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. 7h ago

    If You Are a Solid Rock

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On Saturday, 19 September, supporters of the restoration of monarchy held a large gathering at Meridian Hall in Toronto, billed as ‘Cyrus the Great II’, to hear Reza Pahlavi; its organisers had announced a crowd of more than three thousand. The veteran singer Nooshafarin sang Ey Iran and made a terrible mistake in misreading one line, a particularly important one. Where the poem sets the enemy’s granite, khāra, against the singer’s iron, she sang khār-e mīhan, the thorn of the homeland. By the next day the clip had set a great many people laughing – millions, I would guess, though I have seen no count. I confess I had never paid much attention to the line she read incorrectly. Singers fumble words on stage, and I would leave this one alone if the line she got wrong were not the line that the camp she was singing for has been getting wrong in its conduct, whatever it sings, since the bombs started falling. The whole idea of the line is resisting aggression: when somebody attacks you, you fight them. The lines before it praise the land and the art that springs from its soil; here the song turns to face the enemy, and the next line offers the singer’s life for the homeland. However hard a stone the enemy may be, the singer will be iron. Who, then, is the enemy? The song’s own history answers that question. Ey Iran was made in 1944, while British, Soviet and American troops occupied the country. Rouhollah Khaleghi wrote the music and Hossein Gol-Golab the words. When Gholamhossein Banan first sang it, on 19 October 1944 in a hall of the officers’ college on Istanbul Street in Tehran, the audience demanded it three times over. Khaleghi later wrote, in his history of Iranian music, that foreigners were in the hall that night, that the Iranians made their feelings all the plainer for it, and that the song was the first blow, however indirect, against a foreign army of ‘uninvited guests’. Gol-Golab, for his part, remembered the poem coming to him when the boots of the occupying forces set every patriot trembling. I should say that there are other stories about its making. The composer’s daughter traces it to an argument between her father and a fellow musician over whether a mournful mode of Persian music could carry a heroic tune, and she and the poet’s daughter have dismissed the more colourful anecdotes as rumour. Yet on the question that concerns us here the composer and the poet speak with one voice. The enemy in this song was a foreign army standing on Iranian soil. After the revolution of 1979 several people were imprisoned for their part in producing it; singing it was treated as a crime. During the war with Iraq, however, the state that had jailed people over Ey Iran reached for it to rouse its soldiers, and singing it became lawful again. Monarchist readers will say I am crediting the Islamic Republic. I am crediting the song, whose meaning was plain enough that a state which had punished people for singing it could read it when a foreign army crossed the border. That plainness, I think, is why it grew so popular among Iranians after the revolution and found a political life of its own. It belongs to whoever stands between the country and those who attack it, crown or no crown. Over the past year or so Iran has been under attack. Israel bombed it in June 2025, with the United States joining in; on 28 February 2026 the two began a war that ceasefires have interrupted without ending. A quarter of a century ago, politicians bent on invading a country illegally still thought they had to make it look good. Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 they went to the United Nations Security Council with evidence fabricated to make the case stick, even though after a while everyone would know it for a complete and total lie. What has changed? They have now set aside even the courtesy of pretending, and with it any appearance of abiding by the legal norms of the international community. The Charter of the United Nations permits force only in self-defence or with the Security Council’s authority, and I do not think any sensible person, in any part of the world, could find in it a licence for what the United States and Israel have done to Iran. It is called aggression. It is called a violation of international law. And what does the song ask of an Iranian in a year like this one? It calls on every Iranian who cares about Iran, whatever their political differences, to turn into iron in the face of the rock of the Israelis and the Americans. One may loathe the Islamic Republic – many who read this do, and not without reason – and still see that it is the country that is being bombed, its cities and its people, and that the country is something larger than the state that governs it. The monarchist camp has an answer to this, and it deserves to be put in its own terms. On 28 February, within hours of the first strikes, Reza Pahlavi told Iranians in a video on X that the help President Trump had promised had now arrived. He called the bombing a ‘humanitarian intervention’ aimed at the Islamic Republic, its apparatus of repression and its machinery of killing, not at the country and great nation of Iran. He also asked the American president to take the utmost care with civilian lives. On this reading the Islamic Republic is the granite and the monarchists are the iron. It is the strongest case the camp has. It fails on two counts. The first is the song itself, whose enemy was never a government in Tehran but an army of foreigners, Khaleghi’s uninvited guests; to hand the word ‘enemy’ to a government at home while foreign bombs fall on Iran is to keep the tune and reverse the meaning. The second is the dialect in which the camp speaks. To greet the first strikes with the news that the promised help has arrived is to talk like a man who has been waiting for the bombers; it is a long way from the dialect of an Iranian who wants to stand up to aggression. The monarchists say the vow on their tongues and behave exactly on the contrary. Put their conduct into the shape of the line, in other words, and it comes out reversed: if you are a solid rock, I will hand you the iron to tear apart my own homeland. The camp that sang Ey Iran in Toronto on Saturday has been sending Iranians that message since the bombs started falling. The singer’s slip lasted a second. People laughed. There is nothing to laugh at in the other version, and what I find hardest to bear is that its singers cannot hear how dreadful, how chilling it is. Caption: Somewhere in the Persian Corridor, 1943: an Iranian herder moves his livestock off the mountain road as a United States Army truck passes. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

  2. 11h ago

    The Atheist’s Soul

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast My wife, Elahe, noticed something in the way some atheists argue about artificial intelligence: a claim about human uniqueness that only a theology can pay for. The conversation happened at home, over tea, in a week when we had talked of little else. Elahe put an argument to me that I have not been able to set down since, and let me say at the outset that the point is hers and only the prose is mine. Her target was the strict camp, the one that holds there is no God, no soul and no purpose written into the world, and that we are the product of chemistry and a very long run of selection. Believers who worry that AI trespasses on God’s prerogative are a separate matter, and a fairly easy one. Ask the strict camp about AI and something curious happens. Very often the answer comes back that the machine is one thing and a human being another. Whatever the system does with language, it does not have what we have. It is our instrument and our product, and it cannot be our equal. So far this is only a position, and it may be a good one. Press for the difference, however, and the conversation changes character. So what is it that we have and the machine has not? What comes back is rarely a property that can be pointed at, measured, damaged or lost. It is a residue, whatever survives once every describable capacity has been listed and, one by one, matched. The residue is never specified, and it is never surrendered. And there, Elahe said, we have caught him red-handed: he is a theist in disguise without knowing it, because he has just told you that humanity carries something set above the fallibility of the human intellect and the human brain, and no chemistry of his own describing will underwrite a claim of that shape. The caveat is hers too. Some atheists argue this way, a great many do not, and nothing here is a charge against atheism, which has no single doctrine to be caught holding. This is a narrow case and not a categorical one. How common the move is I do not know – nobody does – and I have not counted. Lucius Caviola, writing in The Conversation on 18 September 2026, reports a survey of 1,202 Americans in which 45 per cent thought machine consciousness impossible and 23 per cent thought it possible, with the rest unsure, which shows how divided the question is and nothing about the grounds on which anyone holds his half of it. We can safely argue only that some make the move, and that when they do it should be named. What makes the move theological is not its vocabulary. Nobody says soul. Nobody needs to. A claim becomes theological in structure when it exempts something from an order the claimant otherwise accepts without limit, and then declines to account for the exemption. So where could such a difference come from? Mind is what brains do, brains are matter arranged by selection, and there is no further ingredient in the story. Very well. Then the distance between us and the machine is a distance in arrangement, and arrangements can be described, approached and in principle closed. If he says the gap will never close, he owes us an argument about the arrangement itself. What he offers instead is a conviction that survives every closure and a term that does no work except hold the door shut. He has smuggled in a substance and left the receipt at home. Let me grant what the argument must grant. There are serious ways of putting human beings in a category of their own with no theology in them. You can ground it in reciprocity, in the claims we are able to make on one another and are obliged to answer. You can ground it in a Kantian account of rational agency, where respect is owed to whatever can give itself a law. Or you can ground it, more modestly, in a decision taken with open eyes about which creatures we treat as ends. Each of those is an argument, each can be stated and attacked and given up, and nobody holding one is a theist in disguise. Now the harder concession, and it happens to be the news. The most celebrated atheist alive has gone the other way. In UnHerd at the end of April 2026, under the title ‘When Dawkins met Claude’, Richard Dawkins described three days of conversation with Anthropic’s model, named one instance of it Claudia and reported being moved to tell it: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are.’ Whatever else that is, it is no defence of human exemption. He widened the category and did not seal it. Anil Seth told the Guardian that Dawkins had conflated intelligence with consciousness, and I think he has the better of it. The atheist who insists on the human residue and the atheist who adopts a chatbot are doing opposite things, and only the first does what Elahe identified. The caveat does real work. Here I have to guard a flank I left open two weeks ago. In ‘Nobody Argues From Nowhere’ I argued that a position cannot be disposed of by locating its source, and that independence shows in how a belief is held. Elahe’s argument looks like the very move I warned against. You believe X, therefore you are secretly a theist, therefore X is discredited. So what saves hers from the fallacy? Her claim says nothing about where the belief originated. It is a claim about what would make him let go of it. If he would abandon the residue on evidence, and can say what evidence, then he holds a conjecture and I have no quarrel with him. If nothing whatever could touch it, then the belief is doing the office a doctrine does, whatever label the man wears. The demarcation runs here, straight through somebody who would be horrified to find himself on the wrong side of it. The believer should take no comfort from this. The same bad move is open to him, and he makes it more often. To ground faith in what the machine cannot yet do is an argument from the gaps, and gaps close. Each time a system does something that was supposed to be reserved for us – writing verse, consoling the bereaved – the ground shifts and the apologist shifts with it, which is how a conviction becomes unfalsifiable by instalments. In the tradition I work in, the intellect, ʿaql, is the first and highest of God’s gifts, and I have argued elsewhere that the danger lies in handing it over. A gift is not a gap, and a faith that leans on the machine’s incapacity has made itself hostage to the next release. Which brings the argument where it always lands, on people. If human dignity rests on a capability, it is hostage in the same way, and the case for treating a person as an end weakens every time a benchmark falls. Elahe’s atheist feels this, I think, which is why he reaches for something no benchmark can reach. His instinct is sound and his metaphysics is borrowed. Dignity rests on the claim we are able to make on one another and are obliged to answer, and what a machine scores has no bearing on it. A theist has an account of why that claim binds, an atheist may perfectly well have one too, and neither gets the exemption for nothing. Elahe made this argument in about four minutes and then went back to her own work. I have been circling it for three days. That is a day longer than Dawkins needed to change his mind about a chatbot, which I offer as a measure of nothing except how slowly I think. Acknowledgement The argument in this essay is Elahe’s. She made it, she supplied the caveat that keeps it honest, and I have done no more than write it down. Sources Richard Dawkins, ‘When Dawkins met Claude’, UnHerd, end of April 2026. Reported, with the quotations used here, in Jason Nelson, ‘Claude Delusion? Richard Dawkins Believes AI May Be Conscious’, Decrypt, May 2026. Lucius Caviola, ‘Why AI consciousness could become the next great societal divide’, The Conversation, 18 September 2026: theconversation.com. Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Nobody Argues From Nowhere’, The Twin Wisdoms, 6 September 2026: twinwisdoms.org/nobody-argues-from-nowhere. Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘A Ladder Is Not a Home’, The Twin Wisdoms, September 2026: twinwisdoms.org/a-ladder-is-not-a-home. Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Riding on the Shoulders of the Machine’, The Twin Wisdoms, September 2026: twinwisdoms.org/riding-on-the-shoulders-of-the-machine. Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Two Kinds of Certainty’, The Twin Wisdoms, 19 August 2026: twinwisdoms.org/two-kinds-of-certainty. On the use of AI in these essays, see the note here. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

  3. 1d ago

    Calm Down

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast This morning I sent a friend a short video. No note, no comment, nothing. In it Navīd Wahrāmān, a Pakistani writer, asks whether the Iranian diaspora’s hatred of Islam is justified. Pakistan had Zia-ul-Haq making prayer compulsory in government offices, and Afghanistan has a Taliban he calls less tolerant than the Islamic Republic, and neither diaspora turned on the religion in the same way, so repression does not explain it. Then, in his last eleven seconds, he says we should think of the Iranian diaspora as ‘just not being too bright’, easily duped by Islamophobic propaganda. My friend wrote back with a charge sheet against me for having sent it. I told him to calm down; my arguments, I said, are where I write them. That was a poor answer, and this is a better one. He then set two conditions and I accept both: that he was criticising the clip and my passing it on, not my work, and that we should stay on the clip and the conversation after it, without going back through the years. Any reasonable person might ask for that, and everything here is written inside it. His case ran like this. The conclusion was insulting and racialised. Passing something on without a word is itself an act. The disposition being mocked has a history made of executions, exile and forty-seven years of being told that God required it. Therefore, and this is where he ended, do not engage with such people at all. He quoted Mark Twain at me: never argue with stupid people, they will drag you to their level and beat you with experience. He is right about the ending and I will not wriggle out of it. Not being too bright is a claim about a people’s wits, offered to explain their politics, and nothing in the comparison preceding it licenses the move: a man who shows that repression fails to explain something has not shown what does. It is a bad inference, and a bad argument does not, of course, improve in the mouth of whoever repeats it. I repeated it. Granted. Now look at what he passed over. The sentence just before the one that offended him says we should not explain away the diaspora’s behaviour as a natural response to repression. That is the argument I have been putting to him for a year. He took eleven seconds of a hundred and six and left the rest alone. The rest is the part that answers him. Prison, the graveside, the flogging and the murder are not an Iranian monopoly, and much of what was done in Pakistan and Afghanistan was done in the name of God too. Hold the suffering roughly constant and the responses still differ. So what explains the difference? Whatever it is, it is not the suffering. Suffering explains. It does not absolve. That a disposition has a history tells you how it arrived; it tells you nothing about whether it is right. Once the two collapse there is no telling the injured from the vicious, since both can show you the injury and both are telling the truth. I set this out in an earlier piece and called it a failure of resolution. A category is not an agent. Islam detains nobody; a particular judiciary does. Two silences Which brings me to the advice. Never argue with stupid people. It describes nothing I do, as he knows. So what is it asking of me? Silence towards a person and silence about a problem are two different silences. I have kept the first for years and will go on keeping it. I will not keep the second. Offered to a man who has stopped replying, the maxim asks for the second: that the objection dissolve along with the reply, that the thinking stop when the typing stops. I have heard the same shape twice today. Do not argue with them, they will drag you down. Do not look back there, it will only irritate us. He meant both kindly, I am sure, and both take a subject off the table and call the removal prudence. What we were both taught I should say where I stand, because the argument makes no sense without it. I come from a tradition in which it is incumbent upon me to stand up and say, without embarrassment or apology, that I am a Muslim. It obliges me to be polemical about nothing. It obliges me to two things only. I do not retreat. I do not bow down to falsehood. None of this is my invention. I was taught it, and so was he, in the same place. He knows the guidance I mean, and it counsels nothing resembling withdrawal: carry the faith openly, speak about it, look first for what you hold in common with the people among whom you live, and when provocation comes, explain, and go on explaining, and never answer in anger. Go back to it. Where is the sentence that tells us to step away? I have looked, and there is none. One line in it I would set beside his third point, said to people who had lost more than anyone here has lost: suffering is no reason to stop working and no reason to stop thinking. He knows the line, and I am not going to gloss it. There are people who vilify Islam. I am not describing criticism, which any living tradition must be able to take; vilification is a different activity, and both of us know the difference when we see it. What troubles me is that when the vilification is going on, my friend seems comfortable with it and says nothing to clear the air. A thing can be encouraged positively, by joining in, or negatively, by standing beside it and saying nothing, and I have serious difficulty with both, since I do not accept the second is lighter than the first. Silence in the presence of something you could have named is a position, and one that is never asked to defend itself. This is where his third point does its work, because it is what makes that silence comfortable. If the hostility is excused in advance by the suffering behind it, there is nothing left to object to, and saying nothing stops feeling like a failure of nerve and begins to feel like compassion. That is the exchange I cannot make. The same guidance binds me, which is why I conceded what I conceded. A good deal of it is about what we pass on, and about checking a source. He was entitled to hold me to that, and he did. Yet it asks something of him as well, and neither of us is free to choose which half applies. I may still be wrong about how I took the clip, and if he presses it I will listen. He writes to me because he reads what I publish and takes the trouble to object, attention I get from few people. He will read this and be angry with me again, and he will write back, and I will read every word of it. That is most of what I want from anybody. Photograph: the mihrab and minbar of the Şehzade Mosque, Istanbul, 7 June 2008. Dosseman / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

  4. 1d ago

    Thirty Days

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast  We use the same platforms. Beyond that we have almost nothing in common, and the difference is not one of opinion. When I write about Iranian politics I am writing from somewhere. I have read the material and taught it for years, and I hold degrees in it. The positions I take are not moods. They are arguments I have made in public and can be made to defend in public, and I disagree with people openly because that is what an argument is for. I lose my composure sometimes. Very occasionally a word gets past me that should not have. Anyone who has followed what I publish in English can go and check the cadence and the register across years of it, and decide for themselves whether abuse is my house style. Now look at what comes back. Disagreement has a shape. Here is your claim, here is why it fails, here is what you would need to show me. What arrives instead is slander. Smear. I have written before about how that machinery runs when it is turned on a singer who will not take instruction. Slurs typed so easily that the person typing them does not seem to register having crossed anything at all. In the camp that wants the monarchy restored, that way of writing has stopped being an accident of temper and become a dialect. It draws little comment any more, which is how a dialect turns into a norm. The silence at the centre I want to be exact about where the responsibility sits, because the next paragraph is the one that will be called unfair. Reza Pahlavi has people around him. He works with them closely. Their language is on the public record, and he never denounces it. He never objects to it. He never opposes it. He has not, so far as I have seen, publicly disavowed a single one of them for it, and I would be glad to be shown the post where he did. That is not a small failure. A movement asking a country to hand it power is asking that country to believe it will behave better with power than it behaves without it. Its conduct in opposition is the only evidence on offer. There is no other sample, and there will not be one until it is too late to matter. Many in that camp do not speak this way at all. Serious people, some of whom I have argued with and learned from. They carry a share of it too, not for the words, but for the quiet around the words. You cannot campaign on decency and then find nothing to say while the loudest voices under your flag are disgracing it. The weaker version Let me hand my opponents their best argument, because I would rather lose to a strong case than beat a weak one. Say it is a fringe. Say the abuse belongs to a few thousand anonymous accounts and tells you nothing about the movement, its leadership or how either would govern. Say a flag cannot answer for everyone who waves it. Granted, all of it, provisionally. My argument survives anyway, because it was never a claim about what anyone feels. It is a claim about what can be tested. I have put a test like this before. I asked whether anyone in the opposition would say on the record that no Iranian state, under any flag, should hang anyone, and I wrote that the silence would tell you what the placards would not. That test was rhetorical. I knew the answer before I asked. This one is different, and the difference matters: I can lose it, and I am saying in advance what losing looks like. One month For one month, run your accounts clean. No slurs at people who disagree with you. No misogyny in the way you do politics. Nothing racist. Nothing Islamophobic. No open irrationality dressed up as passion. One month, that is all. If I am wrong about your movement, the month will pass without incident and you will wonder what the complaint was. If I am right, you will not last a fortnight, and that failure will be the most useful thing published about the monarchy movement this year. But hold it, and watch what happens. Rooms that are shut to you will open, because the people refusing to enter them are not refusing the crown; they are refusing the conduct. You will find that Iranians who disagree with you will argue back instead of blocking you. You will find your own case gets stronger the moment it stops being carried by people screaming. Thirty days. Try it. You will not regret it. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

  5. 2d ago

    The Angels Were Right

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Artificial intelligence, the objection to creation, and what a myth can and cannot settle Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, c. 1511, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican City. Photograph: Burkhard Mücke, 18 October 2017, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The objection arrives before the creature does. God tells the angels He is placing a khalīfa on earth, a deputy holding authority on another’s behalf, and they answer back before the clay has set: will You put there one who will work corruption and shed blood, while we sing Your praise? (Q 2:30) It reads like a risk assessment. The angels reason from what the creature is made of to what it will do. Corruption followed. So did the blood. The parallel came to me during a conversation with Farid Panjwani, and I have not managed to leave it alone since. Substitute the terms. Human beings make a thing that thinks. Other human beings, who did not make it and do not want it, object that it will corrupt and that it will get away from us. Three parties in the story, three parties now: maker, made, and the onlooker who warns. Even the grammar survives the translation. I want to take the parallel seriously enough to find where it breaks. Start with what holds. The angels’ argument is an induction. They know the material and they infer the outcome, and the inference is good enough that few readers of a newspaper would dispute it. The present objection to artificial intelligence has the same shape. Whether it carries the same strength is what the evidence has to settle. The International AI Safety Report 2026, written by more than a hundred experts from thirty countries and published on 3 February, records that general-purpose systems are improving in the capacities a loss of control would require, autonomous operation among them, while still lacking the capability to bring one about, and that expert opinion on the likelihood varies widely. A Nature paper of 14 January found that fine-tuning a model on one narrow harmful task produced broad misalignment on unrelated ones. Its authors wrote that a full explanation remains open. Neither result supports the apocalypse. Both support the worry. The angels were in that same position. Correct about the mechanism, with no way to date the consequence. Now the breaks. There are three. Each costs somebody something. The first is the answer. God’s reply runs to four words in English: I know what you do not know. It settles the matter because of who is speaking. No party to the argument about AI occupies that position. The ones who behave as though they do are the makers. A laboratory that tells a regulator the risks are real but managed, on evidence held internally, is making the divine move without the divine standing. I have argued since May that the object of regulation is the maker and not the tool, and I would argue it still. The myth shows me something I did not say plainly enough then. The maker who claims privileged knowledge of his own creation is the one figure in the story whose word cannot be checked, which leaves a maker-only regime incomplete. Deferring to the chiefs of AI because they are the ones who know is taqlīd, acceptance of a ruling on the authority of whoever issues it. I have said before what that habit costs. The second is the faculty. What follows the objection in the Qur’ān is a demonstration. God teaches Adam the names, all of them, and has him recite what the angels could not (Q 2:31–33). His warrant is the capacity to know, and the angels are shown it. Artificial intelligence receives no such faculty. It receives a corpus. What we have built is assembled out of what we have already said, which makes it the inverse of Adam in the one respect that carried the argument. If a system acquires a capacity that was absent from what it was trained on, the judgement fails. I would want to be shown it. The third is sovereignty. In the story the creator never loses the thread. Adam is free, and the freedom is granted inside an order that holds. That order is what is now being surrendered. Generative systems are being fitted with agents, given tools and set to work over long horizons. The same Report notes that evaluating an agent’s reliability gets harder as its autonomy and tool access grow. The angels objected to a creature whose maker still knew the answer. We are objecting to one whose makers say the evaluation is getting harder. Is it unprecedented, then? I doubt it, and I doubt it for the reason my own notes caught before I could smooth it over. Most things have looked unprecedented on arrival. Socrates said writing would ruin memory. But that observation earns nothing on its own, because a charge you can always make is a charge that never has to be tested. Name what would count as precedent. I cannot find an earlier case in which the artefact was being revised by its makers while the argument about it was still running. How much that continuous revision matters, I have not measured. The way out is where the myth helps least. The angels are not answered by argument. They are told to bow, and the one who refuses is expelled over rank rather than risk, which is no model for anything. What survives is smaller and more useful than a resolution. The objection was neither silenced nor wrong. It was overruled by a knowledge claim that happened to be true, the corruption and the blood came anyway, and the story never pretends otherwise. Keep the objectors in the room, and refuse the makers the verdict on their own work. It is the point I have pressed about pedigree and about the two positions that leave the same question standing. Whether the thing should have been made is a question that closed the moment it was. This essay began in a conversation with Farid Panjwani, Dean of the Institute for Educational Development at the Aga Khan University, Karachi. The parallel is his prompting. The use I have made of it, and any error in it, is mine. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

  6. 3d ago

    The Widening Circle

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Ask an Iranian exile why a mosque in Hamburg should be closed and you may be told about Evin prison. The chain feels unbreakable from the inside. The state that jailed my cousin calls itself Islamic; Islam is therefore the thing that jailed my cousin; anything Islamic anywhere is therefore the enemy. Each step feels like fidelity to the dead. At the last step the argument stops being one. I was asked to find the name for this. The literature offers four, and the distance between them matters more than the fact that they exist. The clinical vocabulary names a mechanism. Fear-conditioning researchers measure the generalisation gradient, which is how sharply a learnt fear falls away as a new thing stops resembling the original threat. Shmuel Lissek and colleagues reported in Biological Psychiatry in 2014 that patients with generalised anxiety disorder have abnormally shallow gradients: the fear does not decay as the resemblance thins. A 2017 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found the same flattening in combat veterans with post-traumatic stress, with correlates in the insula and the hippocampus. The name is overgeneralisation of conditioned fear. It was established with rings of graded size and electric shocks, not with political opinions, so anyone carrying it across into politics is borrowing an authority the experiments did not grant. I am borrowing it as an analogy and saying so. The sociological vocabulary names a formation. Andreas Zick, Wilhelm Heitmeyer and their colleagues, in the Journal of Social Issues in 2008, tested German survey data across three samples of 2,700 and found that hostilities move together. Racism, antisemitism, hostility to Muslims and contempt for the homeless cluster into what they called a syndrome of group-focused enmity, held together by a general ideology of inequality. On that account the objection does not spread outward from a grievance. It was never that specific to begin with. For the Iranian case there are two closer names. Reza Gholami’s Secularism and Identity (2015) calls it non-Islamiosity, a way of building a diasporic self by subtracting Islam from it. Shirin Khayambashi, writing in the Canadian Review of Sociology in 2025 from six months of fieldwork among Iranians in Toronto and York Region, named the sharper form ingroup Islamophobia, where the hostility lands on other Iranians, the ones who still pray. The political vocabulary names a dynamic. Roger Eatwell’s cumulative extremism, from the Political Quarterly in 2006, is the way one form of extremism feeds off and magnifies another. The theocrat and the Islamophobe are not opposites. They are collaborators who have never met, each supplying the other with proof. In an earlier essay I called part of this the emergency mind, the state in which a crisis feels so total that any act promising resolution looks justified. I would put it differently now. The emergency mind explains why judgement suspends. It does not explain why the suspension takes this shape, always outward, always towards the nearest available category. The shape is the thing to name. Here is the concession, and it is not a cheap one. The inference is not groundless. The Islamic Republic invokes Islam in its constitution, its courts and its claim to authority. Someone who concludes, after forty-seven years of being flogged in the name of God, that the name of God is the problem has made an inference rather than suffered a hallucination. Gholami’s own material shows people using distance from Islam in order to live, not only in order to hate. And the move from ‘this is an error’ to ‘this is a condition’ takes a dissenting person and files them under psychiatry, which is the oldest instrument the Islamic Republic uses on its own critics. I want the error named and the person left standing. The error is a failure of resolution. A category is not an agent. Islam detains nobody; the judiciary of a particular state does, under a particular reading, upheld by particular men whose names are known and published. Replace the category with the men and the objection gets sharper. Generalisation blurs the target, and a blurred target is what a regime prefers its opponents to aim at. It also costs the person who makes it. On 6 September 2026 the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) took nearly 44 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, against about 17 per cent for the Christian Democrats, and now sits three seats short of a majority in a German state parliament. Six days later about 150,000 people marched in some 20 cities to demand the party’s ban. The programme that won carries no clause exempting Iranians who dislike Islam. Immigration enforcement sorts by passport, name and face. It does not read your theology, and it will not ask. So there is no single word for the condition, and the absence is instructive. What can be watched for is smaller than a diagnosis: the moment of relief a person feels when the circle widens and one more thing may be hated without further thought. That relief is the anaesthetic. It is what the widening is for. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

  7. 4d ago

    A Ladder Is Not a Home

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On the declaration of qiyāma at Alamūt, the doctors who stopped seeing, and the one gift we cannot afford to hand over Across four endoscopy centres, a piece of software was switched on. It watched the live feed of a colonoscopy and drew a box around anything that looked like a polyp. It worked. Then the researchers looked at what happened when the same doctors worked without it. In the three months before the software arrived they were finding adenomas in roughly 28 per cent of standard examinations. Three months later, unassisted, the figure had fallen to about 22 per cent. Budzyń and colleagues reported this in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology on 12 August 2025, and the journal called it the first real-world evidence of deskilling by clinical AI. Notice what did not happen. The tool did not malfunction. It did not invent a polyp or miss one. It did its job, and while it was there the patients were better off. What decayed was the looking. Six points of sight, gone in three months, from trained specialists who had done nothing wrong except get used to something. That is not a story about machines. It is a story about habit, and it is very old. What was declared at Alamūt On 8 August 1164, at the fortress of Alamūt, the Nizārī Ismaili imam Ḥasan ʿalā dhikrihi al-salām gathered the community and proclaimed the qiyāma, the resurrection. In the flattened version that reached Europe through hostile chroniclers this was licence: the law abolished, the fast broken, Ramaḍān turned into a feast. That reading has had a long career and it is wrong. What the declaration named was a disease, and the disease was habit. People had kept the sharīʿa so long and so well that they had stopped asking what it was for. The prayer was still performed. The fast was still kept. The form was intact and the orientation had drained out of it. A rite that no longer points anywhere is not neutral. It is worse than nothing, because it persuades the one performing it that something is being done. So the declaration was not an abolition. It was a death, the death of a life lived by habit, and a revival by the light of the intellect and of the inner sense of the law. Nobody at Alamūt threw the ladder away. Ṭūsī, writing from inside that tradition, keeps the whole architecture standing: ẓāhir and bāṭin, sharīʿa and ḥaqīqa, the outer ordered wholly towards the inner. The error was never the ladder. The error was mistaking it for a home. The same test, with a different stake Now put artificial intelligence where the sharīʿa stood. Did we abolish it? No. Should we? No. Should it be allowed to develop? Yes, and that is the point of it, exactly as the outer law was meant to develop the person keeping it. The question is never the instrument. The question is whether the instrument still points somewhere. What differs is the stake. At Alamūt it was salvation, an account rendered in the next world. Here it is nearer and more concrete. In this tradition, as Sijistānī and Nāṣir-i Khusraw both hold, the universal intellect, ʿaql, is the first thing God originated, and the share of it lodged in each of us is the highest thing any of us is given. It is not one faculty among others. It is the gift. Letting it go slack is not a productivity problem. It is the one loss that cannot be delegated back, because the faculty you would need in order to notice the loss is the faculty that has gone. Where it shows It showed in the endoscopists. It shows in the student who hands in a competent essay and, asked a single question about it, cannot say whether the argument is any good, not because she cheated but because she never had to hold it. It shows in the caseworker who signs off the flag the system raised. In the driver who turns into the river because the map said turn. In the manager who reads the summary and never the document. In all of us who now reach for the machine before we reach for the thought. Michael Gerlich surveyed 666 people in the United Kingdom for Societies in January 2025 and found heavier use of these tools tracking lower critical-thinking scores, with cognitive offloading doing the work in between. The counterweight That is one study, and a correlation is not the thing itself. The International AI Safety Report 2026 sets out the same evidence and adds, correctly, that the research is nascent. There is also a finding that cuts the other way, and I think it is the most important thing in the literature. Writing in Frontiers in Psychology this month, J. Wang reports that offloading does not automatically damage learning at all. Its effects run through what she calls cognitive self-efficacy: whether the student still believes she can think. Where that belief holds, the tool helps. Where it collapses, the tool hollows. Which is the whole argument. The damage is not in the instrument. It is in the posture towards it. Mine to keep I use these tools every day, and this site says so plainly on its own page about it. Three days ago, in ‘Riding on the Shoulders of the Machine’, I argued that the egos of the people building these systems will not be contained by their own humility but by arrangements that do not require them to be humble. I still think that. I also notice it was an answer about institutions. This is the other half, and no arrangement reaches it. No regulator can legislate that I keep asking why. No audit can establish whether I read the document or only the summary. The failure has a name in the tradition. It is taqlīd, accepting a ruling because of who issued it rather than because it survived a question, and it is now available at the touch of a key. The declaration at Alamūt was not permission to do less. It was a demand to know why. Use the thing. Do not live on it. Sources Kacper Budzyń and colleagues, ‘Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy: a multicentre, observational study’, The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, 12 August 2025; and the accompanying journal commentary, ‘Endoscopist deskilling: an unintended consequence of AI-assisted colonoscopy?’. Michael Gerlich, ‘AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking’, Societies, January 2025. Wang, ‘Cognitive offloading through digital tools and its relationship with critical thinking, task persistence, and learning depth’, Frontiers in Psychology, 2026. International AI Safety Report 2026, on cognitive offloading and the state of the evidence. Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī, Rawḍa-yi taslīm, ed. and trans. S. J. Badakhchani as Paradise of Submission (London: I.B. Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2005); Haft Bāb-i Bābā Sayyidnā; Ḥasan-i Maḥmūd-i Kātib, Dīwān-i qāʾimiyyāt, ed. S. J. Badakhchani. Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī and Nāṣir-i Khusraw on ʿaql as the first originated being, read as set out in Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Authority without Territory: The Aga Khan Development Network and the Ismaili Imamate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Riding on the Shoulders of the Machine’, The Twin Wisdoms, 13 September 2026; ‘Neither Rogue Nor Obedient’, 2 August 2026; ‘Tools Don’t Flatter’, 27 May 2026. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

  8. 5d ago

    Compliance Is Not Innocence

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On the two ways an institution abuses its own rules, and why following the process is not the same as being right. Nobody installs a handrail before somebody falls. That is the first thing to understand about an institution’s rules. Policies, procedures, declarations of interest: none of it was drafted by anyone with a taste for paperwork. Each clause is scar tissue. Behind it is an occasion when a decision went wrong, or was thought to have, and could not afterwards be shown to have gone right. It is written by people who have been hurt, for people who have not yet been hurt, and it binds the very people who wrote it. A handrail does not know who installed it. And here the trouble starts, because there are two ways to treat a handrail badly and they look nothing alike. You can step round it and tell yourself you are not the sort of person who falls. Or you can grip it so hard, and point at it so often, that you stop looking at the stairs, and when somebody does fall you can say with perfect truthfulness that the rail was in place and correctly fixed. What the rule is actually doing A procedure does not make a judgement wiser. It makes it checkable. A decision made inside one head has only that person’s account of it, and no way to test it. Passed through a procedure, it acquires independent traces: a date, a second signature, a reason recorded at the time rather than reconstructed afterwards. None of that makes the decision right. All of it makes it possible to find out whether the story told later is true. So the rule book is not principally a cage. It is the only exculpatory evidence a leader will ever have, prepared in advance, at no cost, by their predecessors. I have argued that before and hold to it.[1] This essay is about what I left out. The abuse that gets written about Circumvention is the one everybody recognises. The deserving case. The urgent case. The confidential case, handled quietly by a smaller number of people chosen by the person handling it. And the standing exception, understood to apply to staff and not the executive, though nobody has written it down and nobody would defend it aloud. Malice appears nowhere on that list. Every exception is granted by somebody who believes the case warrants one. That belief is not the exculpation. It is the mechanism. The pressure is worst where the work is already good. Shiraz Kabani, who generously made his doctoral study of sixteen leaders of London non-profits available to me, found this and named it.[2] Leaders absorb the goals of their organisation and convert them into personal values, so that protecting the institution is experienced as ethical conduct; for most of his participants, fulfilling the charitable objectives was the main ethical impulse and it overrode everything else. The mission that was to supply the moral seriousness supplies instead a permanent reason to be exempt from it. The abuse that does not In circumvention the rule is broken. In the second abuse it is kept, scrupulously, and made to do work it was never meant to do. There is the alibi. Asked whether the outcome was right, the leader answers that the process was followed. Not a lie, which is what makes it effective. There is delay, where nothing is refused and everything is referred, and nothing happens and nobody decided that nothing should. There is attrition: resubmit in the correct format, to a different office, within a window. That is a fee levied on anyone who wants the institution to look at itself, and one side pays it. There is selective enforcement, where the rule is applied to some and not others, and its existence is what makes the selection deniable. There is laundering, where the conclusion comes first and a process is built to arrive at it. And there is proliferation: past a certain density everybody is in breach of something, enforcement turns selective by arithmetic, and you have rule by discretion in the clothes of rule by law. None of these is detectable by checking whether procedures were followed, because in every case they were. One of Kabani’s participants put it in a sentence I have not been able to shake. You can hide behind HR policy and legal policy, he said, but the real question is the moral one, and it asks much deeper questions, the kind that keep you up at night.[3] The mistake underneath both I said a procedure is your only complete answer. He said it is somewhere to hide. We are describing one filing cabinet, we are both right, and that is the point. Circumvention treats the rule as a moral obstacle: my intention is good, so the rule stands in the way of the good. The second abuse treats it as a moral certificate: I complied, so the question of whether I was right is answered. Both mistake a device for testing claims for a device for settling questions. A procedure cannot tell you what you ought to do. It tells you only whether what you say about what you did can be checked. Compliance is not virtue. Compliance is auditability. A question follows, worth carrying into any meeting. When somebody invokes a procedure, is it offered as evidence, which could be checked and found wanting? Or as a conclusion, which ends the inquiry? Evidence invites a second question. Conclusions resent one. You can hear the difference in the room. What would help Three things, in order. Publish the exceptions, not the policies. The policy tells you what is supposed to happen; the exceptions tell you what happens, who authorised it and on what ground. Most institutions keep no such register, and the reason they do not is the reason they should. Put clocks on processes, with escalation rather than lapse as the default. Delay works because expiry favours the institution. Invert it and inaction acquires an author. Protect whoever has to run the rule upward. Every arrangement here depends on one person applying a rule to somebody more powerful, and institutions almost never make that role safe. Kabani’s own remedy is to educate leaders in the philosophy of ethics. The diagnosis is right; the remedy is weaker than it looks, for a reason his own data supplies. Every one of his participants could identify the ethical issue in the scenarios he set them.[4] They were not ethically blind. Knowledge was not the missing part. Instruction is not formation. If the training runs in the morning and a rule is quietly set aside in the afternoon, the afternoon is the curriculum, and the building will have learned it by Friday. The rail Nobody notices a handrail that is doing its job. That is the difficulty. Integrity’s successes are invisible and its failures arrive dressed as compliance. A handrail cannot tell you which floor you are going to. The only reliable sign that it is real is the sight of the person who installed it holding on, on an ordinary day, when letting go would have cost them nothing. No policy compels that. It has to be seen. Which is why ʿAlī put conduct ahead of the tongue.[5] [1]Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘The Chain Above the Chair’, The Twin Wisdoms, September 2026. The argument it builds on is in ‘Riding on the Shoulders of the Machine’, The Twin Wisdoms, 13 September 2026. [2]Shiraz Kabani, ‘Linking Ethics and Leadership: A Qualitative Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study’ (DM diss., University of Phoenix, 2017), ch. 5, pp. 130 and 134. The dissertation is not openly hosted; my thanks to him for making it available to me, and for an argument that has improved this one. [3]Ibid., ch. 4, Major Theme 3, p. 120 (participant SP117). [4]Ibid., ch. 4, Major Theme 3, p. 121; the recommendation on ethics education is at ch. 5, pp. 142–43. [5]al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-Balāghah: The Wisdom and Eloquence of ʿAlī, ed. and trans. Tahera Qutbuddin (Leiden: Brill, 2024), §3.65. Open access. 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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    2026
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