Welcome to the Twin Wisdoms podcasts. Listen to audio companions to our essays — thoughtful commentary and readings on diaspora, politics, and civilisation.
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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.…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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,…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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,”…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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…
Podcast
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.…
Podcast
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…
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…