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Nizārī Ismailis: History, Geography, and Beliefs
Podcast 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… — read more
The Occupation Myth
Podcast 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… — read more
Pakistan Between Riyadh and Tehran: Military Ally, Peacemaker
Podcast 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… — read more
The Manufactured Mirror and the Curated Outrage
Podcast 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… — read more
Iran’s Unfinished Reckoning
Podcast 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… — read more
The Ordinary Apocalypse
Podcast 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… — read more
Without the Adjectives: What the Evidence Reveals About Pahlavi’s Political Project
Podcast 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… — read more
The Zwartboek Mirror
Podcast 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… — read more
War Unseen, War Unleashed
Podcast 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… — read more
The House Slave at the Microphone
Podcast 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… — read more
