The Chain Above the Chair
Podcast On what Imam Ali asked of a governor, the rules an institution writes and then steps around, and why a charitable intention repairs nothing. An institution that will not keep the rules it wrote for itself is not being flexible. It is taking itself apart, quietly, with its own hands, and it will not… — read more
The Word on the Placard
Podcast On Assal Rad’s Don’t Say Palestine, the memo that told reporters which words to avoid, and the test the book does not set for itself On 11 November 2023, on the march from Hyde Park to the American embassy, a family stood in the road holding a sheet of card. Someone had written on… — read more
Riding on the Shoulders of the Machine
Podcast AI, ego, and the question the warnings skip For some months I have been turning over a hope. People routinely outgunned before bureaucratic systems – who lose for want of the right form of words rather than the right case – might climb onto the shoulders of these machines and see over the wall.… — read more
Remigration Includes You
Podcast On the Iranians cheering Europe’s far right, the word sitting in its manifesto, and the people that word names Iranians demonstrating outside the Alte Oper, Frankfurt, 17 February 2024. One placard reads ‘Die AfD ist keine Alternative für Deutschland – AFD Wählen ist so 1933’; the Persian placards call for the end of the… — read more
Nobody Argues From Nowhere
Podcast The charge turns up again and again: a scholar is not independent, because his faith enters his work. Behind it sits an old and appealing idea, that a mind stripped of its beliefs would simply see the truth laid bare. Karl Popper called this the doctrine of manifest truth: the notion that truth, once… — read more
Far From the Mast
Podcast On the mast at Kuhestak, the map that put Tehran under a blast radius, and the test Iran International will not take A telecommunications mast stood near the shoreline at Kuhestak, in Sirik county, on the Hormozgan coast. On the evening of 1 September it was struck and came down across the road. A… — read more
Borrowed Eyes
Podcast On the two machines that manufacture Iran, the eighteen years that keep me from checking, and what Yaser Mirdamadi found when he went back. Fourth in the Narrating Iran series, drawn from Yaser Mirdamadi’s account of his return and argued by Daryoush Mohammad Poor I write about Iran from a position that is not… — read more
No Licence for Slander
Podcast On the difference between criticism and abuse, and what the Iranian diaspora has done with it It sounds like an obvious thing to say, and it is not. Telling criticism apart from cynicism takes training. It takes education. It takes a degree of self-discipline that nobody is born with and few of us are… — read more
A List Is Not a Law
Podcast On the hundred names compiled in Tehran, the accusation waiting at the other end of the flight, and the guarantee neither side is offering On Thursday morning Mohsen Namjoo put out a video saying that by the time anyone watched it he would either be in the air or already on the ground in… — read more
Two Kinds of Certainty
Podcast On the seventy-third anniversary of the 1953 coup, a reflection on the arrogance that ended Mohammad Mossadegh’s government, and the different arrogance that must not be allowed to replace it. Seventy-three years ago today, tanks reached the prime minister’s residence in Tehran and put an end to the government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The anniversary… — read more
Breaking the Mirror
Podcast 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… — read more
In Memoriam: Dr Jalal Badakhchani (1941–2026)
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.… — read more
