaviour and actions. These are all abundantly recored in voice and video. The major line of defence among the monarchist camp has been to pin all of these on infiltrators of the Islamic Republic, which does not hold much water given the significant role of the official advisors and aides of this camp. I have argued before that this is only a part – probably a […]
- [Self-Amputation as Liberation](https://twinwisdoms.org/self-amputation-as-liberation/): Something broke in Iran after 2009 — not in the corridors of power, where repression merely recalibrated, but in the interior of a society that had maintained a fragile compact with the state. The Green Movement did not fail because it was crushed. It failed because the crushing proved, beyond evasion, that the Islamic Republic regarded its own population not as a constituency but as a threat. What died that summer was the last residue of the belief that this order could be reformed from within. What replaced it was something colder: mutual estrangement. The state stopped pretending to serve the […]
- [Civilisation and Its Arsonists](https://twinwisdoms.org/civilisation-and-its-arsonists/): A Nawruz Reflection on War, Hypocrisy, and the Promise of Renewal Before I begin, allow me to share a simple thought—one expressed beautifully by the poet Pablo Neruda: you may cut all the flowers, but you cannot stop the spring from coming (“Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera”). In the Persian tradition, we echo the same truth: no matter how harsh the autumn, no matter how unforgiving the winter, the rose will return and blossom. It is inevitable. It is woven into the very rhythm of existence. And so, as we stand on the threshold of […]
- [The Iran We Still Refuse to See: A Response to The Economist](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-iran-we-still-refuse-to-see-a-response-to-the-economist/): This essay is a response to The Economist article, “Why Ali Khamenei May Have Welcomed the Nature of His Death,” published on 3 March 2026. This analysis of Khamenei’s death as a masterwork of martyrdom theatre is seductive in its neatness, but it is precisely this neatness that should give us pause. The article constructs a compelling arc — brittle regime, orchestrated sacrifice, ideological resurrection — yet in doing so it commits the error that has plagued Western analysis of Iran for decades: it mistakes a curated narrative for the whole picture. The reality on the ground is far more fractured. […]
- [Homo Exsul Furens](https://twinwisdoms.org/homo-exsul-furens/): The Raging Exile: On the Behavioural Pathology of Victim-Perpetrators A necessary preface. This essay targets no race, no ethnicity, no nation, no faith. It identifies a behavioural pattern — observable, documentable, recurring — displayed by a specific segment of political actors in their language, conduct, and digital presence. What follows is a taxonomy of behaviour, not an indictment of identity. There exists a figure in displaced communities for whom I propose the designation Homo Exsul Furens — the raging exile. Not the exile who grieves. Not the exile who labours quietly to preserve what displacement has fractured. But the exile who […]
- [The Pathology of Political Metaphor](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-pathology-of-political-metaphor/): On the Cancer of Calling Others Cancer A certain rot has taken hold of political discourse—one that begins the moment we cease to see our adversaries as human beings and begin to see them as diseases. The metaphor of cancer, that most dreaded of diagnoses, has become a favoured instrument in the rhetorical arsenal of those who wish to circumvent the difficult work of politics. The Iranian regime is cancer. The opposition is cancer. Israel is cancer. Palestine is cancer. The pattern repeats with grim predictability, and with each deployment, something essential to our humanity quietly atrophies. The Grammar of Dehumanisation […]
- [The Paradox of Expectations](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-paradox-of-expectations-a-regime-that-does-not-cooperate-with-its-own-downfall/): A Regime That Does Not Cooperate With Its Own DownfallAn Israeli journalist recently made ironic commentary on President Trump’s war strategy, capturing in a single tweet what might be called the most revealing paradox of our time. But this is not merely about Donald Trump. This is about a cognitive dissonance that has come to define large portions of the Iranian diaspora—a contradiction so fundamental that it exposes the very chasm between rhetoric and reality, between wishful thinking and strategic coherence. Over the past year, one question has echoed persistently through diaspora networks, social media platforms, and satellite television broadcasts: Why […]
- [The Skewed Lens of “The Right Side of History”](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-skewed-lens-of-the-right-side-of-history/): On the Weaponisation of Historical Morality and the Erasure of Conscience There is a phrase that circulates through political rhetoric with the confidence of an axiom and the substance of a mirage: stand on the right side of history. It is uttered with the gravity of moral certainty — by presidents and pundits, by those who wield power and those who merely perform proximity to it. It has been repeated so often, and deployed so promiscuously, that it has achieved what all effective propaganda achieves: it no longer requires justification. It simply is. And in that unchallenged existence lies its most […]
- [When the Dead Are Counted Twice: Inflated Atrocities and the Manufacture of Indifference](https://twinwisdoms.org/when-the-dead-are-counted-twice-inflated-atrocities-and-the-manufacture-of-indifference/): There is a particular cruelty in inflating the number of the dead. It does not honour the victims — it instrumentalises them. And when the inflation is eventually corrected, it does not restore credibility — it destroys it, along with every legitimate grievance buried beneath the exaggeration. This is not a hypothetical. It is a pattern with deep historical roots and a recognisable operational logic. And the recent trajectory of reporting around the January 8–9 events in Iran offers a textbook case — one that demands not merely journalistic scrutiny, but a rigorous analysis of how inflated atrocity figures function within […]
- [The Burning Building and the Monitoring Room: Iran, Diaspora, and the Moral Architecture of War](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-burning-building-and-the-monitoring-room-iran-diaspora-and-the-moral-architecture-of-war/): The fracture at the heart of the Iranian crisis is not, at its deepest level, a disagreement about strategy, ideology, or even the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. It is something far more elemental and far more difficult to resolve: a collision between two entirely different lived realities that have, over decades of displacement and repression, produced two incompatible languages, two irreconcilable hierarchies of suffering, and two mutually exclusive claims to the right to speak about what should come next. I have spent recent weeks writing about this fracture with an urgency that surprises even me — not because the underlying […]
- [When Silence Cannot Be Mistaken for Consent: A Defense of Diaspora Voice](https://twinwisdoms.org/when-silence-cannot-be-mistaken-for-consent-a-defense-of-diaspora-voice/): A thoughtful critic argues that my essay commits a fundamental inversion by shifting moral scrutiny away from the conditions producing violence in Iran and toward diaspora Iranians who speak about that violence. The critique contends that diaspora members are not detached spectators but rather members of the same society with families and personal histories inside Iran, many forced into exile by political circumstances. When internal voices are constrained by communication restrictions and internet shutdowns, diaspora communities become essential conduits for information reaching international audiences—not symptoms of moral detachment but responses to enforced silence. The critic further argues that I collapse diverse […]
- [Speculators in Suffering: The Moral Bankruptcy of Diaspora War Advocacy](https://twinwisdoms.org/speculators-in-suffering-the-moral-bankruptcy-of-diaspora-war-advocacy/): There is a peculiar species of political actor that emerges from every fractured nation—those who, having escaped the inferno, appoint themselves firefighters from across the ocean and prescribe gasoline as the cure. They populate the comment sections, the conference panels, the corridors of foreign capitals, advocating with remarkable enthusiasm for missiles to rain down on neighbourhoods they will never see reduced to rubble. John Keane, the prominent political scientist and democracy expert at Sydney University, observed in his work Violence and Democracy that “the roads through the lands of violence are typically littered with brazen lying, hubris and corpses.” Across two […]
- [While You Celebrate](https://twinwisdoms.org/while-you-celebrate/): A VOICE FROM THE FIRE: What the Diaspora Doesn’t Want to Hear “They killed 168 children in a school. They hit the school twice. TWICE.” These aren’t statistics from a news ticker. These are the words of a man whose voice cracks between fury and grief, who paid seven million tomans—money he doesn’t have—for a VPN just to tell you this. His name is Hasan Aghamiri. He’s inside Iran, under bombardment, with an eight-year prison sentence hanging over him. The Saturday the war started? That was supposed to be his court date. While you debated geopolitics from your apartment in Los […]
- [The Sanctuary of My Conscience](https://twinwisdoms.org/the-sanctuary-of-my-conscience/): I write this in English because the collapse of our shared morality is not a local tragedy; it is a human one. I am calling for a spotlight, not merely on the hypocrisy that surrounds me, but on something far more frgile: the survival of our humanity in an age of organized hate. For three years, I have lived under the shadow of a relentless execution of character. I have been the target of smear campaigns so virulent, so calculated, and so devoid of mercy that they seem to have no floor, no end, and no conscience. Friends, moved by fear […]
- [You Don’t Want Our Freedom—You Want Our Destruction](https://twinwisdoms.org/you-dont-want-our-freedom-you-want-our-destruction/): Iran has infrastructure. Iran’s infrastructure is not the Islamic Republic’s infrastructure. It’s that simple. Even if the IRGC uses the bridges, hospitals, schools, and internet, this infrastructure still belongs to Iran. Even if we call the IRGC “occupiers” (strange, isn’t it? A label Israel has worn proudly for decades now gets slapped on the IRGC through media sleight of hand!), this infrastructure still belongs to Iran. Destroying it doesn’t hurt the IRGC or the autocrats. Destroying it destroys everyone. No ifs, ands, or buts. Iran has internet. Iran’s internet gets shut down; it gets filtered. The solution is not to obliterate […]
- [Bread, Lead, and the Logic of Revenge](https://twinwisdoms.org/bread-lead-and-the-logic-of-revenge/): Think about this situation carefully—don’t run away. Be honest with yourself and with your conscience. This is not an easy test. It is not meant to be. The measure is simple and merciless: beyond our political divisions—whatever they may be—can we refuse to forget that we are human? Here is the test. Imagine you are in the middle of a war—one that has spilled out of battlefields and into cities, into ordinary civic life. You are given two real options, and the means to carry either one out. First situation: You have a weapon. More precisely, you have the means to […]
- [Trading in Pain: Inside–Outside Iran and the Emotional Market of Politics](https://twinwisdoms.org/trading-in-pain-inside-outside-iran-and-the-emotional-market-of-politics/): The fracture between Iranians living under the Islamic Republic and those in the diaspora is not, at its core, a political disagreement. It is something much older, cruder, and far more difficult to resolve: a collision between two entirely different lived realities that have, over decades, produced two incompatible languages, two irreconcilable hierarchies of suffering, and two mutually exclusive claims to the right to speak. The Iranian inside the country inhabits a world defined by the immediate and the mortal. The spectre of arbitrary arrest, economic asphyxiation, crippling sanctions, state violence, and the daily disappearance of neighbours, colleagues, and friends has, […]

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- [Political Consciousness Toolkit](https://twinwisdoms.org/political-consciousness-toolkit/): Test of Political Literacy Iran Crisis Edition This diagnostic instrument uses rigorous critical thinking to examine the internal consistency of political positions regarding Iran’s current situation. Political literacy is not measured by the positions you hold, but by your capacity to apply moral and logical standards symmetrically—to yourself, to adversaries, and to allies alike. The questions below are designed to reveal patterns of reasoning: whether your judgments shift based on who commits an act rather than the nature of the act itself, and whether abstract political commitments survive contact with their concrete implications. This is not a test of loyalty. It […]
- [Pages](https://twinwisdoms.org/pages/): About the Author About Twin Wisdoms Borj Conversations Essays Ismaili Studies Newsletter Podcasts
- [About the Author](https://twinwisdoms.org/about-the-author/): Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor Daryoush Mohammad Poor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Academic Research and Publications at The Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS) in London, where he also lectures for the Department of Graduate Studies. He served as Interim Head of Constituency Studies (2024-2026) and he is the editor of the Ismaili Heritage Series. A scholar whose intellectual range spans international relations, contemporary political theory, political philosophy, Islamic studies, Shi’i studies, and Middle East politics, he brings both academic rigour and lived experience to his writing on Iran and the wider Muslim world. Education & Credentials Born in […]
- [About Twin Wisdoms](https://twinwisdoms.org/about/): Since 2003, my Persian blog, Malakut, has served as a sanctuary for prose. This English counterpart marks a deliberate evolution: a transition from the lyrical to the logical. In an Iranian digital landscape increasingly fractured by partisan vitriol, vulgarity, and the fog of fake news, this space is a commitment to restrained, academic rigor and clear-headed policy analysis. It is more than a blog; it is a response to a crisis of critical thinking. It is time to heed the call of reason. Disclaimer: The views, opinions, and analyses expressed on this website are those of Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor, writing […]

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