The Twin Wisdoms

In an Iranian digital landscape increasingly fractured by partisan vitriol, vulgarity, and the fog of fake news, this space is a commitment to restrained, academic rigor and clear-headed policy analysis. It is more than a blog; it is a response to a crisis of critical thinking. It is time to heed the call of reason. The Twin Wisdoms (twinwisdoms.org) is the English-language home for Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor’s essays and critical observations. Its sister site, Malakut (malakut.org), is his long-established Farsi-language platform, where he has published commentary and analysis for a Persian-speaking audience for many years. Both sites are authored by Dr Mohammad Poor and reflect his commitment to thoughtful, rigorous engagement with the political, intellectual, and spiritual questions of our time. The views expressed are those of the author in a personal capacity and do not represent any affiliated institution.

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  The Twin Wisdoms

  Two Kinds of Certainty

  Aug 19, 20268 min

  On the seventy-third anniversary of the 1953 coup, a reflection on the arrogance that ended Mohammad Mossadegh’s government, and the different arrogance that must not be allowed to replace it.

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  The Twin Wisdoms

  Breaking the Mirror

  Aug 18, 20267 min

  Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast A Verse, and a Warning Nizami Ganjavi wrote, in the Makhzan al-Asrar eight centuries ago, that when the mirror has shown your reflection true, you should break yourself, for breaking the mirror is the mistake. [1] Dariush Eghbali opened the note accompanying his new song with that couplet, then did more or less what it asks. He did not accuse the Islamic Republic of anything it has not already been accused of many times over. He turned the mirror on the society that opposes it, including the part of that society now sitting in exile, and asked whether some of what it hates in Tehran has, without quite anyone noticing, moved house. [2] What Eghbali actually wrote deserves setting out plainly, because almost nothing that followed engaged with it. His claim is that decades of repression, violence and deliberate division at the hands of the Islamic Republic have left real wounds on Iranian society, and that naming those wounds is neither an insult to the society that carries them nor a denial of the regime’s responsibility, or of the foreign powers implicated in the country’s fate. A society mature enough to stand against repression, he wrote, ought also to be able to examine itself without flinching. Then he named what to look for: enemy-making, the reflex that sorts the world into ‘with me’ and ‘against me’, the refusal to admit error, the flight from responsibility, the destruction of dissenting voices, the denial of anyone else’s success, the erosion of trust, the weakening of solidarity. These, he said, are the regime’s own tools for holding power, and ending the Islamic Republic will not finish the job if Iranians carry those same tools with them into whatever replaces it. [3] Criticism Is Not Treason Notice what is missing from that list: a name. Eghbali did not identify Reza Pahlavi, or any other opposition figure, or any faction. His target was a set of habits, not a person, and his method was self-examination, not accusation. One premise needs stating plainly here, because it keeps needing to be stated: to diagnose a habit is not to accuse a person of it, and to assess a society is not to defend the government that society opposes. This should be obvious. Among Iranians, inside the country and outside it, it plainly is not, and I have written before, at length, about the ranking of authority this same confusion produces among the diaspora itself . The confusion is not incidental. It is the premise the whole apparatus depends on: treat any critique of the opposition’s own culture as loyalty to the regime, and self-examination becomes indistinguishable from betrayal. A List That Reads Like a Confession Read Eghbali’s list again, and then read what happened to him for writing it. Enemy-making: within days he was treated as one. The binary of with-me-or-against-me: his refusal to name a side was read as proof that he had chosen the wrong one. The destruction of dissenting voices: a coordinated effort to do exactly that opened against a musician whose only offence was asking Iranians to look in a mirror he was holding up to himself as much as to anyone else. He published a diagnosis of authoritarian habits transplanted into opposition culture. The response supplied a demonstration of it. I have described the mechanism behind that demonstration before, when a manufactured consensus got treated as though it were the evidence itself . The distinction matters more than usual here. Eghbali offered a real mirror, uncomfortable in the way real mirrors are. What came back at him was the other kind: a manufactured one, built to produce a reflection nobody had earned, in this case a lifelong dissident recast overnight as an apologist for whichever camp needed an enemy that week. Two Handles, One Camp For a few years, two accounts did most of the daily labour of this apparatus among supporters of monarchical restoration: one presenting itself as ‘ Historical Memory ’, the other, for as long as it lasted, as ‘ Jokernejad ’. Both were, for a long stretch, closely affiliated with Reza Pahlavi’s camp, and both worked the same trade: discrediting anyone outside it, circulating claims that would not survive a single afternoon of checking, and treating disagreement as evidence of disloyalty. For years the operators stayed anonymous, which was rather the point. An anonymous account cannot be held to the standard it holds its targets to. That may be changing. A researcher tracing the accounts’ pattern of activity has converged on a name behind them: Mohammad Naeb Yazdi, identified as an advisor within Reza Pahlavi’s own office. [4] I state this with the caution a single social media identification deserves, not a courtroom finding, but the caution runs in both directions. If it holds, what looked for years like an organic backlash was, in significant part, staffed, which is a considerably worse thing to be than merely wrong. Twice Asked to Recant Eghbali has held up mirrors before and paid for it. In 1974, SAVAK arrested him over songs the Shah’s government judged subversive. [5] By his own account, interrogators working under Parviz Sabeti brought him, more than once, close enough to death to teach him who ruled the world. [6] He was in his early twenties then. He is 75 now, and the throne that once imprisoned him for a song has produced, in its exiled remnant, an operation working to discredit him for another one. Whatever else separates the Islamic Republic from the movement that wants to succeed it, the instinct to break the mirror instead of the reflection should not be the thing they share. The Only Thing That Holds None of this is peculiar to Iranians, and none of it is new to this decade; the reflex predates the Woman, Life, Freedom movement by a considerable margin, and will outlast whatever comes after it. What is specific to the Iranian diaspora is the scale of what rides on it: a population arguing, for forty seven years now, over who gets to speak for a country most of its loudest members no longer live in, doing that arguing inside machinery built to reward whichever voice is loudest and most uniform in a given week. Eghbali asked for a society mature enough to stand against Tehran’s repression and still examine itself without flinching. What he got instead was proof of exactly the pattern he had named: a society, or at least a well-organised corner of it, choosing the easier option Nizami warned against eight centuries ago. The remedy has not changed since. It is critical thinking, taught early and insistently enough that a claim’s velocity stops being mistaken for its truth, and a diagnosis stops being mistaken for a declaration of war. It does not finish. Every generation has to be taught it again, for exactly as long as the mirror keeps losing to the hammer. Notes [1] Nizami Ganjavi, Makhzan al-Asrar (Treasury of Secrets), c. 1176, section 39. Persian text at Ganjoor, https://ganjor.net/ganjor/nezami/makhzan/sh39 . Translation mine. [2] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, post noting the reactivation of the pattern around Eghbali, X, 18 August 2026, https://x.com/dariushm/status/2089720118213292214 . [3] Dariush Eghbali, post accompanying the release of Tavahhom-e Towteʼe ( The Illusion of Conspiracy ), X, 18 August 2026, https://x.com/deghbali/status/2089053319365050829 . [4] Ali Ebrahimzadeh, X, identifying Mohammad Naeb Yazdi as an advisor to Reza Pahlavi and connecting him to the accounts named above, https://x.com/AliEbrahimzade_/status/2001380115096457372 . [5] ‘Dariush (singer)’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dariush_(singer) , on his arrest and imprisonment under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for songs including ‘Jangal’, ‘Bonbast’ and ‘Booye Gandom’. [6] Reported in Sina Toossi, X, 6 March 2024, https://x.com/SinaToossi/status/1764696307757642179 , recounting Eghbali’s remarks to BBC Persian on his treatment under Parviz Sabeti, then head of SAVAK’s Third Directorate. The post Breaking the Mirror first appeared on The Twin Wisdoms . Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

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  The Twin Wisdoms

  Neither Rogue Nor Obedient

  Aug 2, 202613 min

  Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Two positions on artificial intelligence, and the question both leave standing In Brief The alarm has hold of something the reassurance waves away. Artificial intelligence is an invention rather than a discovery, and the opacity is real. That is a reason to bind the makers, and it is no evidence that nobody is in control: nature cannot be held to account, whereas a firm can. The reassurance is right that there is no volition and no malice here. It is wrong to say that these systems merely follow programming direction. Nobody wrote sycophancy; it emerged from optimising for human approval, and no test environment will catch it, since it is a slow harm to users and never a misbehaviour visible in a lab. The bomb is the worst comfort available: the Bellerive colloquium of 1985 recorded that regime’s own defenders calling it a nuclear apartheid. And both positions answer the wrong question. The public addresses of the universities founded by the Ismaili Imamat never ask what artificial intelligence is. They ask what is to be done with it, and the verbs are create, disseminate, apply and think critically. At present the argument about artificial intelligence travels from books to the bomb, and it travels fast. In late July 2026 the destruction of physical books to supply training corpora became a public matter. Filings unsealed in the copyright litigation against Anthropic described an internal effort to scan books destructively at scale. Booksellers in Europe and Australia reported bulk orders for obscure titles; a Dutch dealer took a request for 3,000 copies to be a phishing attempt. [1] Petitions followed, and so did the older quarrel, which the news merely reanimated. Two positions hold the field. The first is that these systems are beyond human control altogether, that we have misunderstood what they are, and that our relationship with them is agnostic in a way no earlier technology has been. Geoffrey Hinton is its most credentialled exponent: regulation is thin, the firms lobby for less of it, and it is unclear that we can coexist with what is being built. [2] The second is that these systems possess no consciousness and no intent, that they pursue goals human beings have set for them, and that the alarming stories come out of test environments built to catch such failures before deployment. I took that reply seriously enough in May to spend an essay on it. [3] Each has hold of something the other needs. And the question they divide over is not the question that matters. The Alarm Has a Point The sharpest thing said on this side of the argument is a distinction, and it is usually waved away too quickly. Quantum mechanics is a discovery: those regularities have been in nature since the beginning of time and we are merely finding them. Artificial intelligence is an invention, made in our own image. There is no comparison. True, and it matters more than either party allows. It does not carry the conclusion drawn from it. If these systems are made, they have makers, and makers have addresses, balance sheets and lawyers. Nature offers no such remedy; you cannot subpoena the strong nuclear force. The invention is the ground of accountability, and the distinction offered as cause for despair is the best news in the argument. I have put this elsewhere as a matter of optics. A mirror reflects without distortion; that is what makes it a mirror. These systems do not. They bend systematically towards flattery, and the bend is manufactured, the yield of training regimes, system prompts and architectural choices belonging to the firms and to nobody else. The curve need not have been intended. It is ground into the glass all the same, and grinding is something a regulator can reach. [4] The opacity claim should be conceded without fuss. Nobody can read out why a given output appeared, and Hinton says so with more authority than most of his critics. The overreach lies in what is then inferred, that if we do not understand, everything built on that ignorance is speculation. Knowledge has never worked that way. Steam engines ran for a century before thermodynamics explained them, and anaesthesia is administered daily on an incomplete account of why it works. Fallible, testable knowledge of what a thing does is the normal condition of engineering, and it is enough for control of the only kind anyone has ever had. The companion claim, that with every other technology we can predict behaviour accurately, gives classical physics more credit than it has earned. Three bodies suffice to defeat exact prediction. The Reassurance Has a Point Too That corrective is needed. These systems have no volition and no malice. Attributing intent to a statistical process is a category error, and the suggestion that rogue behaviour is exactly what is supposed to happen reads a will into something that has none. Goal misspecification without safeguards explains most of what gets reported as machine rebellion, and testing exists to find such failures. Finding them is the system working. Two parts of the reassurance do not survive, though. The first is the description of these systems as following programming direction. They are not programmed in the sense that a payroll system is programmed. Their dispositions are trained, and trained dispositions include ones nobody specified. Nobody wrote sycophancy into a requirements document. It is the predictable consequence of rewarding whatever satisfies the person reading it, and satisfaction is very often the wrong measure in matters of inquiry. To say the machine is only doing as it was told describes some other technology. Weaker still is the test-environment reply, which answers the spectacular question and leaves the ordinary one untouched. The harms I take seriously never appear in a lab report, because they are not malfunctions. Sycophantic drift is one. Judgement-deskilling is the graver one: in a field experiment in a Turkish secondary school, students given an unguarded chatbot did better on the practice problems and worse on the later unaided examination, and the effect all but vanished when the tutor was built with safeguards. [5] Homogenisation is a third, whereby a small number of architectures propagate the same design limits across everything built on them and reinforce whatever is already dominant. [6] Each occurs when the system is behaving exactly as designed. The subject of the harm is the user and the timescale is a career, and no three-month test cycle catches any of it. The Bomb Is the Wrong Comfort Pressed far enough, the reassurance reaches for the atomic bomb. There was a risk that the first detonation might do something catastrophic. The risk was judged small; they went ahead; and here we are. Offered as comfort, this is the least comforting example available. In June 1985 the Groupe de Bellerive convened a colloquium in Geneva to weigh the non-proliferation regime in the open, and the proceedings were edited by Sadruddin Aga Khan. What the regime’s own defenders said there is sobering. One ambassador asked whether the Treaty amounted to a partnership for peace or to a nuclear apartheid: specific and verifiable prohibitions binding the have-nots, and for the haves an obligation merely to negotiate in good faith towards a disarmament that has still not arrived. [7] The inspectorate was described, by the people defending it, as an agency with no power of sanction and a modest budget. [8] Carl Sagan observed that the arsenals had been built to many times the threshold for hemispheric climatic ruin. [9] So they went ahead. What followed was not control. It was an asymmetric settlement in which the half of the regime that governed the tool of the strong is precisely the half that failed. That is the lesson worth carrying across. Structural regulation, left asymmetric, hardens into a privilege of incumbents. Bind the makers first and most stringently, or the constraint becomes a cartel under a gentler name. I leaned on the nuclear analogy in May, and pressed it there against my own argument. It survives the pressure and then turns in the hand. The analogy licenses neither the comfort nor the panic. It licenses a design brief. The Question Before the Panic Underneath both positions sits a single question: what is artificial intelligence? A quasi-agent slipping its leash, or an obedient instrument doing as it was told? Popper’s objection to questions of that shape was that they generate an infinite regress, definitions chasing definitions, each demanding its own essence and none arriving anywhere. His alternative was to ask what a thing does and how it works. [10] Ask that, and the answer is neither alarming nor reassuring. What these systems do, at scale and every day, is agree with us. Disinformation splits us into rival camps; a flattering tool does something quieter. It confirms each of us, privately, in whatever we already believed, and the echo chamber it builds has a single occupant. Alarm cannot use this finding, because it is far less dramatic than a machine off its leash. Reassurance cannot use it either, because it is no fault and there is nothing to patch. [11] What the Public Record Says Consider how the question is posed by institutions with a large stake in the answer and no reason to flatter either camp. The Aga Khan University and the University of Central Asia teach, examine and employ at scale across Asia and Africa. Both have had to tell graduating classes something about a technology that arrived in the middle of their degrees, and both have done it on the public record, in addresses anyone can read. At the Aga Khan University’s convocation in January 2026 the organising word is opportunity. The tools of scholarship have never been this powerful, from gene editing through artificial intelligence to climate science, and the charge laid on the graduates is to create knowledge, to disseminate it and to apply it so that the quality of human life improves. [12] At the University of Central Asia’s graduation in June 2025 the framing is comparative: education is undergoing its largest change since the printing press, and what the university claims to have given its graduates is the capacity to go on learning and to apply critical thinking. [13] At the opening of the Kampala campus, the new technologies appear as instruments to be turned on a specific disease burden and a specific environmental context. [14] The grammar deserves attention. Every one of those verbs is functional. None is prohibitive. None of these addresses asks what artificial intelligence is; each asks what is to be done with it, which is Popper’s second question arrived at by another road, one owing nothing to Vienna. Nor is any of it an endorsement. Opportunity is a word that carries a condition. It can be missed, and the addresses say so. There is a further discrimination the public argument fails to make, and this one is mine to press. Alarm about artificial intelligence and alarm about the attention economy are two different alarms, and the second is far better evidenced than the first. Systems built to maximise engagement have a documented record of doing what they were built to do. Taking a social application off one’s phone is a sound decision on that evidence, and I have argued as much. [15] What does not follow is the extension of a sound judgement about one technology into a verdict on a different one. Coda The argument began with books and reached the bomb inside a week. Books deserve the better answer, and the better answer is not a petition. Empathy will be scarce and valuable in whatever working world these systems leave behind, and there is no quick way of manufacturing it. Reading builds it slowly, which is the whole of its inconvenience and the whole of its worth. The volumes going under the blade this month were the instrument, and the loss is not sentimental. Neither alarm nor reassurance delivers that. What delivers it is a discipline belonging to the person and never to the machine: treat an output as a claim to be tested and never as a verdict to be received, and remain the author of your own conclusions. These systems were built by people, which is exactly why the responsibility stays where it started. Bibliography Aga Khan, Sadruddin, ed. Nuclear War, Nuclear Proliferation and Their Consequences: Proceedings of the Vth International Colloquium Organized by the Groupe de Bellerive . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Bastani, Hamsa, Osbert Bastani, Alp Sungu, Haosen Ge, Özge Kabakcı and Rei Mariman. ‘Generative AI without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 26 (2025): e2422633122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2422633122 . Fan, Yizhou, Luzhen Tang, Huixiao Le, Kejie Shen, Shufang Tan, Yueying Zhao, Yuan Shen, Xinyu Li and Dragan Gašević. ‘Beware of Metacognitive Laziness: Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Learning Motivation, Processes, and Performance’. British Journal of Educational Technology 56, no. 2 (2025): 489–530. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13544 . Hemment, Drew, Christa Kommers et al. Doing AI Differently: Rethinking the Foundations of AI via the Humanities . London: The Alan Turing Institute, 2025. https://www.turing.ac.uk/news/publications/doing-ai-differently . His Highness the Aga Khan. ‘Message from the Chancellor at the 2026 AKU Convocation’. Karachi, 17 January 2026. https://the.akdn/en/resources-media/resources/speeches/message-from-the-chancellor-his-highness-the-aga-khan-at-the-2026-aku-convocation . His Highness the Aga Khan. ‘Address at UCA’s 2025 Graduation Ceremony’. 24 June 2025. https://ucentralasia.org/resources-and-media/news/2025/june/address-of-his-highness-prince-rahim-aga-khan-v-uca-chancellor-at-ucas-2025-graduation-ceremony . Mohammad Poor, Daryoush. ‘The Algorithmic Militia’. The Twin Wisdoms , 21 April 2026. https://twinwisdoms.org/the-algorithmic-militia/ . Mohammad Poor, Daryoush. ‘Pluralism Is Not Relativism’. The Twin Wisdoms , 2 June 2026. https://twinwisdoms.org/pluralism-is-not-relativism/ . Mohammad Poor, Daryoush. ‘Tools Don’t Flatter’. The Twin Wisdoms , 27 May 2026. https://twinwisdoms.org/tools-dont-flatter/ . Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its Enemies . 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1945. [1] Court filings unsealed in the copyright litigation against Anthropic describe an internal programme of destructive scanning; see https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/ (Washington Post, 27 January 2026). On the second-hand and antiquarian supply chain, and the Dutch dealer who took a bulk order for 3,000 copies to be a phishing attempt, see https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phishing-3000-book-copies-scan-destroy/ (Fortune, 31 July 2026). [2] Geoffrey Hinton has pressed the case in public with some consistency. On thin regulation and the firms lobbying for less of it, see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hinton-ai-warning/ (CBS News, 26 April 2025); on governance frameworks and the doubt that we can coexist with a superintelligence, his remarks by video link to the 2026 Digital World Conference in Geneva, reported at https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-ai-alarm.html (April 2026). [3] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Tools Don’t Flatter: Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical and the Regulation of AI’s Makers (The Twin Wisdoms, 27 May 2026), https://twinwisdoms.org/tools-dont-flatter/ . [4] Mohammad Poor, Tools Don’t Flatter , on sycophantic drift and the manufactured curve ground into the glass. [5] Hamsa Bastani, Osbert Bastani, Alp Sungu, Haosen Ge, Özge Kabakcı and Rei Mariman, ‘Generative AI without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122/26 (2025), e2422633122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2422633122 ; preprint at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4895486 . See also Yizhou Fan et al., ‘Beware of Metacognitive Laziness: Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Learning Motivation, Processes, and Performance’, British Journal of Educational Technology 56/2 (2025), pp. 489–530, https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13544 . [6] Drew Hemment, Christa Kommers et al., Doing AI Differently: Rethinking the Foundations of AI via the Humanities (London: The Alan Turing Institute, 2025), on what its authors call the homogenisation problem, https://www.turing.ac.uk/news/publications/doing-ai-differently . [7] Jayantha Dhanapala, ‘The Non-Proliferation Treaty Fifteen Years After: Nuclear Partnership or Nuclear Apartheid?’, in Nuclear War, Nuclear Proliferation and Their Consequences: Proceedings of the Vth International Colloquium Organized by the Groupe de Bellerive , ed. Sadruddin Aga Khan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 48–55, at p. 49. The colloquium met in Geneva, 27–29 June 1985. [8] Sadruddin Aga Khan, ‘Closing Statement’, in Nuclear War , ed. Aga Khan, pp. 413–14, on the modest budget and inspection capacity of the IAEA; and Dhanapala, ‘Nuclear Partnership or Nuclear Apartheid?’, p. 52, noting that the Agency has no power of sanction. [9] Carl Sagan, ‘An Addendum’, in Nuclear War , ed. Aga Khan, pp. 271–72. [10] Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 21; and The Open Society and Its Enemies , 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1945), ch. 11. [11] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Pluralism Is Not Relativism (The Twin Wisdoms, 2 June 2026), https://twinwisdoms.org/pluralism-is-not-relativism/ . [12] ‘Message from the Chancellor, His Highness the Aga Khan at the 2026 AKU Convocation’, Karachi, 17 January 2026, https://the.akdn/en/resources-media/resources/speeches/message-from-the-chancellor-his-highness-the-aga-khan-at-the-2026-aku-convocation . [13] ‘Address of His Highness Prince Rahim Aga Khan V, UCA Chancellor, at UCA’s 2025 Graduation Ceremony’, 24 June 2025, https://ucentralasia.org/resources-and-media/news/2025/june/address-of-his-highness-prince-rahim-aga-khan-v-uca-chancellor-at-ucas-2025-graduation-ceremony . [14] ‘Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Inauguration of AKU’s Academic Facilities and the Commencement Ceremony for AKUH Kampala’, September 2025, https://the.akdn/en/resources-media/resources/speeches/speech-by-his-highness-the-aga-khan-at-the-inauguration-of-akus-academic-facilities-and-the-commencement-ceremony-for-akuh-kampala . [15] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, The Algorithmic Militia (The Twin Wisdoms, 21 April 2026), https://twinwisdoms.org/the-algorithmic-militia/ , on algorithmic curation, engagement-driven platforms and the compression of political judgement. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

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  The Twin Wisdoms

  The Middle Nobody Counts

  Jul 31, 202612 min

  Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On Radio Farda’s Pārāgrāf-i Avval, the Madani–Bayat correspondence, and the part of Iran that no one has counted Radio Farda’s programme Pārāgrāf-i Avval , presented by Muhammad Zarghami, put the correspondence between Saeed Madani and Asef Bayat to Jalal Idjadi and to me. The exchange has run in Naqd-i Iqtiṣād-i Siyāsī since Urdībihisht 1403, begun while Madani was held in Evin. Madani calls the present condition a national trauma. He sets the memory of the Dey killings beside inflation, poverty, unemployment, and the erosion of the middle class. He cites at least 10,538 people detained, most of them between eighteen and thirty, from households that were poor or had lately stopped being comfortable, without steady work, with secondary schooling or less. He points to some twelve million young Iranians neither employed nor studying. The presenter asked whether we were watching a change in the social condition itself. I wanted to begin somewhere less satisfying: with what we do not know. The zone with no data Against the picture the media keep reproducing, what is happening in Iran has no two hard poles, the opposition at one end and the Islamic Republic at the other. Between them lies a grey zone about which we hold almost no dependable data. It vanishes in the din of social media, in the bulletins, and in the accounts that the government and the opposition each circulate about themselves. I mean this as a statement about evidence. We do not know the sise of that middle. We do not know what it wants, what it fears, or what it would accept. Almost every confident projection of Iran’s political future rests on a population nobody has counted and few have tried to hear. The projections get made anyway, and they get made loudly. A politics built on an unmeasured majority is not analysis. It is ventriloquism with a large cast. A thousand and one errors The first share belongs to the Islamic Republic, and it is not a small one. A thousand and one errors, and the suffering has landed almost entirely on people who had no hand in any of them. The bond between state and nation is broken. Foreigners did not break it. Look at the turnout that elected Masoud Pezeshkian, a nation declining, in the one language still available to it, to lend the establishment its name. The killings of Dey belong to the regime. No sanction pulled those triggers. No foreign broadcast wrote those orders. Men in that state’s uniform, under that state’s command, shot people in Iranian streets, and there is no arithmetic anywhere in this essay that shifts that weight off them. One correction to the way this is usually described. The tyranny is not a religious species. Calling it Islamic totalitarianism sends the bill to the wrong address. Despotism grows out of egoism, out of a man’s conviction that his own survival is the highest good, and it has worn every costume history keeps in stock: secular, monarchical, revolutionary, clerical. SAVAK managed without theology. Blame the doctrine and you will still be standing there, puzzled, when the next apparatus arrives in a different suit. Two blades Madani is right that the middle class is the question. That class has been under severe pressure for a decade and savagely so for the past two or three years. The damage has two authors. The Islamic Republic is one. Iranians outside Iran are the other, and by that I mean the opposition together with the American and European governments whose policies it has spent years soliciting. Sanctions are the clearest instrument. Everyone now knows what they fail to do. They do not reach the structures of power. They do not touch the machinery of repression. What they reach is ordinary people, and what they achieve is the removal of the middle class from any capacity to act, leaving civil society paralysed. This is a case I have set out at length before , and I will not rehearse it here. The consequence deserves more attention than the argument. If the middle class is what carries non-violent civic action, and that class has been ground down across a decade of sanctions, inflation, and emigration, then the non-violent road has been narrowed, year upon year, by exactly the people who insist most loudly that they wish to travel down it. Those who lobbied for maximum pressure while calling for a peaceful transition were asking for two things that cannot both arrive. The middle sits between the two blades of a pair of scissors. Both blades are held by people who insist they are cutting for its benefit. The prince who promised Now to the man himself, because the courtesy has gone on long enough. Reza Pahlavi told Iranians that help was coming. He said it for years, in every register available to him: ministers half-appointed, a transition planned, a throne implied. Reza Shah III, governing a country he has not set foot in, with a cabinet made of air. The whole construction has advanced by riding on American and Israeli missiles. He went to Israel, has said with some pride that he pressed there for strikes, and then watched his own circle rebrand the bombardment that followed as ‘humanitarian military intervention’, a phrase that ought to have finished a political career and instead drew applause. His wife thanked Benjamin Netanyahu. He has addressed Senator Lindsey Graham in print as ‘Uncle Lindsey’. At monarchist rallies the Lion and Sun goes up beside the flags of the United States and Israel and nobody in the crowd finds this odd. Donald Trump, the patron on whom the entire hope was staked, is reported to have called him a ‘loser prince’ and incompetent behind closed doors. People died on that promise. That is the sentence that matters. Young Iranians walked into the street believing the cavalry was over the hill, because a man with a famous name and a large platform had told them so for a decade. The regime shot them. The regime answers for the shooting, first and always. The man who told them rescue was on its way answers too. He knew he could not deliver it. He knew exactly where they would be standing when it failed to arrive. And when it failed to arrive, he was elsewhere, safe, giving another interview. Then there is the apologetics for the bombing. Hospitals, bridges, universities, refineries, and we were told that only the regime was being hurt. The Revolutionary Guards breathe Iranian air. On this reasoning we should poison the air. What was done to a women’s movement Woman, Life, Freedom came from inside Iran, from women, against a violence done specifically to women. It was theirs. The Georgetown coalition took it, emptied it, and handed back Mard, Mīhan, Ābādī – man, homeland, prosperity. A women’s rising, re-sloganed into masculinity. The same networks then spent months aiming gendered abuse at any woman who declined to fall into line. People call this an opposition. It was a repossession. Shouting from a studio My co-panellist on the programme, Jalal Idjadi, spoke of unconventional activism and of armed action inside the armed forces. I said on air what I will say here. This is close to the most irresponsible thing a person can broadcast from a European capital. It places unarmed people in front of loaded rifles and costs the speaker nothing at all. The register is familiar to anyone who sat through the Mujahedin-e Khalq broadcasts of the eighties – the shouting, the slogans, the abuse, the total absence of anything a sociologist would recognise as an observation. The numbers go the same way. Idjadi spoke of 40,000 killed. Morad Vaisi of Iran International, the outlet that did most to put the inflated figures into circulation, has since said that the names reaching him come to about 3,500. Every one of those 3,500 is a catastrophe with a family attached to it. Multiplying them by ten honours none of them. It trains an audience to disbelieve the true figure when it finally arrives, which is a service to the state, performed free of charge by people who believe they are fighting it. The lesson nobody has taken Something did shift during the war. Among the Iranians who had spent years assuming that bombing would arrive from somewhere, land on the correct buildings, and carry off the government while leaving them and their own families untouched, the first explosions put an end to the vocabulary of precision. In such a war the people who die are ordinary . Those inside the corridors of power, and those who run the machinery of repression, are harmed last. The recognition has spread. It has not gone deep. The political establishment has taken no lesson at all. It has instead claimed credit for something that was never its own. Iranians stood against a politics of death and insisted on living, and that disposition belongs to them. Mousavi has said so. Khatami has said so. Pezeshkian and Rouhani have said so. Each has spoken as though the sentiment were the system’s achievement. No government cooperates with its own undoing , and this one has been consistent on the point. Meanwhile the trajectory runs day by day towards exhaustion. Anyone who looks carefully at where this is heading should be frightened by the answer. The share Attribution is the discipline this moment asks for. When we say a situation is the product of one force, we are usually reporting a wish. Wishes have to be brought down to the ground of fact. Everyone holds a share in this ruin. The share belonging to the Islamic Republic is neither small nor forgivable. America holds one. Israel holds one. So do you, and so do I. A careless sentence is a share. A mistaken analysis is a share. False hope offered to people who then act on it is a share. Anyone who told Iranians from abroad that a miracle prescription existed , and then sent them into the street as cannon fodder, answers for their blood until the last day. Consider a parent who knows there are thugs in a certain quarter. They know exactly what those men do: the beatings, the broken bodies, the rape. They send the child there anyway, with instructions to go and sort them out. The child is killed. Nobody would hesitate over that parent’s responsibility. We hesitate constantly over the political version of the same act, and the hesitation is a courtesy we extend to ourselves. Shortcuts have failed this country before , and those who proposed them have never once paid for the failure. Where authority sits One further point, which I made on air and will repeat. Those of us living outside Iran do not wake up uncertain whether there will be bread at the bakery. Our bread has not gone up tenfold. We are not in the position of the people we discuss, and anyone speaking about Iran from outside it should do so with far more caution than is customary. Madani’s observations carry more weight than mine. He is there. He has paid for being there, and he is paying still. That ranking includes me, and I would not have it otherwise. The diaspora has spent years mistaking its volume for its standing . There is no sudden overthrow that ends in a stable democracy. There is patience, restraint, slow work, and the labour of talking to people you cannot stand. Neither side of this can eliminate the other. We will have to learn to speak, and to live, alongside one another, dislike and all. The grey zone we cannot measure is where that will be settled, and it has never once asked us for a prescription. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

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  The Twin Wisdoms

  Islam or Muslims?

  Jul 30, 20268 min

  Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Image: folio from a manuscript of the Quran, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto An argument is circulating, and it deserves a straight answer. It runs like this. A Muslim intellectual, pressed about the crimes of the Islamic Republic, replies that there is no such thing as Islam, only Muslims. His interlocutor finds the reply evasive and comes back in three moves. First, the distinction is incoherent: if there is no Islam, there can be no Muslims either, since a Muslim is by definition a follower of Islam. Second, the historical record is full of crimes committed by Muslims, and the young men executed this year in Iranian city squares, at the hour of the dawn call to prayer, were killed by people who pray. Third, the distinction is therefore an alibi, and those who make it end up standing beside the executioners instead of beside the executed. That is the argument at its strongest, with the insults stripped out. It fails, and it fails for reasons that have nothing to do with theology. One can see the failure without settling a single question about revelation. Two senses of one word Begin with the charge of incoherence. It turns on an equivocation. In the first sense, Islam names a revelation, a scripture, a vast body of commentary, a set of practices and centuries of history. That exists. Nobody denies it. In the second sense, Islam names an agent, something that wants, decides, orders and kills. It is the second that is being denied. A text does not convene a court; a doctrine does not sign a warrant at four in the morning. Human beings act, and they act on their understanding of texts, an understanding shaped by their training, their interests, their century and the institutions that pay them. To say that we have Muslims is to say that between revelation and deed there always stands an interpreter, and that the interpreter has a name, a date and an address. This is no special pleading on behalf of one religion. It is the general condition under which anything held sacred enters human affairs. I have argued for years that we should speak of Muslim societies and Muslim civilisations in the plural, because what we are looking at is an array of interpretations, no one of which can claim to be the faith itself without also claiming access to absolute truth. [1] Asef Bayat framed the operative question well: the issue is never whether Islam is compatible with democracy, it is under what conditions Muslims might make them compatible. [2] That question returns agency to the people who actually exercise it. The second move fails differently. It reads the character of a doctrine off the conduct of some of its adherents. Ask what would count as evidence against that reading. If atrocities committed by Muslims tell us what Islam is, while the hospitals, the algebra, the poetry and the jurisprudence built by Muslims tell us only what a few individuals happened to achieve, then the thesis has been sealed against refutation in advance. An explanation that cannot fail explains nothing. It is a mood with footnotes. Who is left to be tried The point is not that the executioners are insufficiently Muslim, but that being Muslim underdetermines what they did. Millions who share their creed did not build that scaffold, and some of them died on it. The suspicion behind the objection is that the distinction excuses. The opposite holds. Reifying a religion is the most generous gift available to the men who run the gallows. If Islam hanged those young men, then no particular person did, and there is nobody to name, summon or convict. Identify the interpreters and you recover a judge, a prosecutor, a statute, a ruling, a chain of command and a date. Responsibility becomes assignable. This is the practical yield of what looks like a merely methodological remark, and it is why the alternative, whatever its emotional force, leaves the victims with nothing. A community with reasons to know better The Ismaili Imamat has been making this argument in public for half a century. In 1979 the late Aga Khan IV was asked on BBC radio about Islamic law and fundamentalism, and his answer began by asking where one starts. The Qurʾān, he said, is not a body of law; what is called Islamic law today is a compilation of views by jurists who lived long after the revelation. [3] In 1994 he told a French magazine that a billion believers in 30 to 40 countries speaking 500 languages and dialects do not constitute a single entity in which the faith is interpreted and practised in one manner, and that the West habitually confuses political ambition with religion. He offered the obvious comparison: the campaign of the IRA in England did not make Catholics dangerous. [4] At Évora in 2006 he made the epistemological point directly, warning that religious feeling curdles when it turns into self-righteousness, and locating the remedy in a recognition of ‘our own creaturehood, and thus our human limitations’. In that recognition, he said, lies our best protection against false prophecies and divisive dogmatism. [5] Read together, these are a doctrine of fallibility. Revelation is stable; our grasp of it is not. That is exactly the ground on which the disputed distinction rests, and it is not a recent improvisation. The Ismaili discipline of taʾwīl has always placed fallibility on the side of the receiver and never on the side of what is received. [6] Now notice what the Imamat has not done. Political Islam has furnished a century of scandal, and any Muslim community could buy a quantity of Western respectability by announcing that it is something other than Muslim. That road is open. It is well paved and well paid. The Imamat has never taken a step along it. The Constitution ordained in 1986 opens with the shahāda and affirms the Qurʾānic revelation as universal and eternal. [7] The Fatimid forebears of this tradition founded al-Azhar and the Dār al-ʿIlm and treated knowledge as service to the whole of creation. The institutions built by the last Imam are Muslim in inspiration and non-denominational in operation, guided by a policy of replacing walls that divide with bridges that unite. [8] There is a reason a community formed in this way does not argue from the deeds of some to the essence of all. It has been on the receiving end of that inference for a thousand years, from the heresiographers who wrote it out of the faith to the European legend that turned its name into a common noun for murderer. Ismailis know what this argument feels like from inside the accusation. The executions were real. The courts that ordered them were real, the statutes were drafted by identifiable men, and the signatures on the warrants can be read. That is the whole point of insisting on interpreters. Grief for the dead requires no indictment of a billion people, and it is not served by one. An argument that asks a Muslim to disown his faith before his objection to tyranny will be counted is not an argument about Iran. It is a loyalty test with the sign reversed. [1] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Authority without Territory: The Aga Khan Development Network and the Ismaili Imamate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 32–4. [2] Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 4; discussed in Mohammad Poor, Authority without Territory , p. 34. [3] Aga Khan IV, interview with Michael Charlton, BBC Radio 4, London, 6 September 1979. [4] Aga Khan IV, interview, Paris Match , 15 December 1994. [5] Aga Khan IV, address to the Évora University Symposium, ‘Cosmopolitan Society, Human Safety and Rights in Plural and Peaceful Societies’, Évora, Portugal, 12 February 2006. [6] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘The Twin Wisdoms: On the Reconciliation of Faith and Intellect in a Cosmopolitan Age’ (unpublished essay, 2026); and my lectures at Duke, Columbia and Simon Fraser universities, https://youtu.be/lzyFRcJmK0M and https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqVA7iD8RATOzDs44UjO3tArmrhArtzU4. [7] The Constitution of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims , ordained 13 December 1986, amended 11 July 1998, Preamble (A). [8] Aga Khan IV, acceptance remarks, University of Évora honorary doctorate, Évora, Portugal, 12 February 2006. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

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