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The Rock and the Library
Podcast Date: 13/09/2003 | Photo: Mohammad Mahmoudi |Copyright: © ACHB On the inscription of Alamut, and the inheritance the citation does and does not name The item took a few minutes. On Sunday, in Busan, the World Heritage Committee inscribed Alamut Castle and six associated fortifications – Lambesar, Navizaršāh, Šams Kelāyeh, Qosṭinlār, Širkūh and… — read more
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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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The Flag in the Stands: On the Monarchist Abuse of the Lion and Sun
PodcastThe Lion and Sun has been systematically claimed by Iran’s monarchist restoration movement, which deploys it as a pre-Islamic or anti-Islamic identity marker — a visual shorthand for the proposition that authentic Iranian identity is secular and fundamentally in tension with Shi’i Islam. This is not an interpretation of history; it is a confiscation of… — 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
