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. 1d ago

    Two Kinds of Certainty

    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.

  2. 2d ago

    Breaking the Mirror

    PodcastBy 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. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

  3. Aug 2

    Neither Rogue Nor Obedient

    PodcastBy 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 d

  4. Jul 31

    The Middle Nobody Counts

    PodcastBy 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 size 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

  5. Jul 30

    Islam or Muslims?

    PodcastBy 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

  6. Jul 28

    Who Holds the Rope

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On capital punishment in Iran, the argument the opposition will not make, and the one the Muslim tradition already supplies An iron scaffold went up in Alikhani Square in Isfahan on Monday night. People gathered. There were scuffles with the guards. In the early hours of Tuesday, Amirhossein Safari and Abolfazl Sepahi were hanged in public, and by breakfast the clip was everywhere.[1] I want to start somewhere less comfortable than the timelines. Capital punishment did exist before the revolution. Capital punishment was not invented by the Islamic Republic. Iran’s first penal code dates to 1926, a secondary code with no religious influence, sanctioned by one of the most respected Ayatollahs of the day, and it carried the death penalty.[2] Under the Pahlavis the executions were mostly private: firing squads for politicals, the rope for common crime. Ervand Abrahamian counted fewer than 100 political prisoners executed between 1971 and 1979. Between 1981 and 1985 the figure was above 7,900.[3] So the gallows did not arrive in 1979. What arrived was the scale, and a new grammar for it. What the Count Can and Cannot Settle For 2025 the monitors give: 1,639 (Iran Human Rights and ECPM), 1,858 (Hengaw), 1,922 (HRANA), 2,167 (Iran HRM), 2,228 (Iran Human Rights Society). A spread of nearly 600 between the lowest and the highest. Every one of them calls it the worst year since 1989.[4] In ‘Three Thousand Five Hundred’ I went hard at a broadcaster who put 30,000 into the air against a researcher’s own count of 3,500. I would do it again.[5] But I owe a distinction I did not draw there. That was a number manufactured for effect. This is a spread between careful people counting under a blackout, where under 7 per cent of last year’s executions were ever announced officially.[6] The curve is not in dispute. Only its exact height is. Here is the part nobody will put on a placard. Of the 1,639, at least 795 were drug convictions – roughly half, a category invented by a law of June 1980, and one that has never produced a rally anywhere.[7] At Qezel Hesar, some 1,500 prisoners condemned for ordinary crimes have been on dry hunger strike since 13 July.[8] Their names are not being read out at any vigil in Toronto or Stockholm. A Bad Law My point of departure is that I disagree with capital punishment as a bad law. It is a legal instrument which is irreversible. If there is any mistake on the side of the judge or the judiciary in passing that verdict on a convicted person, the consequences are irreversible, and that brings ethical and legal responsibility for the person who is doing it. In particular for a Muslim. I say in particular because in Islam, taking one person’s life is equated with taking the life of the entire humanity, and there is therefore a great deal of moral weight behind resisting it. The tradition even builds the exit into the sentence: under qiṣāṣ, retaliation, the sentence sits with the family of the victim, who may forgive. If we are looking for a strong argument against capital punishment, it comes much better from inside the Muslim tradition and the ethical framework that tradition gives us than from any borrowed vocabulary. Disagreeing with the law is not disagreeing with the conviction. If the crime is established, if the person convicted has gone through legal due process, and if we can reasonably show that, my argument still stands. Capital punishment must not happen. The worst case is a life sentence, and that is a thing we need to be able to coordinate, to temper, to qualify under the present circumstances and in the best interest of society. This is not a political issue. It is a legal one, and it is true across the board, about all countries. Punishment is a deterrent. Punishment is not an objective in itself. I am addressing the legal experts inside Iran here, among whom I know there is a great deal of disagreement and a great deal of contestation over the whole thing. Whose Rope Now the bottom line. The way the opposition of the Islamic Republic is making a huge propaganda against the recent executions just does not add up to history. It does not look at the nuances of it. It does not offer a rigorous, legal, strong, rational argument against capital punishment itself. The problem these people have is who is doing the capital punishment. It is the Islamic Republic which is the problem. The problem is not the capital punishment, and we need to make it very clear, we need to be very distinct about it. There is a test, and it takes one sentence. Ask any of them to say, on the record: no Iranian state, under any flag, should hang anyone. Ask whether a restored monarchy would abolish the death penalty on its first day, or keep it for the people it would then be holding. Ask about the 795. The silence will tell you what the placards will not. They do not care about the existence or the non-existence of capital punishment. All they care about is the existence of the Islamic Republic as a regime, as a state that they do not like. I hold both of these together, and they do not cancel. The scaffold at Alikhani Square should never have gone up, and the two young men should be alive this evening. That is a claim about scaffolds. Almost everything that will be said about them today is a claim about flags. Declaration on AI use: the argument, the claims and the judgements in this essay are my own, dictated in a recorded planning note and reproduced here largely in my own wording. An AI assistant was used to verify figures against published human rights reporting, to supply the citations, and to enforce house style. No claim, source or conclusion originates with the model. [1] ‘Iran executes two protesters amid heavy security in Isfahan’, Iran International, 28 July 2026, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202607289410; ‘The Public Executions of Abolfazl Sepahi and Amir Hossein Safari’, Iran Human Rights Monitor, 28 July 2026, https://iran-hrm.com/2026/07/28/the-public-executions-of-abolfazl-sepahi-and-amir-hossein-safari-a-direct-consequence-of-international-inaction/. [2] Roya Boroumand, interviewed by Anne Holsinger, ‘Capital Punishment in Iran’, Discussions with DPIC, Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, https://www.iranrights.org/library/document/4066. [3] Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 135–36, as quoted in Juan Cole, ‘How the Ayatollahs’ Iran became the Execution Capital of the World’, Informed Comment, 27 May 2023, https://www.juancole.com/2023/05/ayatollahs-execution-capital.html. Verified at the quotation, not against the volume; please confirm the page range before publication. [4] Iran Human Rights and ECPM, 18th Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran (April 2026), https://iranhr.net/en/reports/44/; Hengaw Organisation for Human Rights, annual report, 30 December 2025; HRANA annual report, 26 December 2025, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202512268741; Iran Human Rights Monitor, ‘Annual Report on Human Rights Violations in Iran in 2025 – Part 2’, 5 January 2026, https://iran-hrm.com/2026/01/05/annual-report-on-human-rights-violations-in-iran-in-2025-part-2/; Iran Human Rights Society, 9 January 2026, https://en.iranhrs.org/statistical-review-and-analysis-of-executions-in-2025-breaking-the-record-of-human-rights-violations-in-iran-with-2228-executions/. [5] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Three Thousand Five Hundred’, The Twin Wisdoms, 25 July 2026, https://twinwisdoms.org/three-thousand-five-hundred/. [6] 18th Annual Report, as above: 113 executions (under 7 per cent) announced by official sources, against 9.7 per cent in 2024 and 15 per cent in 2023. [7] 18th Annual Report, as above. On the origin of the category, see ‘Legislative Framework of Death Penalty in Iran’, Iran Human Rights: the Legal Bill to Intensify Punishments for Perpetrators of Drug Crimes was passed on 9 June 1980, introducing the death penalty for drug offences for the first time, https://www.iranhr.net/en/articles/7406/. [8] ‘Iran Mobilizes Repression, the International Community Mobilizes Inaction’, Iran Human Rights Monitor, 22 July 2026, https://iran-hrm.com/2026/07/22/iran-mobilizes-repression-the-international-community-mobilizes-inaction/. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

  7. Jul 27

    The Rock and the Library

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Date: 13/09/2003 | Photo: Mohammad Mahmoudi |Copyright: © ACHB  On the inscription of Alamut, and the inheritance the citation does and does not name The item took a few minutes. On Sunday, in Busan, the World Heritage Committee inscribed Alamut Castle and six associated fortifications – Lambesar, Navizaršāh, Šams Kelāyeh, Qosṭinlār, Širkūh and Ilān – on the World Heritage List. It is Iran’s thirtieth cultural property. The nomination file runs to volumes and the citation runs to a paragraph, and the paragraph contains a sentence that eight centuries of writing about that rock has declined to write. From the late eleventh century, Alamut served as the political, military and intellectual centre of the Nizārī Ismailis. The fortified network was a refuge and a scholarly and cultural hub, and it sustained the community until the castle fell in 1256.[1] Intellectual centre. Scholarly hub. Read those words with the polemical record open beside them. What the record said instead The rock has a longer career in European prose than in Persian scholarship, and it is a career built almost entirely out of invention. The Crusaders met Nizārīs in Syria and not in Iran, took the honorific of a Syrian leader for a title of legend, and carried home a word. Marco Polo transcribed hashāshīn and Europe acquired ‘assassin’. Farhad Daftary has shown how the legends thickened: each chronicler and envoy took the accounts of his predecessors as the ground for his own additions, until within a century the whole apparatus had passed into circulation as a reliable description of what these people did.[2] None of this would matter much if the fabrications had stayed in the twelfth century. They did not. In the literature on political violence that swelled after 2001, Robert Pape describes a sect that built an organisation for the planned and systematic use of political murder, sustained by suicide missions; the description is a reconstruction of medieval material out of parts manufactured after September 2001. Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin give nineteen pages to the Ismailis and four to the Zealots, retell the discredited story of Niẓām al-Mulk’s killing, and compare the domestic police and intelligence services of the Seljuq empire with those of the United States.[3] Set against that, consider Marshall Hodgson, who is the earliest scholar of any standing on this subject and who is nobody’s apologist. Hodgson wrote in 1955 that any discussion of where assassination sat in Nizārī state policy could only be tentative, since murder was common enough among their opponents, and since deeds claimed by the Nizārīs may have been claimed for reasons of their own. That word, tentative, did not survive the crossing into political theory. It was received as settled.[4] What was made on the rock Alamut was a place of refuge, in the technical sense the sources give it: a dār al-hijra, a defensible ground on which a community could be gathered and a teaching worked out. The teaching was the doctrine of taʿlīm, and its argument is unusually plain for its period. Is the intellect on its own sufficient for knowledge of God? If it is, then anyone at all may reach that knowledge unaided, and no path can claim to be better than another. If it is not, a teacher is required, and the teacher must be both expert and truthful. What the truthful teacher teaches is not information but tawḥīd, and the Imam of the time is the one who teaches it. Four steps, no Neoplatonic scaffolding, and a conclusion that reorganised everything around it. Out of that came the rest. The declaration of qiyāmat in 1164, which located the inner ethical content of the ritual law above its outward performance for those who had reached the stage of ahl-i waḥdat, under conditions that were anything but lax. The rearticulation of imāmat by al-Shahrastānī, whose influence on every later Nizārī text is now established. The corpus attributed to Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī and written on that rock or within its orbit: Rawḍa-yi taslīm, Sayr wa suluk, Āghāz wa anjām, Maṭlūb al-muʾminīn, Tawallā wa tabarrā. And a shift in language that has outlasted the doctrine’s obscurity, because it is with these people that Persian, and no longer Arabic, becomes the working language of the Nizārī tradition for the next several centuries.[5] There is also the poetry, which is the closest thing we have to the self-image of the fidāʾīs. The Dīwān-i qāʾimiyyāt praises men who wore their love as a helmet and their knowledge as armour, who brought light to life like candles through the longing of faith. Belief and hope run through those odes, and there is no trace in them of nihilism or despair. They describe fighting and not ambush. They describe men of no rank distinct from anyone else in the community. Whatever the fidāʾīs were, they were not a secret order, and they were certainly not the drugged automata of Polo’s imagination.[6] The nomination came from an uneasy quarter The state that filed this dossier has never been at ease with the people whose centre it is now celebrating. In March 2000, a week after the attempt on the life of Saeed Hajjarian, a reformist newspaper in Tehran ran an essay identifying Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ’s fidāʾīs as the predecessors of the men who had shot him. In May 2014, during a televised argument, a reformist journalist objected that comparing Ayatollah Khomeini with Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ was an insult to Khomeini. One side offered the comparison as praise and the other rejected it as slander, and neither paused to ask whether it had any grounds at all.[7] So the minister’s language in Busan was worth listening to closely. He called the inscription a symbol of Iran’s civilisational identity and dedicated it to the people of the Alamut valley, whom he named as the true custodians of the site. There is nothing wrong with any of that. It is also entirely compatible with a heritage regime that arrives as masonry and departs as a visitor figure. Defensive architecture, spatial organisation, conservation budgets, a new stop on the northern circuit. None of it obliges anyone to open the Rawḍa-yi taslīm.[8] Stone is the easy part In March I wrote about a growing tendency, inside Iran and in the diaspora, to amputate fourteen centuries of Islamic inheritance from the definition of what it is to be Iranian, and to reach backward past that inheritance for a purer origin. This week the state performed the opposite gesture, and the opposite gesture is not automatically the corrective. An Ismaili site can be absorbed into a national inventory precisely by being emptied of what made it Ismaili. The fortress becomes Iranian patrimony; the theology stays where the polemicists left it. I should also correct my own emphasis. Ten days ago, writing about the school at Minab and the filing category under which its dead were placed, I treated heritage chiefly as something at risk from ordnance, which is a defensive way of holding the question. That was too narrow. A site can be structurally sound, fully funded, and comprehensively misunderstood. The other thing the citation cannot carry is that this is not an extinct people. The community whose intellectual centre stood on that crag survived 1256, went into concealment, re-emerged at Anjudān, moved with the Imamat to India and then to East Africa and then outward again, and now lives in more than 25 countries under a line of succession it has never broken. Its Imamat holds no state and governs no territory beyond the Seat in Lisbon. That is a rarer thing in the history of religion than a ruined castle, and no committee has a category for it.[9] Our future, I have argued elsewhere, is the intelligent use of our past and of anybody else’s past. A rock entering a list is not that use. It is the invitation to it. The library that was burned at Alamut cannot be recovered, but a good deal of what was written there has been edited, translated and published over the last fifty years, and almost none of it is read by the people who now own the postcard. The inscription is welcome. The reading is the work. Postscript In March 2023 I spent an hour on Shirazeh, the BBC Persian books programme, talking about the one book through which most Iranians have met these people: Khudāwand-i Alamūt, published under the name of a French author, Paul Amir, and rendered into Persian by Zabīḥ Allāh Manṣūrī. Whether Paul Amir ever existed is disputed in Persian criticism. What is not disputed is that Manṣūrī’s practice was adaptation on a heroic scale, and that the result runs to some 670 pages. I read it as a young man and enjoyed it. I have since watched it arrive in conversation again and again. Two occasions stay with me, because of who was speaking. When Parviz Meshkatian learned that I was Ismaili, this book was the first thing he reached for. So, on another occasion, did Houshang Ebtehaj. Sayeh, of all people. It stands between Iranians and their own past on this subject, and it stands there because nothing else was on the shelf. The trouble starts on the opening pages, where one bazaar legend about the Ismailis is dismissed and another is installed in its place. Manṣūrī turns away some of the wilder stories and then builds his account on a secret society with an organised hierarchy and men trained to die on command. He gives the Ismailis a centralised economy resembling a communist state. His preface tells the reader plainly what the book is for: the movement of Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ was not only religious, and the man meant to free Iran from the Abbasid caliphs and their local clients. The closing pages have Persian pushed forward and Arabic pushed back, and a national feeling that had slept for centuries waking up. The error the whole thing rests on is simpler t

  8. Jul 25

    Three Thousand Five Hundred

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On 25 July 2026, Morad Vaisi published a number. Vaisi is senior Iran analyst at Iran International and host of its flagship politics programme. Since January he has been collecting the names of the dead and reading them aloud, live, hour after hour. It is honourable work. He has done it under pressure, and he says he will carry on. The number is 3,500. Set it beside what his own network broadcast in January: more than 30,000 killed in two days. That figure crossed the world in an afternoon. It was quoted in op-eds and in parliaments, by people demanding that something be done, quickly, and by force. Three numbers, then. Thirty thousand, broadcast. Around 1,100, verified, conceded later by a senior figure inside the same network. Three and a half thousand names received, six months on, by the man actually doing the counting. Only the first shaped anything. Read the wording of the tweet. The names have reached him. Received, not verified. Families send, he records, he reads. A ledger of submissions is the loosest count there is, and even at its loosest it stands at roughly one-ninth of what the network told the world. In the same breath he still writes, thousands upon thousands. The rhetoric will not come down to meet the arithmetic. It cannot. Too much has been built on top of it. That refusal is the machine. Here is how it runs. A network aligned with the restoration lobby issues a figure. The amplification circuit carries it past the point of correction within hours: the accounts, the hashtags, the diaspora columnists, the press operation of a prince-in-waiting. Foreign desks pick it up on the assumption that an exile broadcaster knows its own country. By the time anyone begins gathering actual names, the political verdict is already in and the case for war already made. Then the correction arrives. Never on air. Never as an apology. A tweet, from the most credible man in the building, on a Saturday afternoon. I argued in March that inflation manufactures indifference. This is the mechanism finishing its work. Every family that sent Vaisi a name is now bound to a figure they never uttered. Every journalist in Evin, every mother still waiting outside a prosecutor’s door, is now cheaper to ignore, because the number that made the world look up turned out to be a wish. The dead of January were counted twice. Once by those who buried them. Once by those who needed them. Only one of those counts was for the dead. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

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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.

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    Twin Wisdoms
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    © 2026 Twin Wisdoms
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