The Architecture of Cruelty
Podcast 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… — read more
The Thesis Without a Scaffold
Podcast 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… — read more
When Language Fails: Vulgarity, Silence and the Unfinished Conversation
Podcast 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… — read more
Signal Through the Blackout
Podcast 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… — read more
Finding Light in the Darkness
Podcast 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… — read more
Our Future Is Not Their Past
Podcast 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… — read more
Beyond the Pause
Podcast 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… — read more
Voice to What End?
Podcast 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… — read more
The Iranian Abroad: A Shift the Diaspora Has Not Registered
Podcast 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… — read more
The Normalcy We Must Defend
Podcast 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… — read more
