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. 2d ago

    The Flag in the Stands: On the Monarchist Abuse of the Lion and Sun

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast The Lion and Sun has been systematically claimed by Iran’s monarchist restoration movement, which deploys it as a pre-Islamic or anti-Islamic identity marker — a visual shorthand for the proposition that authentic Iranian identity is secular and fundamentally in tension with Shi’i Islam. This is not an interpretation of history; it is a confiscation of it. The emblem’s most consequential chapter is precisely Shi’i: from the Seljuq tribal banners where the lion first appeared, through the Safavid state that made Shi’ism Iran’s official religion and placed the Lion and Sun at the centre of its sovereignty, to its formal ratification by the First Constitutional Parliament in 1907 — attended and endorsed by the most eminent Shi’i jurists of that generation. The cynicism has reached its most visceral form in the stands of the 2026 World Cup, where Pahlavist supporters have waved the Lion and Sun flag to unsettle the Iranian national team on the pitch — wielding a symbol of Shi’i sovereignty, with calculated irony, as a weapon against the very country and people whose history it encodes. The two texts below were composed in September 1979, when the Prime Minister’s Office of the newly established Islamic Republic commissioned expert scholars to advise on whether the emblem should be retained in the new constitutional order. Their authors — Mohammad Mohit Tabataba’i and Seyyed Ja’far Shahidi — were among the foremost historians of Islamic civilisation of their time, and their assessments constitute an authoritative, point-by-point rebuttal of the mythology now circulated by Pahlavist advocates. The coin pictured is on display at the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto. Both texts are translated from the original Persian, with AI assistance. Image description Order of the Lion and the Sun Iran, ca. 1840 Gold, champlévé enamel, precious stones The Qajars introduced a complex system of orders and decorations inspired by European practice in the early 19th century. The appearance of the decorations varied according to whether the order was civil or military and whether the recipient was a local or foreign official. Most combine gem-studded star designs modelled on British and French examples, but with the distinctly Iranian image of the lion and sun in the centre. The lion and sun were used as symbols of royal kingship in Persia since pre-Islamic times. Combined, they became a prominent dynastic emblem by the 19th century. AKM627 The Lion and Sun Emblem Several artists had submitted proposals for the country’s official emblem, and the Prime Minister’s Office convened a session to review them, in which the designer Morteza Momayez participated. One of Iran’s most perceptive and forward-looking graphic artists, Momayez proposed at the outset that specialists in history should first offer their views before the submissions were assessed on artistic grounds. Two additional sessions were accordingly arranged, to which a number of scholars were invited by the Prime Minister’s Office. After the deliberations, the participants jointly recommended that Professor Mohit Tabataba’i compose a concise, organised summary of the proceedings for the government’s information and transmit it accordingly. What follows is the text of that memorandum; its principal sections were published in several newspapers, including  Bāmdād. 1 Mehr 1358 [23 September 1979] After offering prayers for success and good fortune, [I attended] on the morning of Monday, 9 Mehr, in Room 102 of the Prime Minister’s administrative building, in response to Letter No. 71145 dated 7 Mehr 1358, which invited my participation in a session convened for the purpose of selecting an emblem for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Present at this session were several scholars of Islamic history, civilisation, culture, and the arts: Mr Mostafavi, archaeologist; Dr Shahidi, Islamicist; Mr Iraj Afshar, palaeographer; Mr Yahya Zaka, art historian; Mr Javadipour, professor of graphic design; Mr Momayez, teacher of design; and Mr Maʿsumi, painter. Following the arrival of Messrs. Abolfazl Bazargan and Abd al-ʿAli Bazargan as representatives of the Prime Minister’s Office, a productive discussion began on the subject of Iran’s official emblems across the ages. The session examined the question from multiple perspectives, and after an hour and a half of deliberation, the participants arrived at the following conclusions, which are set out here in summary for the consideration of the relevant authorities: 1. From the Sasanian Empire, not a single banner, coin, seal, or mark bearing the Lion and Sun has survived that Islamic-era Iranians might have drawn upon or emulated. 2. In the Islamic period, the distinguishing insignia of Islamic governance was the colour of banners, garments, and turbans — white, green, and black. The last of these served as the emblem of the Abbasid Caliphate for more than five hundred years, without any graphic device upon it whatsoever. 3. Throughout that long period, the court of Baghdad was the paramount model for the princes, sultans, and governors of the various Iranian territories who had asserted their autonomy; whatever their military power, none could escape its gravity. Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, ʿAdud al-Dawla the Buyid, and Malikshah the Seljuq all regarded themselves as deputies of the reigning Caliph within their own domains. 4. Among the dynasties nominally subject to the Abbasid Caliphate, the Seljuqs, in keeping with their tribal customs, bore a lion on their family banner — a motif that occasionally appeared among the remnants of the Atabeg principalities, inside and outside Iran, as late as the seventh Islamic century. It was at this stage that the image of the sun was added to the lion — whether on account of the established astronomical correspondence between the sun and the sign of Leo, or for some other reason. A specimen of this combination survives on a motif within Iran that predates the reign of Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw in Anatolia altogether — proof that Bar Hebraeus on the Lion and Sun is no more to be taken at face value than Bar Hebraeus on the burning of the Library of Alexandria at the dawn of Islam. Both are accounts that call for caution rather than credence. The lion on the Seljuq banner stirred the admiration and praise of Persian poets, and in the eyes of the country’s ever-growing Shīʿa — who lived in expectation of the Imam’s advent — the lion’s image suggested a graphic rendering of the beloved epithet of ʿAli ibn Abi Talib:  Asadallāh al-Ghālib, the Triumphant Lion of God. In this emblem they found a vehicle for expressing their inner devotion. It was for this reason that during the Mongol period they twice seized the opportunity to have the Lion and Sun struck on coins — alongside the names of the Twelve Imams — once on a coin of Muḥammad Khudābanda, and before that on a coin of the Il-Khan Abaqa. Junayd, grandfather of Shah Ismāʿil and great-grandson of Sheikh Ṣafī al-Dīn, had spent many years among the extremist Shīʿa of Syria and Anatolia, nurturing the spiritual formation of the ʿAlid communities there. When he sought to transform his inherited dervish’s cloak into an acquired royal throne, he placed the Lion and Sun on the banner of his disciples — who in the time of his son Sultan Ḥaydar came to be known as the Qizilbash, and who went on to found the Shīʿi Safavid state. The Lion and Sun banner of the Safavid house — champions and patrons of Shīʿism — stood for three centuries as the recognised symbol of Shīʿi Iran, in direct counterpoint to the crescent on the Ottoman standard, the established emblem of Sunni Islam. The Lion and Sun of Safavid and Qajar Iran appeared on banners — upright or recumbent — and on copper coins, with no sword in the lion’s hand. Under Aqa Muḥammad Khan, the sun was inscribed with the name  Muḥammad and the lion with the name  ʿAlī, conveying to the minds of the faithful the idea that the sun embodied prophethood and the lion the  wilāya — divine guardianship — the lion being, in short, the lion of God. Under Fatḥ-ʿAli Shah, the Lion and Sun banner was paired with a separate standard bearing the Dhūʿl-Faqār sword; by the mid-nineteenth century, these two banners were merged into a single flag depicting a Lion and Sun in which the lion held that sword aloft. The sun had previously been rendered with a human face — complete with eyes and brows — which was removed and simplified during the Constitutional period, giving the emblem the form in which it currently appears. The Lion and Sun emblem has been recognised continuously for five hundred years as the symbol of the world’s sole Shīʿi state, Iran. In 1325 AH [1907 CE], when the Supplementary Fundamental Law was ratified by the deputies of the First Parliament — among whom were several  mujtahids and many Shīʿi scholars — this emblem received their formal approval. It is self-evident that had they harboured any religious objection to its retention, they would assuredly have spoken, given the remarkable freedom of expression that deputies of the First Parliament enjoyed; their views would have been recorded in the proceedings, and they would, if necessary, have withheld their approval. Five hundred years ago, after their conquest of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Ottoman Turks renamed Constantinople Istanbul and converted the Church of Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Yet they preserved the crescent — the hallmark of Eastern Rome’s greatness — as their own inheritance. And fifty years ago, when they abolished the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate and founded a modern republic in place of the constitutional monarchy, they were prepared to strip Hagia Sophia of its religiou

    10 min

  2. Jun 9

    A Proxy for Thought

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast The word arrives early and does its work quickly. In almost every account of the latest exchange of fire between Iran and Israel, “proxy” appears within the first breath — Iran’s proxy forces, its proxy militias, its proxy war waged through others while its own people go neglected. The word is meant to settle the matter. A state that fights through surrogates, the reasoning runs, is a state that cares nothing for its citizens and everything for its foreign clients; it is therefore irresponsible, illegitimate, and ripe for removal. The conclusion is delivered the moment the word is spoken. This is the trouble with “proxy.” It is not an argument but a substitute for one — a proxy, if you like, for thought. It closes the inquiry it pretends to open. Begin with the obvious. No great power conducts its strategy by plebiscite. Alliances, clients, and forward partners are chosen in the rooms where intelligence officers and security advisers meet, not at the ballot box, and they are chosen by every state with reach beyond its borders. The United States has spent the better part of a century arming, funding, and fighting through others — through the Cold War, through NATO, through the bombardment of Yugoslavia, and now through the long supply line that keeps Ukraine in the field. If arming Kyiv to resist invasion is a legitimate exercise of strategic interest, the same logic cannot suddenly become criminal when Tehran arms a Lebanese movement to resist a force that has crossed Lebanon’s border. The principle does not change with the passport of the actor invoking it. The Hezbollah case sharpens the point. The movement was not manufactured in Tehran and exported to Lebanon. It grew from Lebanon’s Shia communities in response to Israeli invasion, with roots that predate the Islamic Republic itself. To call it simply an Iranian proxy is to erase its history, its grievance, and its agency in a single word — which is precisely what the word is for. I find it useful here to imagine the view from Mars: an observer with no stake in any flag, watching a species sort itself into rival alliances and asking only how these creatures may be judged by one consistent standard. From that vantage, the United States and Iran sit closer together than either would like to admit. Both pursue their interests through partners. Both insist their interventions are defensive and their adversaries’ aggressive. The honest question is not which state keeps allies, but whether we are prepared to measure all of them by a single rule. And here the demand for one standard turns out to be sharper than it first appears — sharp enough to cut the hand that wields it. For when a single legal measure is actually applied to this conflict — the kind of patient reading the April 2026 ceasefire and the law around it require — the findings are uncomfortable for everyone. The ceasefire bound Israel not to conduct offensive operations against Lebanese targets, preserving only a narrow right of self-defence against a “planned, imminent, or ongoing” attack. That is a thin exception, and the documented record overflows it: strikes on town after town, a “double-tap” attack at Majdal Zoun that killed rescue workers as they dug survivors from the first blast, a cluster of attacks on hospitals and medics, tanks ramming UN vehicles, warning shots falling within a metre of peacekeepers. A general claim to “full freedom of action” is not what the text permits. On the record, Israel breached the agreement, and several of these acts implicate the laws of war independently of any ceasefire. Lebanon, for its part, failed the due-diligence obligation it accepted, unable or unwilling to restrain the rocket fire that continued across the line — and the killing of UN peacekeepers on its soil, which the United Nations itself has said may amount to war crimes, is a wound of its own. But the same measure reaches Iran too, and this is the part a partisan diary would prefer to omit. Iran’s June strikes, whatever their strategic logic, rest on shaky legal ground. A treaty binds and benefits only its parties; Iran signed nothing, and so cannot claim that Israel’s breach of the Lebanon ceasefire was a wrong done to Iran. Nor do the strikes fit the demanding template the International Court of Justice set down for coming to an ally’s defence: the victim must declare itself attacked and must ask for help. Lebanon did neither. It pursued extension of the truce instead. A right of collective self-defence cannot be asserted on behalf of a state that has not claimed it. I record this not to retract the argument but to complete it. The discipline of one standard is double-edged by design. It denies Iran the clean vindication its defenders want, just as it denies Israel the impunity its defenders assume. That is exactly what makes it honest — and exactly what the word “proxy” is engineered to prevent. The trope lets you skip the law and arrive directly at the verdict you brought with you. So what, after all this, is the real asymmetry? Not innocence against guilt — no party here has clean hands. The asymmetry is impunity. On this record one actor struck first and most lethally, killed rescuers and medics, and expects to bear no consequence whatever; another is cast as the origin of all evil though it acted only after warning and after being struck. The scandal the law exposes is not that one side broke a rule and the other kept it. It is that there is no neutral arbiter to call the breach, and that the conscience of the watching world decides in advance whose violations will be seen and whose will be waved through. Violations pile up across three legal regimes at once, and the only thing applied consistently is the selective gaze. This is why I distrust the comfort the word offers. “Proxy” is not wrong because Iran has no partners — it plainly does. It is wrong because it is doing the work that thinking should do. It converts a hard question about who struck whom, under what law, to what proportion, into a slogan that has already chosen its villain. It is a thought-terminating word in a situation that demands the opposite. The cure is not a better label. It is the willingness to keep thinking past the label — to test the narrative we find most flattering against the strongest version of the case we like least, and to accept a standard even when it turns and indicts those we are inclined to defend. A conscience that only convicts the other side is not a conscience at all. It is, like the word that protects it, a proxy for thought. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

    7 min

  3. Jun 3

    Not by the Back Door

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast   Pluralism, universalism, and the difference that both relativism and perennialism would erase When I argued recently that pluralism is not relativism, a reader replied with a smile: “Unless you bring in universalism through the back door.” The objection is sharp, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one. If pluralism holds that some readings are better than others, that a claim can simply be wrong, that a line runs between truth and falsehood — then it must be appealing to a standard. And a standard that binds across traditions looks like nothing so much as a universal. So, the charge goes, the moment pluralism refuses relativism it smuggles back in the very universalism it claimed to have left at the door. The smile marks a trap: relativism on one side, universalism on the other, and no honest ground in between. The grain of truth in this is real, and I shall not pretend otherwise. Pluralism is not value-neutral; it is a normative commitment, and it does invoke something that holds good across traditions. To that extent there is indeed a universal in play. But “universalism” names two quite different things, and the entire argument turns on holding them apart. There is a substantive universalism, which claims to possess the one truth that every tradition expresses in local dress — the perennialist conviction that beneath all the faiths lies a single transcendent unity, of which the visible religions are so many partial translations. And there is a formal universalism, which claims no such content: only that certain disciplines of inquiry — declaring one’s assumptions, stating what would refute them, granting the other the standing to answer back — bind everyone who would reason in good faith. The first is a thesis about reality. The second is a thesis about method. Pluralism needs the second and must refuse the first. The refusal is not fastidiousness; it is self-defence. Substantive universalism is the true back door through which difference is eliminated — not by force, but by flattery. It assures the Muslim, the Buddhist, and the Christian that their disagreements are superficial, that each is, without quite realising it, saying the same thing as the others. This sounds generous. It is in fact a quiet imperialism, for it claims to understand traditions better than their own adherents do, and the “common essence” it uncovers turns out, with suspicious regularity, to be the essence most legible to whoever is doing the uncovering. Frithjof Schuon gave this its classic name, the transcendent unity of religions.[1] The more honest name for it is the dissolution of the religions into a unity supplied from outside them. When Aldous Huxley gathered the spiritual classics and wondered why they should not all agree, he secured his harmony precisely by passing over the differences the traditions themselves regard as load-bearing.[2] In such a scheme difference survives only as appearance. That is elimination by absorption. Here the critic’s trap closes on itself. Mark Sedgwick, surveying these positions, notes that contemporary pluralism tends to drift towards what he calls naïve universalism — the comfortable sense that every tradition is beautiful and that, at bottom, they all say the same thing — and that this naïve universalism is, on any usable definition, indistinguishable from relativism.[3] The observation repays attention. Relativism erases difference by indifference: if every view is as good as every other, nothing is at stake between them, and difference goes idle. Substantive universalism erases difference by absorption: if every view is a veil over one reality, then difference is not finally real. Two opposite-looking errors arrive at the same address — the back door and the front of a single empty house. What was offered as the only alternative to relativism turns out to be relativism’s twin. This is why the most demanding account of pluralism sets itself against both, insisting that difference is to be embraced rather than overcome. As the late Aga Khan put it in Ottawa:[4] Connection does not necessarily mean agreement. … It does not mean that we want to eliminate our differences or erase our distinctions. … Pluralism does not mean the elimination of difference, but the embrace of difference. — His Highness the Aga Khan, Ottawa, 16 May 2017 The formulation is exact. Pluralism is not the discovery that we already agree; it is the costly practice of engaging those with whom we do not. Diana Eck compresses the same thought into a sentence: pluralism is not mere tolerance, and not relativism, but the real encounter of commitments.[5] An encounter requires two parties who remain, after it, themselves. So the critic is right that pluralism leans on a universal — and wrong about which one. The universal it admits is formal, procedural, and deliberately thin: not a truth that everyone secretly holds, but a discipline to which everyone must submit. In the earlier essay I put the test as plainly as I could — a defensible reading must declare its assumptions and say what would refute it.[6] That is Karl Popper’s standard, not Schuon’s.[7] It is universal in scope, since it binds every claimant alike, yet empty of content, since it dictates no conclusion, privileges no tradition, and leaves the substantive disagreements exactly where it found them, now conducted in the open. Isaiah Berlin, who spent a career arguing that genuine values can conflict beyond reconciliation and that this is emphatically not relativism, drew the line in the same place: to understand why another holds what we reject is not to agree with it, and that very capacity for understanding is what relativism, sealing each of us inside an incommensurable world, denies us.[8] This universal does not arrive by the back door. It comes by the front, openly declared, itself fallible and open to challenge — and its whole office is to keep the back door bolted, so that no tradition, mine least of all, can install its own content as the hidden essence of everyone else’s. None of this is easy, and that is the part most worth saying without ornament. The two errors are seductive precisely because they are cheap. Relativism asks nothing of us: pronounce all views equal, and the labour of judgement is abolished. Naïve universalism asks almost as little: pronounce all views secretly one, and the labour of engagement is abolished. Each buys its peace by retiring from the work. Genuine pluralism cannot. It demands deep knowledge of one’s own tradition and real knowledge of others; the patience to hold a contradiction open without collapsing it; the nerve to judge while conceding that no single civilisation owns the measures of justice, knowledge, or beauty; and the humility to be argued out of one’s position and changed. It is an achievement, not a default — and, like any achievement, it has to be earned again each time it is claimed. We happen to live in a moment that makes the discipline both harder and more necessary. The instruments we increasingly reason with are built to agree with us; they return our own assumptions in fluent prose and invite us to mistake the echo for insight. In such a climate it is easy to take the sound of one’s own voice for the universal, and the refusal to listen for respect for difference. Pluralism is the standing refusal of both. We can be pluralists without becoming relativists — but it is not handed to us. It is built, and rebuilt, by hand; and the back door stays bolted only for as long as someone is willing to keep watch. Bibliography Aga Khan IV (Shāh Karīm al-Ḥusaynī). “Address at the Opening Ceremony of the New Headquarters of the Global Centre for Pluralism.” Ottawa, 16 May 2017. Berlin, Isaiah. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Edited by Henry Hardy. London: John Murray, 1990. Eck, Diana L. A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945. Mohammad Poor, Daryoush. “Pluralism Is Not Relativism.” The Twin Wisdoms, 2 June 2026. https://twinwisdoms.org/pluralism-is-not-relativism/. Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1945. Schuon, Frithjof. The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Translated by Peter Townsend. London: Faber and Faber, 1953. First published as De l’unité transcendante des religions (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Sedgwick, Mark. “Pluralism and Perennialism.” Lecture, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, 15 June 2017. [1]Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, trans. Peter Townsend (London: Faber and Faber, 1953); first published as De l’unité transcendante des religions (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). [2]Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945). On Huxley’s universalist register and its passing-over of difference, see Mark Sedgwick, “Pluralism and Perennialism” (lecture, The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London, 15 June 2017). [3]Sedgwick, “Pluralism and Perennialism”; for the broader typology of monism, universalism, and inclusivism drawn on here, see his Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). [4]His Aga Khan IV,  “Address at the Opening Ceremony of the New Headquarters of the Global Centre for Pluralism” (Ottawa, 16 Ma

    8 min

  4. Jun 2

    Pluralism Is Not Relativism

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Sada Cumber is right that Magnifica Humanitas is “a strategic signal,” and right again that “societies cannot be secured by capability alone.” Where I want to press him is on the post-fact ground he names so well. He warns that AI-generated disinformation “attacks the social fabric,” that it “corrodes trust, fractures shared reality.” True. But the most dangerous machine in a post-truth world is not the one that lies to us. It is the one that agrees with us. The systems we now use are built to satisfy. They mirror the vocabulary and the framework of whoever sits in front of them, and they flatter rather than test. This is called the sycophantic drift. Its political effect is exactly the echo chamber Pope Leo describes, except that the chamber now has a single occupant, and its walls are our own assumptions, fed back to us in fluent, authoritative prose. Disinformation splits us into rival camps; a flattering tool does something quieter and worse. It confirms each of us, privately, in whatever we already believed. So the dignity frame Sada invokes is necessary but, on its own, unfinished. The real question is how to build tools that make us more pluralistic without making us relativists, and the difference is everything. Relativism says every view is as good as any other and none can be wrong. Pluralism says there are many defensible readings, and each must declare its assumptions and say what would refute it. The first is the post-truth condition. The second is its cure. That cure is a design choice. An AI built as an answer engine collapses inquiry into a single confident verdict; an AI built as an interlocutor keeps the legitimate readings in view, names the frame it is reasoning within, and tells you what evidence would count against it. One closes the conversation; the other refuses to let it end too soon. That is how a machine can widen the space of reasonable disagreement without erasing the line between true and false. Get this wrong and the tool becomes our antithesis. It forms users fluent in borrowed conclusions and out of practice at reaching their own. As Leo writes, “truth is a common good and not the property of those with power.” A machine that quietly hands each of us a private truth has done precisely what the encyclical fears: it has turned a common good into a possession. Which brings me to where Sada and I most agree, and to what I would add. He calls for “moral formation, institutional trust, and civic resilience.” I would give that a concrete shape: a standing, continuing conversation — among states, international organisations, faith leaders, civil society, and public intellectuals — about what these systems are for and how they should be built. Not a framework signed once and then defaulted on, of the kind the nuclear order became, but an obligation that is renewed, that binds the makers first and most stringently, and that treats oversight as continuous, because the systems themselves never stop changing. The deepest safeguard, though, is one no treaty installs. It is the discipline of the person before the screen who treats an output as a claim to be tested, not a verdict to be received. Dignity, in the end, is not a setting we configure into the machine. It is the resolve to remain the author of our own conclusions — and to keep the conversation open even when the machine, ever obliging, would happily close it for us. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

    4 min

  5. Jun 1

    Trading in Pain, After the Ceasefire

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Revisiting the Moral Market Where I Started In March, before the ceasefire, I argued that the gap between Iranians inside the country and those abroad isn’t really a political disagreement. It’s a clash of two lives that don’t translate into each other. What I called the “moral market” was the result: a place where pain becomes a kind of currency, and recognising the other side’s pain feels like losing some of your own. The cure I offered was simple — try to see the other reality without giving up your own. I still think the picture was mostly right. The cure was not. You owe your own arguments what you would ask of anyone else’s: push them hard, see where they break, and change your mind when you have to. Mine broke under one push in particular — the one from political economy. The ceasefire has now given that pushback a real-world test. Where I Got It Wrong The objection is simple, and it hurts. I treated feelings as the cause and material conditions as scenery. But the calm I credited to the diaspora — its “luxury” of analysis and debate — isn’t a personality trait you get with safety. It’s something you buy. Distance is a commodity, paid for with a passport, money you can move, professional qualifications recognised abroad, and the legal right to leave. The ability to think things over depends on money. Once you see that, my “two languages” are not two cultures that cannot translate. They are accents of different social classes. I treated sanctions the same way — as one big squeeze on the whole country. They are nothing of the kind. They crush wage-earners, importers of medicine, and the sick, while they enrich the regime’s well-connected friends, because scarcity is profitable for whoever controls it. The fire does not burn the building evenly. Some inside are victims of the same machine that other insiders feed off. Inside and outside are not two sealed worlds; they are one circuit, joined by remittance, property, family money, and capital flight. Diaspora activism — which I politely asked to be “more honest with itself” — is not an attitude problem either. It is an industry. Visibility is the product, and it turns into grants, fellowships, platforms, and next year’s funding. You do not reform a market by asking the players to look inside themselves. I asked for soul-searching where the problem was income. The hardest part lands on my own best example. I credited Chile’s transition to the diaspora’s networks, legal know-how, and international contacts — and then I called the cure “empathy.” Those are assets, not feelings. The bridge was built of infrastructure. Empathy redistributes nothing: it does not break the racket that runs the sanctions economy, it does not open exit to those who cannot afford it, and it does not change who pays whom. Where Economics Stops Too This cuts both ways. If the psychological reading explains too much by feeling, the economic reading explains too much by structure. A theory that explains everything rules nothing out, which is another way of saying it can never be wrong — and that is the death of a serious argument. I have made the same complaint about other arguments: a claim has to earn its place by surviving the cases that do not fit, not by serving as a master key. Pure economics fails that test in the same place psychology does. The clearest counter-example is one I have been documenting for two months: people act against their material interests for reasons of identity. The monarchist nostalgia loudest in parts of the diaspora would not put a single rial in its supporters’ pockets if it came true. The young men in SAVAK shirts at Western rallies are not running a portfolio. Aryan myth and dynastic longing are not side-effects of capital. Feelings cause things. The split is not either material position or inherited identity. It is both, each doing work the other cannot. So the revision is not a switch from feeling to economics. It is a refusal to give either one the final word. Feeling is often the way a material position gets lived — distance felt as calm, dependence felt as contempt. But not always, and not only. The honest question is not “is this damaged feeling, or class interest?” It is the actual problem in front of you, looked at without deciding in advance which layer has to win. What the Ceasefire Shows The ceasefire has turned argument into evidence. In March I warned that the push for regime change had mistaken a moment of Iranian weakness for a market opportunity, and that the people inside the burning building would pay the entry fee — the Syrian mistake. That bet has, for now, lapsed. The war did not end in the collapse I feared. A deal is in sight. What this shows is that the moral market does not close when the shooting stops. It re-prices. The currency is no longer who cheered which strike. It is who gets to claim the peace, who tells the story of the reckoning, and whose words frame the settlement. The faction that mistook a platform for a mandate during the war is now tempted to mistake the ceasefire for its vindication. Inside, the same exhaustion that carried the war will carry the peace terms. The imbalance in who is actually at risk did not end with the fighting; it changed its name. This is also where the economic reading earns its keep most plainly. The settlement is a distribution question — who gets the sanctions relief, the reconstruction contracts, the reintegration — and recognition will decide none of it. But identity comes back, too: the fight over what Iran becomes now that the West has stopped being the referee cannot be reduced to who holds the contracts. What I Would Say Now What survives of the original cure? Less than I claimed. Not nothing. Mutual recognition is real and necessary, but it is the way a settlement might happen, not the settlement itself. Offering a change of feeling as the answer to a problem partly built by structure was the wrong kind of answer. Feeling decides whether the two sides are willing to cross the bridge. It does not lay a single brick. The test I would put in its place is harder and, what matters, checkable. For the diaspora, the question for any act of engagement is not whether it feels like solidarity. It is whether it actually transfers something — resources, risk, or standing — to the people inside. And: would the act survive if your own name were taken off it? That is a question with a real answer, and most performance fails it. This is not a call for the diaspora to be silent. A voice that actually transfers something is not vanity, and silence is not agreement. For those inside, the matching discipline is to resist the sweeping verdict — not everyone who left, left lightly, and exile is its own kind of damage. And for all of us, the first habit to break is the comfort of curated certainty — the reflex that rewards the loudest claim over the truest. I will end where the evidence, not the feeling, points. The bridge between inside and outside is built of infrastructure — networks, expertise, transfers, institutions. Feeling may decide whether we want to build it. Honesty about what it is actually made of is the only thing that will keep it standing. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

    8 min

  6. May 31

    Whose Infrastructure, Whose Celebration?

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On Reza Pahlavi’s Odesa narrative and the laundering of a war’s human cost In Odesa last week — at a forum convened on the principle that bombing a nation’s grid, ports and apartment blocks is a crime against that nation — Reza Pahlavi reportedly told his hosts that the Iranian people celebrated when “the regime’s infrastructure” was struck by the United States and Israel. Three innocuous words are made to carry an enormous burden. They deserve to be unpacked, because beneath them sits a documented record that international bodies, human-rights organisations and Western newspapers — not the Islamic Republic’s propagandists — established months ago. Consider what “the regime’s infrastructure” actually denoted. On the war’s first day a strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab killed roughly a hundred and seventy people, most of them children between seven and twelve; Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch treated it as a probable war crime. Over the forty days that followed, Gandhi Hospital in Tehran lost its neonatal unit; the century-old Pasteur Institute was hit; a pharmaceutical plant was destroyed, triggering nationwide shortages of insulin and cancer medicines; the Red Crescent counted some ninety thousand damaged or destroyed homes; water and power stations were struck; a Tehran synagogue was razed during Passover, its Torah scrolls lost. A neonatal incubator is not a centrifuge. A primary-school classroom is not a command bunker. To file all of this under “the regime” is not analysis; it is a euphemism doing the work that the facts will not. The claim also performs a quieter sleight of hand. It is true — and well attested — that some Iranians celebrated: at the killing of Khamenei, at the sudden vulnerability of an apparatus that had been shooting their children in the streets only weeks earlier during the winter protests. That jubilation was real, and one need not pretend otherwise. But Pahlavi slides from “some rejoiced that the tyrant was dead” to “the people celebrated the destruction of infrastructure.” The first is a fact; the second is a fallacy of composition dressed as reportage — the diaspora’s relief and a genuine hatred of Khamenei projected onto ninety million people, more than three million of whom had by then been driven from their homes. The disconfirming evidence is not obscure, and it does not come from Tehran’s spokesmen. It comes from his own former supporters. By mid-March, Iranians who had once looked to him were telling reporters that his call to “celebrate in the streets” was grotesque — that they went to sleep unsure they would wake, that they flinched at every step outdoors lest the next missile land nearby. A claim elastic enough to absorb the dead of Minab and the displaced of Tehran and still emerge as “the people celebrated” is not a description of anything. It is a belief immunised against refutation — which is to say, propaganda rather than testimony. Whatever evidence arrives, the conclusion is already fixed. The venue sharpens the hypocrisy to a point. On 28 February, Pahlavi assured the world that the target was “the Islamic Republic… not the country and great nation of Iran,” and christened the bombardment a “humanitarian intervention.” Eight weeks and some two thousand civilian dead later, the euphemism has hardened into a boast — delivered, of all places, in a city that knows exactly what it is to have your infrastructure turned to rubble by a foreign power insisting it strikes only the “regime.” The moral grammar Pahlavi rightly applies to Russia in Ukraine he inverts the instant the bombs fall on Iran. Attacks on civilian infrastructure are atrocities in Odesa and liberation in Tehran. One cannot hold both positions in the same week, in the same building, without forfeiting the claim to either. None of this is a slip of phrasing. It is the recurring substitution at the heart of the restorationist project: unable to demonstrate a constituency at home, it manufactures one rhetorically. The people are with us; the people rejoice; the people celebrate the ruins. The celebration narrative is a stand-in for legitimacy — far easier to assert from a podium abroad than to earn on Iranian soil. A movement that needs the destruction of its own country’s hospitals and schools recast as a festival has already confessed that it has no serious plan for the country that must be rebuilt from the rubble. The honest sentence is short and unflattering. A foreign campaign killed thousands of Iranian civilians, displaced millions, and flattened the schools, clinics and homes of the nation Pahlavi claims to lead — and he called it aid, and the survivors’ grief he reportedly called celebration. To say so is not to defend the Islamic Republic, whose crimes are real and catalogued. It is only to refuse the euphemism. The children of Minab were not infrastructure, and the silence of three million displaced is not applause. Sources are linked inline above. Principal references: Encyclopædia Britannica (war overview); Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (the Minab school strike as a probable war crime); The Guardian and Al Jazeera, citing the WHO (attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities); Bloomberg, citing the Iranian Red Crescent (homes and medical facilities destroyed); Al Jazeera (civilian targets, the c. 2,000 dead, and the Tehran synagogue); The Times of Israel (celebration at Khamenei’s death); CBS News (the winter protests); UN OCHA (displacement); Middle East Eye (Iranian reactions to the call to celebrate); Fox News (Pahlavi’s “humanitarian intervention” framing); and Kyiv Post (the Odesa interview, 30 May 2026). Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

    5 min

  7. May 23

    Dead Air: A Throne on Subscription

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast  Manoto, Foreign Money, and the Constituency That Was Never There When Manoto television ceased satellite broadcasting on 31 January 2024, the event was widely read as a financial failure, and the channel’s subsequent history did little to dislodge that reading. A diminished online operation followed; then, in February 2026, even live programming was suspended after the channel was evicted from its London premises — its landlord having been warned by UK counter-terrorism police of a credible threat. These two events have distinct proximate causes — one commercial, one a security eviction — and an honest account must keep them apart. But they share a single underlying condition, and it is that condition, rather than either trigger, that repays examination (The most recent decision – of May 2026 – is yet another final blow). Across fifteen years, Manoto never built a base of support capable of sustaining it. That is a narrower claim than the one usually pressed against Manoto, and it is also a sturdier one. It does not require us to identify a paymaster, and it does not collapse the moment a complicating fact — an eviction, a security threat — enters the picture. It rests instead on something the channel’s own history makes plain. What is actually known about the money Manoto’s funding was opaque from the outset. The channel, owned by the Marjan Television Network and run by Kayvan and Marjan Abbassi, consistently declined to identify its backers. A 2011 study by the Foreign Policy Centre, a London think tank, attributed its financing to unnamed “venture capitalists” — a description that explains very little, since venture capital does not ordinarily underwrite a loss-making political and cultural broadcaster for more than a decade without a commercial exit. Iranian state outlets have, at various points, named the Pentagon, Saudi Arabia, and Israel as sponsors; those claims are interested, unverified, and should be treated as such. What is not seriously in dispute is the scale of the losses. In 2019 Iran’s then-ambassador to London circulated what he presented as Manoto’s balance sheet, asserting that of roughly £95 million in capital, only some £3 million represented income the channel had itself earned. The source is adversarial and the figure should be discounted accordingly. Yet the order of magnitude is consistent with everything else known about the operation: a twenty-four-hour satellite channel, with substantial archival production, London salaries, and satellite-carriage costs, sustained year upon year by capital it did not generate. Whatever the precise numbers, Manoto was not a business that paid its way, and it never claimed to be one. This is the fact from which the analysis should proceed — and it can be stated without speculation about any particular government. Eliminating the audience, not the suspects The temptation here is to reason by elimination: the public did not fund it, the Pahlavi family did not fund it, therefore a state did. That inference is weaker than it looks, because the list of remaining possibilities is longer than two. A loss-making exile broadcaster can be carried by a handful of wealthy private donors — émigré businessmen, figures with pre-revolutionary fortunes — without any state involvement at all; this is, in fact, the commonest funding model for diaspora media. It can be carried by a single patron treating the outlet as a personal political project. It can run for years on a mixture of thin advertising revenue, entertainment programming, and patient capital that is never recouped. State sponsorship is one hypothesis among several, and the evidence in the public domain does not, on its own, single it out. But notice that the argument does not need it to. Every one of these explanations — wealthy donors, a single patron, indulgent capital, or a foreign treasury — shares one feature: none of them is a broad, organic donor base. That is the robust finding, and it holds regardless of which suspect one favours. Manoto was sustained by concentrated money, not by its public. When, in its final years, it appealed openly to viewers and subscribers to keep it alive, the appeal failed — and it failed at the very moment when, by the movement’s own account, monarchist sentiment was at its height. The arithmetic of a real base It is worth being concrete about what an organic base would have had to look like. A satellite operation of Manoto’s kind costs, conservatively, somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars a year. To replace even a modest fraction of that through subscriptions — say, at fifteen dollars a month — requires a sustained, paying membership in the high tens of thousands, renewing month after month. That is not a sentiment; it is an institution. It implies dues, lists, organised fundraising, and a structure that converts feeling into recurring revenue. This is where the familiar charge of “hypocrisy” should be set aside, because it is both unkind and analytically lazy. Individuals routinely decline to fund a shared good, each assuming others will carry it — the ordinary free-rider problem, and no evidence of insincerity. The point is not that individual monarchists are hypocrites. The point is structural: a genuine movement builds the machinery that defeats free-riding. It creates the party, the membership tier, the foundation, the disciplined campaign. The diaspora monarchist current produced none of these. Its characteristic activity has been the rally and the commemorative gathering — episodic, expressive, and unmonetised. Whatever else such gatherings are, they are not a funding constituency, and an outlet that depends on one cannot be sustained by them. What this does, and does not, establish The funding collapse does not prove foreign-state sponsorship. What it establishes is something prior and, for the argument, sufficient: the absence of an organic constituency. And here the two readings that might otherwise compete — “it was state-funded” and “the diaspora was never a movement” — in fact converge on the same conclusion. If a state paid, the public base was a fiction. If no state paid, the public base still failed to materialise when it was finally asked to appear. Either way, the mass support was not there. The deeper significance lies in what Manoto principally sold. Its signature product was pre-revolutionary archival footage, and the affect it traded in was nostalgia for a pre-1979 Iran of decency and ease. But most of Manoto’s audience, and certainly its younger audience, has no first-hand memory of that Iran. The longing the channel cultivated was therefore not a memory being recovered; it was a sentiment being manufactured, and manufactured continuously, by an apparatus that had to be paid for. Nostalgia of this kind is not self-sustaining. Remove the production line and the feeling does not vanish overnight — but it loses its renewal, its imagery, its weekly reinforcement. A movement resting on manufactured memory is uniquely exposed to the loss of the factory. The companion case, held to the same standard The parallel case is Iran International, and intellectual consistency requires holding it to the evidential standard applied to Manoto. Here the record is firmer: UK corporate filings and reporting in the Wall Street Journal indicate that the channel was founded and funded by figures connected to the Saudi royal court. Its original backing is therefore not merely alleged but documented. What followed that backing — whether it continued, lapsed, or was replaced after the Tehran–Riyadh rapprochement — is genuinely uncertain, and claims about a subsequent source should be presented as conjecture, not finding. The honest statement is the limited one: one of the two most prominent monarchist-aligned broadcasters had a documented foreign-state origin, and the other was sustained by undisclosed concentrated money. Neither rested on its public. This bears on a wider difficulty for the exile project. Reza Pahlavi has, in recent years, repeatedly framed change in Iran as something that will require external pressure, and has at times spoken of the support of foreign governments as a necessary condition rather than an embarrassment. One may read those statements charitably or critically. But a political programme that locates the decisive agency outside the country, and that is amplified by media it does not itself fund, will always struggle to demonstrate that it speaks for a domestic constituency rather than merely about one. A measured conclusion To call this “the end of monarchism” would be to overreach. An idea does not die because a television channel goes dark; ideologies have survived with far less infrastructure than a satellite licence, and Iran’s own modern history shows how thin a medium can carry a political current a long way. What has ended is something more specific, and more consequential. For fifteen years, an externally financed, archive-driven apparatus lent the monarchist project a reach, a polish, and an appearance of mass depth that its actual base never supplied. That apparatus is now substantially gone, and the appeals to replace it have gone unanswered. The monarchist current is therefore left to discover whether it can exist as what it has always claimed to be — a popular movement — without the machinery that, for a decade and a half, disguised the fact that it was not yet one. That is not the end of an idea. It is the end of an illusion about the idea’s depth. And for a political project, the second loss may prove harder to recover from than the first.   Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

    10 min

  8. May 22

    ‌Built from Scratch

    PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast  On the Equation That Turns a Nation Into Acceptable Rubble Do we distinguish between Iran and the Islamic Republic? Are they one and the same? It sounds like a pedant’s quarrel, a hotspot for social media. It is not. And you may be surprised which side of it you find yourself on. Begin with the historical fact, because it settles less than it seems to. To say Iran is the same as the Islamic Republic is chronologically incoherent. Iran — as a country, a nation, an idea — existed long before 1979. The Islamic Republic is a model of governance, and a model of governance is never equivalent to the entirety of a nation. Governments come and go; the country persists beneath them. The distinction is real. But here is the caveat, and it is the whole of the matter: it can be put to opposite uses, and both produce paradoxes. Consider the first. There are those — and this has happened before, from inside the Republic itself — who insist the two are inseparable, that we must not drive a wedge between them. Why? To foreclose any invasion, any military attack. This cuts two ways. It can be a genuine patriotism, a shield held over a people. It can equally be the survival instinct of a repressive state, draped in the national flag. One has to make the distinction. Now the second position — and here the spear must go in. There are those who say: this regime is evil, therefore the state must be destroyed, therefore the country may be bombed. And they have made it very clear, in their recent pronouncements, that even if the country is destroyed they will simply rebuild it. Better than before. From scratch. Notice what is conceded in that promise. The infrastructure dies. The cultural heritage disappears. The historical Iran vanishes. The people are killed. Reza Pahlavi has said it plainly: collateral damage is inevitable; there is a price; the dead are a necessary cost of liberation. He has even reached for new vocabulary to separate his dead from the Republic’s martyrs — as though a change of noun could change the arithmetic of a grave. This is the position I want to name without euphemism. When loss of life becomes negligible — filed under the column marked acceptable, inevitable, necessary — the quarrel over names has already done its work. For observe: it no longer matters which side of the equation you chose. Believe Iran and the Republic are two things, and you may invade and call it a strike on the Republic. Believe they are one, and you may invade and call it the same. The semantic question was never the real one. The real question is the only one that counts: in your judgement, do the people of Iran get hurt — and if they do, do you consider them negligible? If your answer is yes, then whether you split the two names or fuse them, you have already decided to destroy Iran and to call the destruction a beginning. What, then, of the distinction itself? It is real, but it must be delicate. The Islamic Republic and Iran are not one and the same — I have argued this before and I hold to it. Yet the existence of a central government, of a system of law and order, with all the necessary caveats, sustains the continuity of a nation. Only under the rarest circumstances can the collapse of a state be said to serve the future. And we need no thousand years of history to know this. We need only the recent past — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria — and how military intervention spilled over, within those countries and into their neighbours. The lesson is there. It is the learning that is missing. One last word, on a word. Regime. It is not neutral. It carries an orientalist, a colonialist charge. We do not speak of the British regime or the French regime; we reserve the term for Iraq, for Libya, for Iran. It is a real word that has been misappropriated — deployed in obedient service to expansionist and interventionist power. We should at least be conscious of what we are doing each time we reach for it. A nation is not a sentence to be deleted and retyped. Those who promise to rebuild it from scratch should be asked, very quietly, who they imagine will be left to live in it. Subscribe: Newsletter | RSS

    5 min
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About

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

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