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Nobody Is Free to Stay
Podcast 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… — read more
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Self-Amputation as Liberation
PodcastSomething 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… — read more
