The Twin Wisdoms

Twin Wisdoms
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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.

  1. 6D AGO

    When Language Fails: Vulgarity, Silence and the Unfinished Conversation

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast 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, Life, Freedom uprising had confessed his bewilderment. He could not understand what they were saying. Not their demands—those were simple enough. He meant something more unsettling: their words, spoken in Persian, had become incomprehensible to him. The language itself had fractured. Sadeghi crystallised what this meant. When the shared medium of language collapses, politics becomes impossible. What remains is not debate but violence dressed in words. The proliferation of profanity we are witnessing—from state enforcers and from segments of the diaspora opposition alike—is not just crude speech. It is the audible sound of a linguistic space imploding. As Mehdi Jami put it, profanity becomes “the language of those who have lost language.” When you can no longer persuade, you wound. When argument fails, obscenity substitutes for agency. The Profanity Trap The diagnosis matters because the response matters. Some will say: the regime debased language first, so we are entitled to debase it back. The Islamic Republic spent four decades emptying moral vocabulary of meaning, turning piety into brutality, justice into revenge. Why should the opposition perform civility when faced with systematic degradation? The logic is seductive. But it conceals a trap. Profanity is not transgressive. It is mimetic. When you adopt the language of dehumanisation, you do not escape the power structure—you replicate it. The insult, the slur, the sexualised humiliation: these are not tools of liberation. They are the linguistic equivalent of the interrogation room. They work by reducing the other person to an object, something beneath argument, unworthy of speech. The revolutionary who curses becomes structurally identical to the torturer who curses. Both have exited the realm where politics is possible. I have watched this unfold in real time. The comment sections have become laboratories of linguistic violence. The Telegram channels, the exile television programs, the social media ecosystems—these spaces no longer host political discourse. They host its disintegration. People do not respond to arguments; they excavate motives. They do not engage claims; they assign tribal affiliations. Reformist. Regime agent. Traitor. The words function as terminal judgments, not as openings for thought. Once you have been labelled, you have been expelled from the conversation. What follows is not refutation but elimination. The Emergency Mind I am asked, when I write for non-Iranian audiences, to explain something that appears inexplicable: why do so many Iranians abroad celebrate violence against their own country? Why do they wave flags of states bombing Iranian cities? Why has their political vocabulary contracted into a lexicon so obscene that even sympathetic journalists cannot quote it? The question is posed carefully, as though the questioner fears discovering that Iranians are somehow collectively damaged, predisposed to self-destruction. My answer is this: they are not damaged. They are trapped. Trapped in what I would call the emergency mind—a psychological state where normal ethical reasoning suspends because the crisis feels so total that any action, no matter how destructive, appears justified if it promises resolution. The emergency mind cannot think in gradations. It cannot weigh harms against harms. It knows only: this must end, by any means necessary. And once you enter that state, bombing becomes deliverance, sanctions become surgery, civilian death becomes unfortunate but necessary collateral. The tragedy is that the emergency mind is both comprehensible and catastrophic. I understand the rage. I understand the desperation. I understand the decades of humiliation, the repeated cycles of hope crushed, the exhaustion of waiting for change that never arrives. But understanding the source of a delusion does not make it less delusional. Those who cheer for external intervention, who fantasise that foreign powers will deliver Iranian freedom, are not seeing clearly. They are seeing through the distortion of trauma. And that distortion has convinced them that destruction is construction, that rubble is the foundation for something new. Woman, Life, Freedom—and What Came After Sadeghi described the Woman, Life, Freedom movement as a “narrative revolution,” and she was right. For the first time in modern Iranian political discourse, the movement refused to treat human life as negotiable. It insisted on a foundational principle: no political goal justifies the deliberate sacrifice of civilians. Not regime change, not national sovereignty, not ideological purity. This was not pacifism. It was a refusal of the logic that makes bodies into currency. But the movement’s linguistic achievement has been betrayed by some who claim to speak in its name. I remember those early weeks clearly. I thought, briefly, that certain opposition figures might play constructive roles. That illusion lasted days. What followed was instructive. A close friend—someone I had trusted—turned on me for criticising prominent diaspora activists and their alliances with foreign policy hawks. I was accused of being a regime agent. The accusation was absurd, but the fury behind it was real. No amount of evidence mattered. The more carefully I argued, the deeper the other person retreated into fantasy. Then the fantasy collapsed on its own. The Georgetown coalition fell apart. The movement became toxic in monarchist circles. And those who had been dining with warmongers, who had been genuflecting to the architects of Middle Eastern devastation, suddenly found themselves abandoned by the very forces they had courted. The lesson was straightforward: you cannot champion “woman, life, freedom” while embracing the most misogynistic, life-destroying policies imaginable. The contradiction was not ideological. It was moral. And it was unsustainable. Testing Arguments, Not Loyalties One sign that a society’s capacity for rational discourse is failing: people stop listening to what is said and become obsessed with who is saying it. I have written about this principle before, and I will keep writing about it because it is foundational. If an argument is sound, it remains sound whether voiced by a friend or an enemy. If a claim is false, it remains false whether uttered by a reformist or a revolutionary. The content of speech must be separable from the identity of the speaker. Without that separation, there is no reasoning—only loyalty tests. This principle is under siege from every direction. The state rejects it because it cannot permit citizens to evaluate claims independently. The opposition rejects it because it has constructed a narrative where any criticism is, by definition, a betrayal. The result is a Tower of Babel rebuilt: everyone speaking, no one hearing, the cacophony mistaken for politics. The cost of this collapse has been personal. The sheer volume of slander I have endured over these years—not only from adversaries but from people I once called friends—has been staggering. It has required a kind of fortitude I did not know I possessed. But it has also clarified something essential: standing in the path of truth, refusing to be intimidated by the mob, refusing to surrender to the dust-storm of accusation and rage—this is not martyrdom. It is simply the minimum requirement for intellectual honesty. And it confers something invaluable: the knowledge that your positions are yours, not the product of fear or tribal pressure. What Comes Next The task, as I see it, is neither to despair nor to pretend. The linguistic space necessary for politics has not been destroyed completely. It has been damaged, badly, but fragments remain. They exist in the quiet conversations that happen away from social media, in the essays that circulate among small circles, in the moments when someone reads a sentence, finds it unclear, and says: “This doesn’t make sense. Fix it.” These are not dramatic acts. But they are the acts through which a common language is rebuilt. Sadeghi and Hamdieh’s conversation was one such moment. Listening to them—Sadeghi in London, Hamdieh in Tehran, myself elsewhere—I felt something shift. Not hope, exactly. Clarity. The diagnosis they offered was unsparing, but it was also precise. Language has failed. Politics has collapsed into violence. Profanity is not rebellion; it is capitulation. The task now is reconstruction, and reconstruction requires patience, discipline, and the refusal of shortcuts. This is not a strategy for victory. It is a refusal. A refusal to accept that the only language left is the language of force. A refusal to grant my adversaries the power to dictate who I become. When I choose argument over insult, when I insist that my interlocutor remains a potential participant in rational discourse rather than an irredeemable enemy, I am not being naive. I am being precise about the stakes. Because the moment I surrender that insistence, I have conceded the very thing worth defending: the possibility that human beings might still speak to one another as something other than instruments wrapped in competing slogans. That possibility has no strategic value. It will not topple regimes. It will not restore anything. But without it, whatever emerges from the wreckage will replicate the structures we sought to escape. I have learned, through these years of standing firm while accusations flew, that there is a cost to this position. I accept that cost. I will not move from it. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

    20 min

  2. APR 30

    Signal Through the Blackout

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast 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 United States and Israel, the predicament of the Iranian diaspora, and the cultural sediment from which a future Iran might be reassembled. What follows is a written distillation of that conversation, sharpened where the medium of speech compelled compression, and folded into the longer arc of arguments I have been pursuing in The Twin Wisdoms. A Cold Spring It was the ninth of Ordibehesht, and Tehran was still cold. Sobhan Yahyaei opened our conversation by remarking on the unseasonable chill, hinting that the bitter winter of 1404 — political, psychological — has not yet released its grip on the Iranian collective mind. He was calling from Tehran, from a new studio called Hamārā, the previous one having been lost. I was in London. We were connected over Telegram — that most Iranian of workarounds — under conditions of dire internet scarcity: Iran remains under a sustained digital blockade, with the vast majority of the population denied reliable access to the open internet. The line faltered more than once. That the conversation happened at all is, in its modest way, a political act. It is one episode in a season explicitly framed around Life in a Time of War, and it accumulates by sitting alongside the recent dialogues Hossein Hamdieh has conducted with Hamid Dabashi and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj in the Borj series — conversations whose threads I have tried to take up elsewhere on these pages. My first proposition is structural. The confrontation between Iran, the United States and Israel is not, in its deepest stratum, a confrontation of interests. It is a confrontation of ignorances. Each side processes the other through media-generated caricatures shaped by security apparatuses and political establishments whose interests rarely coincide with the welfare of ordinary human beings. Israel I would describe — and the description is descriptive, not polemical — as a rogue actor whose disruptive interventions deepen regional hostilities. Its conduct is the late, lingering claw of European colonialism, embedded after the older imperial structures collapsed. The United States, in turn, slid into the vacated colonial position; what was draped during the late twentieth century in the language of international institutions has, since the dawn of the twenty-first, been brazenly cast aside. To miss this overarching frame is to guarantee that one’s analysis will be shallow. I anticipate the predictable rejoinder: “Colonialism, imperialism — these are the tired vocabularies of a stale left.” They are not. To register the realities of colonialism and Orientalism is a mainstream academic position, not a fringe radicalism. The vocabulary is uncomfortable for a particular kind of Iranian audience because it implicates more than one party, and an audience trained to want a single villain finds multi-causal analysis unbearable. The Allergy and the Argument Yahyaei pressed me on precisely this point. Chap hargez nafahmīd — “the left never understood” — has acquired the status of folk wisdom. He noted, fairly, that many Iranians today recoil instinctively from academic critiques of capitalism and imperialism. Why? My answer was diagnostic, not denunciatory. What is being expressed in that slogan is not a coherent ideological position. It is a symptom. It is the desperation of a people squeezed between internal authoritarianism and external coercion, who have knocked on too many doors that refused to open and who now, in their rage, want the entire wall torn down. The reaction is human. It is also analytically empty. Pressed on what they mean by “left,” the slogan’s adherents typically cannot say. The word has devolved into an abusive term, an insult aimed at anyone who dissents from the prevailing emergency mood. The exquisite irony is that the society these speakers idealise — with functioning healthcare, decent schools, a roof over every head — is precisely the social-democratic arrangement the intellectual left has theorised for a century. They are cursing their own utopia. This is not unique to Iran. It is a structural feature of societies under prolonged stress. The economically marginalised American who voted for Donald Trump out of spite for a complacent establishment, the British voter who chose Brexit to scapegoat foreign labour for domestic decay — these are the same gestures, performed in different idioms. Iranians are not exhibiting a peculiar national pathology. They are reacting, predictably, to severe economic and political disenfranchisement. And what they want, beneath the slogans, is what every human population wants: a roof that does not leak, food for their children, a decent school, and a glimmer of hope. The Loud, the Silent, and the Funded Here the temptation is to speak of “the Iranians abroad” as a single body, to be condemned or defended in toto. I have refused this elsewhere on these pages, and I refused it again with Yahyaei. There is no monolithic diaspora. There is a loud diaspora, and there is a silent one, and the two have very little to do with each other. The loud diaspora dominates platforms, media outlets and placards. It is the diaspora of the slogan ‘death to the three corrupt: mullah, the leftist and the Mujahid’ — which constructs a monolithic in-group and consigns everyone else to an enemy camp. It is the diaspora that, in certain quarters, celebrated the bombing of its own homeland. It is, in many cases, a diaspora bankrolled not by independent Iranian entrepreneurs but by foreign state actors and intelligence services whose financial transparency is non-existent. The output of certain Persian-language outlets — Iran International, Manoto — is what I would call, with full deliberation, intellectual filth, deliberately manufactured to produce a skewed and standardised polarisation. By British legal standards much of what they broadcast borders on incitement; but because the broadcasts are in Persian and invisible to the host society, no one prosecutes. The silent diaspora is larger, more variegated, and infinitely more interesting. It is the diaspora that endowed Ehsan Yarshater’s Encyclopædia Iranica. But beside diaspora, we can still speak of the atmosphere and vision that sustained the Institute of Ismaili Studies’ Encyclopaedia Islamica, that funded Jane Lewisohn’s Golha project — a meticulous archive of the entire classical Persian musical heritage. These are unflashy enterprises. They do not trend. Bombs cannot destroy the poetry of Hafez or the verse of Houshang Ebtehaj; sanctions cannot reach a recording of Golha. The silent diaspora is the actual infrastructure of cultural continuity — the patient, unglamorous labour without which any future river has no bed. One cannot simultaneously claim the mantle of liberal modernity and rage against the academic critique of liberal modernity. To do so is to want, at once, the prestige of the West and exemption from its self-criticism. This is not a coherent intellectual posture. It is wounded pride dressed up as politics. Iranshahr as Common Starting Point Yahyaei asked whether a plural, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional society like Iran can articulate a common national interest. My answer: yes, but only if we identify its foundation correctly. The foundation is not ideology. It is not religion. It is not ethnicity. It is not even language. It is humanism — the unglamorous insistence that the human being, any human being, precedes belief, mother tongue, gender, skin colour or place of birth. The human being is the axis and centre of all values. Everything else is superstructure. I anchor this in the cultural geography of Iranshahr — not as a nationalist slogan but as a layered, composite reality. Iranian culture is an irreducibly intertwined tapestry of pre-Islamic, Islamic, Shia, Sunni, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jewish, Bahāʼī, Kurdish, Turkic, Lor and Baluch threads, bound together by the unifying medium of the Persian language. The Shāhnāmeh itself, contrary to the fantasy of a “pure Persian” text, was composed in the Islamic cultural milieu of the fourth Hijri century. Ferdowsi’s Persian is not pre-Islamic nostalgia; it is a magnificent synthesis. Synthesis, not purity, is the signature of this civilisation. Both the nativist purification project — which fantasises about an Iran cleansed of its Arab or Islamic heritage — and the theocratic monopoly project — which insists on a uniform Twelver Shia identity — are, spitting into the wind. The Scholars of Ray Now to the harder proposition. Yahyaei pressed me on the moral status of those diaspora actors who lobby foreign governments for intensified sanctions or direct military intervention. I did not equivocate. To petition foreign powers for war on one’s own homeland is to manufacture consent for violence in the precise sense Herman and Chomsky gave to the phrase. The blood is on the hands of those who supplied the pretext for foreign action. Once the machinery was set in motion, the lobbyists discovered they could no longer stop it; their agency, real in the pushing, evaporated at the moment of consequence. There is a historical parallel I drew in the conversation, and I want to restate it because it captures the structural recurrence of the pattern. In the thirteenth century, the jurists and theologians of Ray and Qazvin wrote letters to the Mongol khan inviting him to destroy the Ismaili state of Alamut. A Muslim community wrote to a non-Muslim conqueror asking him to annihilate a Muslim community that thought differently. The Mongol invasion that followed devastated all of

    13 min

  3. APR 29

    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 Iftar — an occasion made particularly poignant by a broader climate in which conflict had created an atmosphere of suspicion and unease. I endeavoured to speak candidly, while remaining true to my humanist sensibilities.

    10 min

  4. APR 27

    Our Future Is Not Their Past

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast 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 come to carry the whole of my argument about modernity, and I want to put it down at the outset rather than build up to it. Our future is not their past. Our future is the intelligent use of our past and of anybody else’s past, the responsible and critical creation and invention in the present, and the intelligent prediction of what is to come. That is the formula. Everything else in this essay is commentary on it. I write the sentence in this compressed form on purpose, because the temptation in our public conversations is to surrender to a much shorter slogan: that to be modern is to follow Europe. The slogan is so well established that even those who reject it tend to argue against it on its own terms. They concede the geography of modernity even as they protest its content. They assume that someone has reached the destination and that the rest of us are still on the road, and they then quarrel about how quickly to walk. The first task of any honest reflection on a non-Eurocentric modernity is to refuse this picture entirely. There is no destination. There never was. What is called modernity in the European story is itself a particular history, with its own losses, its own injustices, and its own unresolved questions. To take it as the universal template is not to honour it; it is to flatten it. The intelligent thing is neither to imitate that history nor to pretend it never happened. The intelligent thing is to read it carefully, to learn what can be learned from it, to refuse what should be refused, and to set it alongside our own history with the same critical attention. How the Linear Story Was Imposed To understand why the slogan has had such a grip on us, we need to recall how it entered our intellectual life. It did not arrive as a gentle suggestion. It arrived together with the military, financial, industrial and scientific might of European colonial expansion. The encounter, for most Muslim societies and for much of the wider world, took place under conditions of subjugation. The first impressions were of overwhelming material superiority. Cities were bombarded; economies were rearranged; institutions were dismantled or made subordinate; languages were displaced from the offices of state. People who had thought of themselves as inheritors of a great civilisation found themselves addressed as backward children who needed to be brought up. In that situation, the natural human response was a wound to dignity, and the natural response to such a wound is to want to prove oneself. The reformist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew out of this. Its founders were brilliant and serious people. They took the measure of the imbalance and tried to do something about it. They wanted to show their interlocutors, and themselves, that they too could think, that they too could organise, that they too could legislate, that they too could be modern. But the manner in which they tried to demonstrate this had a hidden cost. It accepted, as the very ground of the demonstration, the framework that the conqueror had set. The questions to be answered, the criteria of progress, the markers of seriousness, the timeline along which one’s society was to be assessed: all of these were borrowed from the very civilisation whose dominance was the original wound. The result was a curious kind of mirror politics, in which the ambition was to do, in the twentieth or twenty-first century, what Europe had done in the eighteenth or nineteenth. Our future was to become their past. The arrow of history pointed in only one direction, and our task was to walk it as quickly as we could. Why the Linear Story Misleads The first problem with this picture is that it is empirically wrong. There is no single line called modernity along which all societies are travelling at different speeds. There are, instead, many entangled processes, technological, economic, political, religious, aesthetic, that have unfolded differently in different places and that continue to unfold. To call only the European version of these processes modern is to mistake one example for the genus. It is, ironically, a provincial mistake disguised as a universal one. The second problem is that the picture is ethically corrosive. If we accept that our future is their past, we accept by the same gesture that we are behind, that our traditions are obstacles, that our languages are quaint, that our forms of authority are at best transitional, and that the only respectable destination is the one already mapped by someone else. This is not a posture compatible with self-respect, and it is certainly not a posture from which one can contribute anything new to the world. It is a posture of permanent apology. The third problem is intellectual. The linear story disables the very faculty by which a civilisation renews itself, namely the patient, critical reading of its own resources. If those resources are by definition pre-modern, there is nothing to read; one’s only work is to clear them away. Whole generations have been raised on this assumption, and the result has been a strange amnesia in which our libraries are full of books that no one has been trained to engage. A Different Picture Against this picture, I want to set another. To be modern, in the sense that I find defensible, is not to occupy a place on a line. It is to inhabit one’s time intelligently. That has three components, and the order in which I name them matters. The first is the intelligent use of the past, both our own and anyone else’s. Use is the operative word. We are not asked to worship the past, nor to repeat it, nor to put it on a museum shelf and bow before it. We are asked to use it, which means to read it for what it can teach us about the questions we are facing now. Some of what we will find will still be alive and applicable; some will be dead and best laid to rest; some will be alive but only on condition that we revise it for new circumstances. Discrimination of this kind is itself a high intellectual virtue, and it is the opposite of nostalgia. It also extends across borders. The intelligent use of the past does not stop at the boundary of one’s own civilisation. It includes the European past, the Indian past, the Chinese past, the African past, the indigenous pasts of the Americas. To insist that we draw on our own history is not to refuse other histories. It is, on the contrary, to acquire the standing from which one can engage other histories without flinching. The second component is responsible and critical creation in the present. This is the moment that the linear story most reliably erases, because it cannot imagine that anything new could come from outside the path it has already mapped. But invention does not require permission. The Persian poets did not ask permission to invent the ghazal; the Arab grammarians did not ask permission to invent the science of naḥw; the Iranian filmmakers of the last half-century did not ask permission to make the cinema they have made. Where these inventions have flourished, they have done so by drawing on local resources while engaging the wider world, and by holding themselves to a high standard of craft. There is no reason we cannot do the same now in law, in education, in finance, in architecture, in technology. The question is not whether we are allowed to create; it is whether we are willing to do the work. The third component is the intelligent anticipation of the future. By this I do not mean futurology, which is mostly entertainment. I mean the disciplined imagination that reads present tendencies and asks where they are pointing, what they will demand of us, and what we ought to be preparing for. Climate disruption, demographic change, the next revolution in computation, the reorganisation of work, the migration of authority away from the territorial state: these are not science fiction. They are the conditions in which the next generation will live. To be modern in any non-trivial sense is to be already thinking about them, and to be thinking about them with our own concepts and our own commitments rather than borrowing the worry list of someone else’s commentariat. Pluralism Without Relativism Notice what happens when these three components are taken together. The picture they draw is not of a single arrow but of many traditions, each engaged in its own version of intelligent use, critical creation and disciplined anticipation. This is what writers on the subject have come to call multiple modernities, and it is the only honest description of the world we actually inhabit. It is also the only description that allows us to honour both the unity of human experience and the irreducibility of its plural expressions. It is important not to confuse this pluralism with relativism. To say that there are several modernities is not to say that anything goes, or that all arrangements are equally good, or that judgement has been suspended. It is to say that the standards by which we evaluate human flourishing, justice, knowledge, beauty, are themselves not the monopoly of any one civilisation, and that any serious conversation about them has to be conducted with humility on every side. Some inventions of the European modern period are durable contributions to the human inheritance and should be received as such. Some are local solutions whose universalisation has done more harm than good. The task is to tell the difference, and the only way to tell the difference is to do the patient work of comparison rather than reach for the slogan. The Self–Other Tr

    15 min

  5. APR 25

    Beyond the Pause

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast 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,” reads, at its best, as a quiet warning. He argues that what we are witnessing across West Asia is not stability but a pause — a breathing space purchased by pressure, not produced by structure. Ceasefires hold for a season; chokepoints remain latent; dialogue dissipates unless it accumulates into institutions. The core proposition — that durable outcomes require continuity, coordination and institutional anchoring, and that Pakistan is moving from facilitator to potential anchor — deserves to be read carefully by anyone who takes the region’s future seriously. I find myself in agreement with the spine of his argument. What I want to offer here, in the most deferential spirit, is a widening of the frame. First, a point of reinforcement. Sada is right that the present moment is defined by asymmetry: disruption is less costly to generate than stability is to sustain. That single sentence is, in effect, a theorem of the contemporary regional order. It explains why the Strait of Hormuz functions not as a closed route but as a latent pressure point; why external guarantees have thinned; why time horizons in Tehran and Washington cannot be synchronised by diplomacy alone. It also explains why Islamabad’s convening of the recent US–Iran engagement — not Muscat this time — signals something more than a change of venue. It signals a change in the geography of trust. That is a non-trivial shift, and Sada is right to name it. Where I would respectfully expand his analysis is on the question of who, precisely, generates the disruption that makes stability so expensive. Sada’s framing is systemic and elegant; it treats fragility as an emergent property of the region’s interdependence. I agree that interdependence without governance produces fragility. But interdependence does not decay on its own. It is actively destabilised by specific actors whose strategic interest lies precisely in preventing the region from consolidating. Any honest reading of the last two years — from the Saudi energy strikes to the Islamabad talks, from the covert logic of sabotage to the overt logic of air campaigns — points to a structural spoiler that cannot be folded neatly into the language of “external actors.” Israel, armed with an undeclared nuclear arsenal and shielded by the American veto, is the central asymmetry the region must learn to speak about in plain terms. No anchor state, however capable, can hold a system that is being actively pulled apart from within. Naming this is not a polemical indulgence; it is a condition of analytical seriousness. The second place where I would gently extend Sada’s argument concerns Pakistan itself. He writes of a transition from facilitation toward potential anchoring. I would go further and argue that the transition has already begun, and that it carries a contradiction Islamabad must now metabolise in public. The Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Riyadh, and the integration of Pakistani airpower into Saudi air defences, has given Pakistan the convening weight that makes its mediation credible. It has also, unavoidably, compromised the appearance of neutrality on which mediation is presumed to depend. Foreign Minister Dar’s visit to Tehran in March, with its explicit disclosure of SMDA obligations, was a first attempt at squaring this circle through strategic transparency. It is, to my mind, the most interesting diplomatic innovation of the year: a wager that honesty about one’s commitments is more stabilising than performative impartiality. If it holds, it may become a template for how medium powers mediate in a post-hegemonic order. This brings me to the deeper theoretical point. Sada distinguishes between dialogue that dissipates and dialogue that accumulates into structured institutions and practices. I would add a third category, and it is the one on which the region’s future most depends: dialogue that deters. The paradox of the current pause is that it is being held together, in part, by the very asymmetries Sada identifies. A nuclear-capable Pakistan inside Saudi defences raises, rather than lowers, the cost of Iranian miscalculation, and by the same token raises the cost of Saudi adventurism. Mutual deterrence is not an institution, but it can be the scaffolding on which institutions are built, provided it is explicitly linked to a framework of mutual constraint. A mutual cap-and-reduction understanding between Islamabad and Tehran — on enrichment, on stockpiles, on the doctrines governing their use — is, as I have argued elsewhere on Twin Wisdoms, the only credible long-term path. It is also the hardest. I close with a critical-rationalist caveat, in the spirit of the friendship that animates this exchange. Every framework offered for the region’s future — Sada’s, mine, anyone’s — must remain falsifiable. We should be suspicious of any account, however elegant, that immunises itself against refutation by absorbing every counter-example into its schema. The next twelve months will test whether Pakistan’s anchoring is real or rhetorical; whether the Islamabad channel accumulates or dissipates; whether the spoilers are contained or indulged. Sada has given us the right question. What remains, for the rest of us, is to refuse the comfort of a premature answer, and to keep the dialogue honest enough to survive the asymmetries it is trying to name. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

    6 min

  6. APR 24

    Voice to What End?

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast 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 ends. The real question is not whether Iranians should be heard. The real question is this: heard by whom, for what end, and translated into what programme of action? This is where the slogan begins to darken. Too often, in the online activism of a segment of the Iranian diaspora, “be their voice” does not mean careful solidarity, disciplined witness, or intellectually honest advocacy. It means: amplify the suffering of Iranians until it becomes morally easier to justify sanctions, sabotage, siege, or military intervention. The slogan sounds compassionate, but its political afterlife is often brutal. I have been circling this problem in several earlier essays. In “The Depth Illusion” I argued that moral language is frequently used as philosophical scaffolding for war apologism. In “The Normalcy We Must Defend”  I showed why sanctions do not principally wound repressive elites; they wound the civilian fabric of society—the sick, the poor, the ordinary family trying to keep life going. And in “War Unseen, War Unleashed” I wrote about the peculiar spectacle of distance masquerading as courage: those with no skin in the game speaking as though other people’s ruins were a form of principle. The slogan sits at the intersection of all three. Let me be clear, because the fallacy arrives predictably: “So, you want people’s voice not to be heard?” No. Nothing could be further from the truth. I want voices to be heard without being ventriloquised. I want suffering to be witnessed without being converted into a permission slip for more suffering. I want the grief of Iranians to remain Iranian grief—not raw material for the fantasies of exilic heroism, foreign intervention, or civilisational theatre. The world already knows that the Islamic Republic is repressive. This is not hidden knowledge waiting for a hashtag to disclose it. The prisons are known. The executions are known. The violations of due process are known. Women’s struggles are known. Labour grievances are known. Ethnic and religious marginalisation are known. What, then, is really being added when the slogan is repeated with such fever? Very often, not knowledge, but pressure—pressure towards a conclusion already desired. And that conclusion is almost always sold dishonestly. It is rarely stated in full. Nobody wants to say openly: I want sanctions that will make medicine scarcer; I want instability that will make daily life harsher; I want foreign powers with their own strategic interests to decide that Iran is now a suitable site for managed destruction. So the cruelty is wrapped in the language of care. A poster says “Be their voice”, but the subtext is too often: help intensify the conditions under which ordinary people will break. Yet life inside Iran, however wounded, is not reducible to a theatre of total despair. People still bury their dead, celebrate their children, translate books, fall in love, quarrel, study, work, laugh, pray, and endure. This does not mean life is normal in the shallow sense, nor does it excuse repression. It means that a society is more than its torment, and that those who claim to speak for it must not desire its collapse as proof of their moral seriousness. If one wants a more rigorous test of this matter, one might begin not with a slogan, but with coherence. That is precisely why I created the Political Consciousness Toolkit: not as a test of loyalty, but as a test of symmetry, consistency, and moral seriousness. Can one oppose authoritarianism and foreign bombing at the same time? Yes. Must one? I would argue that any politics worthy of the name requires precisely that double refusal. To refuse the slogan in its current usage is therefore not an act of silence. It is an act of resistance—resistance to sentimental blackmail, to bad faith, and to the cheap moral glamour of speaking for others while prescribing the instruments of their further harm. Solidarity does not mean borrowing another people’s pain and spending it recklessly. It means refusing to make their pain serve the ambitions of empire, exile nostalgia, or dynastic fantasy. Iranians do not need ventriloquists. They need honesty. They need political literacy. They need allies who can distinguish between amplifying a voice and hijacking it, between witness and weaponisation, between conscience and performance. A slogan is never innocent when its consequences are not. So yes, hear the people of Iran. But hear them as human beings, not as ammunition. Hear them in their plurality, their fatigue, their endurance, and their right not to be “saved” into rubble. The task is not to become their voice. The task is harder, humbler, and far more moral: to stop drowning it out with the echo of our own desires. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

    5 min

  7. APR 23

    The Iranian Abroad: A Shift the Diaspora Has Not Registered

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast 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 a direction that neither passport indices nor the slogan-politics of a loud exilic faction can register. Under sanctions, bombardment and the machinery of media caricature, ordinary Iranians have conducted themselves with a composure that Europeans and North Americans have begun, quietly, to notice. This essay argues that the shift is real; that the myth of a lost universal esteem — that all Iranians were once revered and are now despised — must be named and refused; and that while a loud diaspora, still litigating 1979, cannot see the shift, a quieter and wiser diaspora has long been reading it correctly. A Portuguese friend, trained in anthropology, Faranaz Keshavjee, wrote to me recently that the forty-seven seconds of Tehran footage looped on her evening news did not square with the voice-over. The voice-over spoke of a horrific theocracy that must disappear; the footage showed women in Zara-adjacent outfits eating ice-cream, men in sunglasses, a bazaar going about its business. She asked, with the honesty of someone untrained to choose a side, whether she was reading her own screen correctly. She was. Her question could not have been posed by most of the louder Iranian exiles of my generation, because the apparatus through which they process Iran was sealed shut in the winter of 1979 and immunised, in the Popperian sense, against every subsequent refutation. My first submission is that something has shifted in how Iranians are encountered abroad, and the shift is not an artefact of self-regard. The evidence is modest, anecdotal and cumulative, and precisely for that reason social scientists ought to take it seriously. An Iranian passenger at a Frankfurt taxi rank is waved to the front of the queue by a driver following the news. A Lisbon greengrocer presses a second pomegranate into her customer’s bag and refuses payment. A Toronto professor tells her seminar that the most composed work she has received this term came from a student whose cousins were being bombed. None of this appears in any index. All of it circulates, person to person, in the ordinary transactions by which reputations are formed. The second submission is that this shift has been produced not by diaspora advocacy but by the conduct of Iranians inside the country — the very population a loud segment of the diaspora addresses as a silent object awaiting liberation. Under sanctions that have hollowed out the middle class, under a war economy imposed from without and an ideological economy imposed from within, Iranians have continued to run schools, stage concerts, publish poetry, conduct weddings and bury their dead with a dignity no foreign observer can entirely unsee. The women walking through Tehran with their hair uncovered are not staging a photo-op for a Washington think-tank; they are negotiating, piecemeal and at real risk, the terms of their own ordinary life — a form of moral seriousness legible even to audiences who cannot name a single Iranian poet. It is imperative to name a myth that has hardened into diaspora common sense: that all Iranians, before 1979, enjoyed a universal esteem that has since been forfeited, and that we now carry an unearned stigma. The myth is seductive because it contains a fragment of truth — the green Pahlavi passport did open certain counters at certain airports — and dangerous because the fragment has been inflated into a metaphysics. Pre-revolutionary Iranians abroad were, like every other migrant population, a mixed constituency whose standing varied by class, language, comportment and the prejudices of their hosts. Orientalist caricature did not begin in 1979; nor did European warmth towards Iranians end there. What changed was the arrival of a regime whose conduct supplied new material to old caricatures. To say that Iranians were once universally revered and are now universally suspect is to trade a complex sociological reality for a consoling fairy tale. Here a loud segment of the exilic diaspora misreads the score. The typical polemical post that circulates in Farsi these days — and such posts are abundant — rehearses a familiar choreography: a catalogue of real grievances, a rewinding of the tape to 1979, and the nomination of a single legitimate heir who alone can restore the train to its rails. The diagnosis of diaspora vanity is often sharp and in many respects just. The prescription, however, reproduces the very structure it condemns: a politics of restoration staged in Paris or Los Angeles, addressed to an Iran that no longer exists. The binary my Portuguese friend was cautioned against — the people want regime change / the people are content with theocracy — is the same binary the loud diaspora keeps reinscribing in monarchist, republican and leftist variants alike. But the diaspora is not monolithic, and to speak as though it were would reproduce the very error under examination. Alongside the loud faction there is a quieter diaspora that has been reading the situation correctly for some time — scholars, physicians, engineers, teachers and unshowy artists who carry Iran in their work rather than their slogans. They mentor students without auditioning for television, fund clinics and archives without branding them, translate without proselytising, and decline the invitation to convert grief into spectacle. They are less vocal and more resolute; less photogenic and more useful; less certain about the next slogan and more disciplined about the next decade. Much of the shift this essay traces has been prepared, invisibly, by their conduct. There is a structural reason for the louder faction’s blindness. Exile, as Said reminded us, is first a condition and only afterwards a vantage point; when the condition hardens into an identity, the vantage point narrows. A self-understanding predicated upon 1979 has a powerful incentive to keep the catastrophe freshly lit, because the alternative — conceding that Iranians inside the country are now generating their own reputations without exilic intermediation — is to concede that the forty-nine-year vigil may not have been the axis around which Iran was turning. The vigil has had its dignities. But dignity is not accuracy, and grief, however earned, is not a method. What, then, should be said to the interlocutor trying in good faith to read past her evening news? The answer is not a counter-slogan but an invitation to attend to the texture of ordinary Iranian life — the cousin’s wedding, the school run, the queue at the bakery — and to the parallel conduct of the quieter diaspora whose daily work has been slowly restoring what the louder faction imagines was permanently lost. A theory that cannot be refuted by any observation has become a creed; a politics that cannot be revised by the conduct of those in whose name it is conducted has become a performance. Iranians inside the country, together with the wiser part of the diaspora outside it, are conducting the actual refutation. The question is whether the rest of us will learn from them, or go on carrying, in Hafez’s phrase, a smiling lip over a bleeding heart — mistaking the bleeding for the argument. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

    8 min

  8. APR 22

    The Normalcy We Must Defend

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast 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. On Sanctions, the Temptation of a War Economy, and the Quiet Labour of Breaking the Cycle A reflection on a conversation between Hossein Hamdieh and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj in the Borj series. The sanctions doctrine rests on a falsified premise. For a century, economic coercion has been justified to Western publics as an alternative to military conflict. The empirical record shows the opposite: sustained economic pressure on industrialised states increases the probability of armed confrontation. This is not a marginal effect or a contested interpretation. It is the dominant pattern. The oil embargo on Japan precipitated Pearl Harbour. Maximum pressure on Iran, sustained from 2012 through 2025, has now been crowned by direct American military strikes. The theory fails its own test. What Esfandyar Batmanghelidj identifies, in his recent conversation with Hossein Hamdieh, is the structural logic beneath this failure—what he terms the cycle. Economic pressure generates domestic instability. Instability, at sufficient magnitude, becomes the justification for the military intervention that economic coercion was purportedly designed to avoid. This is not rhetorical flourish. It is pattern recognition. The question Batmanghelidj places before us is simultaneously intellectual and political: how does one interrupt a cycle when every institution—military, bureaucratic, ideological—has configured itself to perpetuate it? My purpose here is not summary but analysis. I take up Batmanghelidj’s diagnosis and extend it through three domains: the falsifiability problem in sanctions theory, the regional architecture required to break the cycle, and the structural temptation of the war economy. Each domain reveals hidden assumptions that, once made explicit, dissolve certain comforting binaries and clarify the actual decision space. The Sanctions Doctrine and the Problem of Self-Immunisation Premise one: economic coercion is presented as a substitute for armed conflict. Premise two: if this claim were empirically sound, we would observe a negative correlation between sanction intensity and subsequent military engagement. What we observe instead is a positive correlation. Nicholas Mulder’s The Economic Weapon documents this pattern across a century. More careful economists warned in the 1920s that accumulating pressure on large economies tends to make war more likely, not less. The prediction has been borne out repeatedly. A falsifiable theory, confronted with systematic disconfirmation, would be revised or abandoned. The sanctions doctrine has instead been immunised through auxiliary hypotheses: sanctions were insufficiently comprehensive; the target regime was unusually resilient; the next iteration will succeed. What cannot be entertained—because it would destabilise too many institutional commitments—is that the core premise is wrong. This is Popperian self-immunisation: the theoretical framework survives not through empirical adequacy but through the continuous addition of ad hoc protections. Batmanghelidj observes that the sanctions imposed under Obama in 2012 and rebranded as Trump’s maximum pressure in 2018 are substantially identical. This dissolves the partisan narrative by which American liberals reassure themselves that present cruelty is a Trumpian aberration rather than bipartisan structural logic. The cruelty is encoded in the system. Iran has been constructed, across decades and administrations, as a target rather than a negotiating partner. The Ideological Incoherence Hypothesis A second binary requires dismantling: the current American administration characterised as either civilisational crusader or transactional deal-maker. Batmanghelidj’s diagnosis is more precise and, I submit, correct: the obstacle is not excessive ideology but insufficient ideological coherence. Incoherence is the problem. This matters because a segment of Iranian opinion has convinced itself that Western antagonism is metaphysical—that an independent Iran is ontologically intolerable to the West. If true, diplomacy is theatre and fortress politics the only rational posture. But the historical record contradicts this. The United States has negotiated settlements with governments whose ideology it finds repugnant—Vietnam, contemporary Syria—when structural conditions align. To foreclose diplomacy on civilisational grounds is sophisticated fatalism, and fatalism is typically the rationalisation of abdicated agency. The task is harder and less dramatic: identify the political conditions under which agreement becomes possible, and cultivate them. Batmanghelidj’s suggestion that transformative diplomacy—a non-aggression framework, explicit mutual economic benefit, regional normalisation architecture—may be required rather than narrow technical fixes deserves examination. These are not utopian aspirations. They constitute the minimal vocabulary of any durable settlement. The Regional Horizon as Strategic Depth Thesis: the decisive plane of action has shifted from bilateral (Iran-US) to regional (Iran-Gulf). This is not a geographical observation but a structural one. The seven years of diplomatic groundwork towards normalisation with Riyadh, Doha, and Abu Dhabi was not sentiment. It was the construction of strategic depth through economic interdependence—dense transactional webs with co-geographical actors. Batmanghelidj’s analogy to postwar Europe is apt. Airbus is the institutional residue of a Franco-German decision to become co-owners of prosperity rather than perennial combatants over territory. The mechanism: create joint economic assets sufficiently valuable that their destruction becomes mutually ruinous. Why should Iran-Saudi Arabia, or Iran-Qatar, not follow this logic? The recent conflict has imposed costs on this project. Targeting Gulf infrastructure has depleted Iranian political capital in capitals where it was beginning to accumulate. But the project is deferred, not terminated. The critical variable is whether Iranian leadership resists the Hormuz temptation—the idea that a choke point, tolled or closed, can substitute for regional partnership. It cannot. A demonstrated deterrent is not equivalent to a structural economic position. Confusing the two is a category error with generational consequences. Hidden assumption made explicit: regional economic integration requires Iran to function as a normal state—predictable, treaty-abiding, oriented towards mutual gain—not as a revolutionary vanguard. This is not a moral judgement. It is a structural prerequisite. Revolutionary rhetoric is incompatible with the trust infrastructure required for joint economic projects. The Asymmetry of Societies Batmanghelidj notes an asymmetry that Western discourse systematically inverts. For all the rhetoric about an ideological Islamic Republic, Iranian society has not been mobilised into the expansionist, revanchist, paranoid politics observable in contemporary Israel. The dialogue between state and society in Iran is strained but extant. Demands are still made from below; power, however reluctantly, still responds. This is the empirical foundation for any claim to normalcy. The human being is the measure and axis of value—madār va miḥvar-i arzish mā ādamī ast. A society that mourns its dead as persons, not as units in a cosmic drama, that seeks functional roofs and competent schools, is a society whose normalcy warrants defence. Defending it is the political project. This is not sentimental. It is the criterion by which state legitimacy is assessed. The War Economy Threshold Batmanghelidj’s reference to Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction functions as a structural warning. Interwar Germany’s trajectory was not solely ideological derangement. It was the economic reorganisation of an industrial base under sustained external pressure, combined with unresolved resentment, until weapons production became more profitable than welfare production. The state ceases to serve society; society is conscripted into serving the state’s armament requirements. Iran has, to date, avoided this threshold. Its industrial economy remains predominantly civilian-oriented. But the capacity to tip is latent. Every month of attrition marginally increases the probability. The deepest defence of the nation is not state armament but protection of the civilian fabric upon which any legitimate state must rest. This is the Popperian criterion: what would falsify the claim that Iran is defending itself? Answer: the subordination of civil society to permanent mobilisation. Indigenous Economic Thinking as Exit Strategy Batmanghelidj’s final recommendation—Isabella Weber’s How China Escaped Shock Therapy—points to the necessary intellectual labour. The answer to imposed orthodoxy is not counter-orthodoxy but the patient excavation of indigenous economic frameworks capable of articulating a development path that is neither IMF template nor autarky. Iranian economic debate has oscillated between state dirigisme and market fundamentalism. Neither is sufficient. What is required is unglamorous, iterative, fallibilist work to construct a model fitted to Iran’s actual contingencies. The Cycle and Its Interruption The cycle Batmanghelidj identifies is the machinery that disperses collective agency—through sanction, war, and manufactured emergency that suspends ordinary reasoning. Breaking the cycle requires protecting the conditions under which a society can think, argue, build, correct, mourn, and begin again. This is not heroic. It is daily. And it is the measure o

    11 min
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About

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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