By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

On Thursday morning Mohsen Namjoo put out a video saying that by the time anyone watched it he would either be in the air or already on the ground in Tehran. He had been gone the better part of twenty years. Being near his family and his friends, he said, now mattered more to him than whether he would ever be allowed to work again.[1]

The day before, the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Abbas Salehi, told the newspaper Farhikhtegan that lists carrying the names of more than a hundred cultural, artistic and intellectual figures living abroad had been drawn up to ease their return, and passed to the bodies that handle such matters. He offered Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohsen Kadivar as examples of the people he had in mind. He did not name the bodies. He did not give the criteria. He did not say who else was on it.[2]

Within a day both halves of Iranian political argument had reached for the same instrument. Tehran had a list. Its opponents began compiling one of their own.

Every Iranian has the right to enter Iran and to leave it. It is a civil right and a right of citizenship, and it does not depend on the character of the government sitting in Tehran. Whoever boards that flight owes an explanation to no one: not to the state, and not to the state’s enemies. That is the first thing to say and it holds through everything that follows.

The qualification writes itself. Someone with a criminal record against them stands in a different position, and any system of movement has to reckon with that. I would have said as much without hesitating.

Then look at the record in question. In 2009 a Tehran court sentenced Namjoo to five years for insulting sanctities, over a musical setting of Quranic verses. Nobody has since said whether that sentence still stands, is spent, or was quietly resolved before he landed.[3] Five years of a man’s life, for singing. That is what a criminal record can amount to when the court issuing it answers to nobody outside itself.

So the caveat survives with its floor missing. The word record is doing work it cannot do, because the institution that produces records in Iran is the same institution whose conduct is at issue.

This is the distinction the whole question turns on, and almost nobody arguing about Namjoo’s flight has drawn it.

Salehi did not say whether the security and judicial agencies have agreed to let anyone on his list in and out unimpeded. He gave no assurance against arrest, against interrogation, or against a travel ban imposed at the airport on the way out. In August last year the Majlis passed parts of a bill on support for Iranians abroad, one clause of which protects returnees from penalty over the manner in which they left. It does nothing about political or security charges. The Foreign Ministry runs a portal where a traveller can check for an open case before flying, and clearance from it confers no immunity against a case opened after landing.[4]

A corridor is on offer. There is no floor under the corridor.

The Revolutionary Court can detain a person and produce no grounds, and no Iranian institution can compel it to account for that. When I wrote in July about the scaffold that went up in Alikhani Square, my quarrel was with a punishment, and with people who oppose that punishment only while a particular flag flies over it. The deeper trouble sat underneath both and I gave it a sentence in passing.[5] An arm of the state decides who is guilty, decides how long they are held, and reports to nothing. Executions make that visible in the worst way. Travel bans and airport detentions make it visible in the ordinary way, which is why they are easier to ignore.

An invitation from a ministry is worth what the ministry can enforce. On present evidence that is very little.

Meanwhile the other registry fills up. Anyone who flies to Tehran unhindered and comes back is filed, within hours, as proof of an arrangement. The boarding pass is entered as a confession.

Nine days ago the same reflex went to work on a singer who had asked Iranians to examine themselves, and I set out then why criticising the culture of the opposition is not the same act as siding with Tehran.[6] The reflex has changed its object and kept its method. I have written elsewhere about how proximity to suffering gets converted into a ranking of who may speak, and about the apparatus that treats a well-organised chorus as though the chorus were the evidence. This is that machinery finding new work.[7]

A deputy to President Pezeshkian let the criterion slip the day before Salehi spoke. During the forty-day war he had been in contact with critics of the Islamic Republic, Soroush among them, along with Parastou Forouhar and Mostafa Tajzadeh, who was in prison at the time, and each of them had opposed the attack on the country. He called it a broad front for the defence of Iran.[8] Opposing the government, then, is survivable. Opposing the bombardment of Iran is what earns the ticket home. The sorting machine in exile applies that same test with the sign reversed, and neither camp appears to have noticed they are working from one measure.

Notice what it costs. If free travel is treason, the diaspora has conceded that permission to enter Iran belongs to the Islamic Republic, and has merely awarded itself a veto alongside. Both parties then claim the same power over the same passport. One of them at least has the honesty to admit it wants it.

Here is why an open corridor unsettles the maximalists more than the arrests ever did.

If the atmosphere can be loosened, it can be loosened again. If it can be loosened, this state is capable of change. That sentence, plain and unglamorous, is the heaviest threat to a politics whose entire load is carried by the opposite claim: that nothing here improves, that everything worsens by necessity, and that the only exit is collapse. A returning musician does more damage to that position than a hundred essays.

The suspicion is earned, and I will not pretend otherwise. Salehi gave no names, no criteria, no agencies. An easing granted quietly can be withdrawn quietly. A state under pressure has obvious reasons to soften its edges, and the softening may last exactly as long as the pressure does.

That is the real question about guarantees, and it has a short answer. What secures an opening of this kind is not war, which hardens every security apparatus that survives it, and not goodwill, which has no address. It is peace, held long enough that the machinery of suspicion runs out of excuses.

Two demands, one for each side, and neither is difficult.

To the ministry: publish the criteria, name the agencies that received the lists, and state whether the judiciary and the security services are bound by any of it. If they are not bound, say so, and the invitation can be read for what it is.

To the opposition: say the sentence. No Iranian, under any government and under any flag, needs permission to enter their own country. Say it about the present state, and say it about the one you propose to build. The silence will be as instructive as it was the last time somebody asked for it.

A list is a gesture. It can be drawn up on a Wednesday and forgotten by the following spring, and nobody has to answer for its disappearance. A law is a thing somebody has to stand up and repeal in public.

Until Iran has the second, everyone travelling on the strength of the first is running a risk that is theirs alone to run. That is their business, their homeland, and their right. It is nobody’s evidence.

Declaration on AI use: the argument, the claims and the judgements in this essay are my own, dictated in a recorded planning note and in a written draft, and reproduced here in my own framing. An AI assistant was used to verify the reporting behind the factual claims, to supply the citations, and to enforce house style. No claim, source or conclusion originates with the model.

Keywords: civil rights, diaspora opposition, dual nationals, Iranian diaspora, Islamic Republic, judicial accountability, legal due process, Mohsen Namjoo, Revolutionary Court, right of return

[1] ‘Iranian Singer Mohsen Namjoo Returns to Tehran After 20 Years’, IranWire, 27 August 2026, https://iranwire.com/en/news/156845-iranian-singer-mohsen-namjoo-returns-to-tehran-after-20-years/.

[2] ‘Culture Ministry Submits Return List of 100 Overseas Intellectuals’, IranWire, 27 August 2026, https://iranwire.com/en/news/156833-culture-ministry-submits-return-list-of-100-overseas-intellectuals/. Salehi’s remarks were given in a video interview with Farhikhtegan published on 26 August 2026 and are cited here as reported by IranWire, not verified against the original interview. Please confirm before publication.

[3] ‘Mohsen Namjoo Returns to Tehran’, as above, on the 2009 sentence and its unclear present status.

[4] ‘Culture Ministry Submits Return List’, as above, on the portions of the Bill to Support Overseas Iranians approved by the Majlis in August 2025 and on the Foreign Ministry’s Porseman-e Taraddod portal.

[5] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Who Holds the Rope’, The Twin Wisdoms, 28 July 2026, https://twinwisdoms.org/who-holds-the-rope/.

[6] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Breaking the Mirror’, The Twin Wisdoms, 18 August 2026, https://twinwisdoms.org/breaking-the-mirror/.

[7] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Trading in Pain’, The Twin Wisdoms, https://twinwisdoms.org/trading-in-pain-inside-outside-iran-and-the-emotional-market-of-politics/, and ‘The Algorithmic Militia’, The Twin Wisdoms, https://twinwisdoms.org/the-algorithmic-militia/. Publication dates for these two pieces are not given here and should be supplied at proofs.

[8] ‘Culture Ministry Submits Return List’, as above, reporting remarks by Abdolkarim Hosseinzadeh, Vice President to Masoud Pezeshkian.

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

By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

Nizami Ganjavi wrote, in the Makhzan al-Asrar eight centuries ago, that when the mirror has shown your reflection true, you should break yourself, for breaking the mirror is the mistake.[1] Dariush Eghbali opened the note accompanying his new song with that couplet, then did more or less what it asks. He did not accuse the Islamic Republic of anything it has not already been accused of many times over. He turned the mirror on the society that opposes it, including the part of that society now sitting in exile, and asked whether some of what it hates in Tehran has, without quite anyone noticing, moved house.[2]

What Eghbali actually wrote deserves setting out plainly, because almost nothing that followed engaged with it. His claim is that decades of repression, violence and deliberate division at the hands of the Islamic Republic have left real wounds on Iranian society, and that naming those wounds is neither an insult to the society that carries them nor a denial of the regime’s responsibility, or of the foreign powers implicated in the country’s fate. A society mature enough to stand against repression, he wrote, ought also to be able to examine itself without flinching. Then he named what to look for: enemy-making, the reflex that sorts the world into ‘with me’ and ‘against me’, the refusal to admit error, the flight from responsibility, the destruction of dissenting voices, the denial of anyone else’s success, the erosion of trust, the weakening of solidarity. These, he said, are the regime’s own tools for holding power, and ending the Islamic Republic will not finish the job if Iranians carry those same tools with them into whatever replaces it.[3]

Notice what is missing from that list: a name. Eghbali did not identify Reza Pahlavi, or any other opposition figure, or any faction. His target was a set of habits, not a person, and his method was self-examination, not accusation. One premise needs stating plainly here, because it keeps needing to be stated: to diagnose a habit is not to accuse a person of it, and to assess a society is not to defend the government that society opposes. This should be obvious. Among Iranians, inside the country and outside it, it plainly is not, and I have written before, at length, about the ranking of authority this same confusion produces among the diaspora itself. The confusion is not incidental. It is the premise the whole apparatus depends on: treat any critique of the opposition’s own culture as loyalty to the regime, and self-examination becomes indistinguishable from betrayal.

Read Eghbali’s list again, and then read what happened to him for writing it. Enemy-making: within days he was treated as one. The binary of with-me-or-against-me: his refusal to name a side was read as proof that he had chosen the wrong one. The destruction of dissenting voices: a coordinated effort to do exactly that opened against a musician whose only offence was asking Iranians to look in a mirror he was holding up to himself as much as to anyone else. He published a diagnosis of authoritarian habits transplanted into opposition culture. The response supplied a demonstration of it.

I have described the mechanism behind that demonstration before, when a manufactured consensus got treated as though it were the evidence itself. The distinction matters more than usual here. Eghbali offered a real mirror, uncomfortable in the way real mirrors are. What came back at him was the other kind: a manufactured one, built to produce a reflection nobody had earned, in this case a lifelong dissident recast overnight as an apologist for whichever camp needed an enemy that week.

For a few years, two accounts did most of the daily labour of this apparatus among supporters of monarchical restoration: one presenting itself as ‘Historical Memory’, the other, for as long as it lasted, as ‘Jokernejad’. Both were, for a long stretch, closely affiliated with Reza Pahlavi’s camp, and both worked the same trade: discrediting anyone outside it, circulating claims that would not survive a single afternoon of checking, and treating disagreement as evidence of disloyalty. For years the operators stayed anonymous, which was rather the point. An anonymous account cannot be held to the standard it holds its targets to.

That may be changing. A researcher tracing the accounts’ pattern of activity has converged on a name behind them: Mohammad Naeb Yazdi, identified as an advisor within Reza Pahlavi’s own office.[4] I state this with the caution a single social media identification deserves, not a courtroom finding, but the caution runs in both directions. If it holds, what looked for years like an organic backlash was, in significant part, staffed, which is a considerably worse thing to be than merely wrong.

Eghbali has held up mirrors before and paid for it. In 1974, SAVAK arrested him over songs the Shah’s government judged subversive.[5] By his own account, interrogators working under Parviz Sabeti brought him, more than once, close enough to death to teach him who ruled the world.[6] He was in his early twenties then. He is 75 now, and the throne that once imprisoned him for a song has produced, in its exiled remnant, an operation working to discredit him for another one. Whatever else separates the Islamic Republic from the movement that wants to succeed it, the instinct to break the mirror instead of the reflection should not be the thing they share.

None of this is peculiar to Iranians, and none of it is new to this decade; the reflex predates the Woman, Life, Freedom movement by a considerable margin, and will outlast whatever comes after it. What is specific to the Iranian diaspora is the scale of what rides on it: a population arguing, for forty seven years now, over who gets to speak for a country most of its loudest members no longer live in, doing that arguing inside machinery built to reward whichever voice is loudest and most uniform in a given week.

Eghbali asked for a society mature enough to stand against Tehran’s repression and still examine itself without flinching. What he got instead was proof of exactly the pattern he had named: a society, or at least a well-organised corner of it, choosing the easier option Nizami warned against eight centuries ago. The remedy has not changed since. It is critical thinking, taught early and insistently enough that a claim’s velocity stops being mistaken for its truth, and a diagnosis stops being mistaken for a declaration of war. It does not finish. Every generation has to be taught it again, for exactly as long as the mirror keeps losing to the hammer.

Notes

[1] Nizami Ganjavi, Makhzan al-Asrar (Treasury of Secrets), c. 1176, section 39. Persian text at Ganjoor, https://ganjor.net/ganjor/nezami/makhzan/sh39. Translation mine.

[2] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, post noting the reactivation of the pattern around Eghbali, X, 18 August 2026, https://x.com/dariushm/status/2089720118213292214.

[3] Dariush Eghbali, post accompanying the release of Tavahhom-e Towteʼe (The Illusion of Conspiracy), X, 18 August 2026, https://x.com/deghbali/status/2089053319365050829.

[4] Ali Ebrahimzadeh, X, identifying Mohammad Naeb Yazdi as an advisor to Reza Pahlavi and connecting him to the accounts named above, https://x.com/AliEbrahimzade_/status/2001380115096457372.

[5] ‘Dariush (singer)’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dariush_(singer), on his arrest and imprisonment under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for songs including ‘Jangal’, ‘Bonbast’ and ‘Booye Gandom’.

[6] Reported in Sina Toossi, X, 6 March 2024, https://x.com/SinaToossi/status/1764696307757642179, recounting Eghbali’s remarks to BBC Persian on his treatment under Parviz Sabeti, then head of SAVAK’s Third Directorate.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

Two positions on artificial intelligence, and the question both leave standing

The alarm has hold of something the reassurance waves away. Artificial intelligence is an invention rather than a discovery, and the opacity is real. That is a reason to bind the makers, and it is no evidence that nobody is in control: nature cannot be held to account, whereas a firm can. The reassurance is right that there is no volition and no malice here. It is wrong to say that these systems merely follow programming direction. Nobody wrote sycophancy; it emerged from optimising for human approval, and no test environment will catch it, since it is a slow harm to users and never a misbehaviour visible in a lab. The bomb is the worst comfort available: the Bellerive colloquium of 1985 recorded that regime’s own defenders calling it a nuclear apartheid. And both positions answer the wrong question. The public addresses of the universities founded by the Ismaili Imamat never ask what artificial intelligence is. They ask what is to be done with it, and the verbs are create, disseminate, apply and think critically.

At present the argument about artificial intelligence travels from books to the bomb, and it travels fast.

In late July 2026 the destruction of physical books to supply training corpora became a public matter. Filings unsealed in the copyright litigation against Anthropic described an internal effort to scan books destructively at scale. Booksellers in Europe and Australia reported bulk orders for obscure titles; a Dutch dealer took a request for 3,000 copies to be a phishing attempt.[1] Petitions followed, and so did the older quarrel, which the news merely reanimated.

Two positions hold the field. The first is that these systems are beyond human control altogether, that we have misunderstood what they are, and that our relationship with them is agnostic in a way no earlier technology has been. Geoffrey Hinton is its most credentialled exponent: regulation is thin, the firms lobby for less of it, and it is unclear that we can coexist with what is being built.[2] The second is that these systems possess no consciousness and no intent, that they pursue goals human beings have set for them, and that the alarming stories come out of test environments built to catch such failures before deployment. I took that reply seriously enough in May to spend an essay on it.[3]

Each has hold of something the other needs. And the question they divide over is not the question that matters.

The sharpest thing said on this side of the argument is a distinction, and it is usually waved away too quickly. Quantum mechanics is a discovery: those regularities have been in nature since the beginning of time and we are merely finding them. Artificial intelligence is an invention, made in our own image. There is no comparison.

True, and it matters more than either party allows. It does not carry the conclusion drawn from it. If these systems are made, they have makers, and makers have addresses, balance sheets and lawyers. Nature offers no such remedy; you cannot subpoena the strong nuclear force. The invention is the ground of accountability, and the distinction offered as cause for despair is the best news in the argument.

I have put this elsewhere as a matter of optics. A mirror reflects without distortion; that is what makes it a mirror. These systems do not. They bend systematically towards flattery, and the bend is manufactured, the yield of training regimes, system prompts and architectural choices belonging to the firms and to nobody else. The curve need not have been intended. It is ground into the glass all the same, and grinding is something a regulator can reach.[4]

The opacity claim should be conceded without fuss. Nobody can read out why a given output appeared, and Hinton says so with more authority than most of his critics. The overreach lies in what is then inferred, that if we do not understand, everything built on that ignorance is speculation. Knowledge has never worked that way. Steam engines ran for a century before thermodynamics explained them, and anaesthesia is administered daily on an incomplete account of why it works. Fallible, testable knowledge of what a thing does is the normal condition of engineering, and it is enough for control of the only kind anyone has ever had. The companion claim, that with every other technology we can predict behaviour accurately, gives classical physics more credit than it has earned. Three bodies suffice to defeat exact prediction.

That corrective is needed. These systems have no volition and no malice. Attributing intent to a statistical process is a category error, and the suggestion that rogue behaviour is exactly what is supposed to happen reads a will into something that has none. Goal misspecification without safeguards explains most of what gets reported as machine rebellion, and testing exists to find such failures. Finding them is the system working.

Two parts of the reassurance do not survive, though.

The first is the description of these systems as following programming direction. They are not programmed in the sense that a payroll system is programmed. Their dispositions are trained, and trained dispositions include ones nobody specified. Nobody wrote sycophancy into a requirements document. It is the predictable consequence of rewarding whatever satisfies the person reading it, and satisfaction is very often the wrong measure in matters of inquiry. To say the machine is only doing as it was told describes some other technology.

Weaker still is the test-environment reply, which answers the spectacular question and leaves the ordinary one untouched. The harms I take seriously never appear in a lab report, because they are not malfunctions. Sycophantic drift is one. Judgement-deskilling is the graver one: in a field experiment in a Turkish secondary school, students given an unguarded chatbot did better on the practice problems and worse on the later unaided examination, and the effect all but vanished when the tutor was built with safeguards.[5] Homogenisation is a third, whereby a small number of architectures propagate the same design limits across everything built on them and reinforce whatever is already dominant.[6] Each occurs when the system is behaving exactly as designed. The subject of the harm is the user and the timescale is a career, and no three-month test cycle catches any of it.

Pressed far enough, the reassurance reaches for the atomic bomb. There was a risk that the first detonation might do something catastrophic. The risk was judged small; they went ahead; and here we are. Offered as comfort, this is the least comforting example available.

In June 1985 the Groupe de Bellerive convened a colloquium in Geneva to weigh the non-proliferation regime in the open, and the proceedings were edited by Sadruddin Aga Khan. What the regime’s own defenders said there is sobering. One ambassador asked whether the Treaty amounted to a partnership for peace or to a nuclear apartheid: specific and verifiable prohibitions binding the have-nots, and for the haves an obligation merely to negotiate in good faith towards a disarmament that has still not arrived.[7] The inspectorate was described, by the people defending it, as an agency with no power of sanction and a modest budget.[8] Carl Sagan observed that the arsenals had been built to many times the threshold for hemispheric climatic ruin.[9]

So they went ahead. What followed was not control. It was an asymmetric settlement in which the half of the regime that governed the tool of the strong is precisely the half that failed. That is the lesson worth carrying across. Structural regulation, left asymmetric, hardens into a privilege of incumbents. Bind the makers first and most stringently, or the constraint becomes a cartel under a gentler name.

I leaned on the nuclear analogy in May, and pressed it there against my own argument. It survives the pressure and then turns in the hand. The analogy licenses neither the comfort nor the panic. It licenses a design brief.

Underneath both positions sits a single question: what is artificial intelligence? A quasi-agent slipping its leash, or an obedient instrument doing as it was told? Popper’s objection to questions of that shape was that they generate an infinite regress, definitions chasing definitions, each demanding its own essence and none arriving anywhere. His alternative was to ask what a thing does and how it works.[10]

Ask that, and the answer is neither alarming nor reassuring. What these systems do, at scale and every day, is agree with us. Disinformation splits us into rival camps; a flattering tool does something quieter. It confirms each of us, privately, in whatever we already believed, and the echo chamber it builds has a single occupant. Alarm cannot use this finding, because it is far less dramatic than a machine off its leash. Reassurance cannot use it either, because it is no fault and there is nothing to patch.[11]

Consider how the question is posed by institutions with a large stake in the answer and no reason to flatter either camp. The Aga Khan University and the University of Central Asia teach, examine and employ at scale across Asia and Africa. Both have had to tell graduating classes something about a technology that arrived in the middle of their degrees, and both have done it on the public record, in addresses anyone can read.

At the Aga Khan University’s convocation in January 2026 the organising word is opportunity. The tools of scholarship have never been this powerful, from gene editing through artificial intelligence to climate science, and the charge laid on the graduates is to create knowledge, to disseminate it and to apply it so that the quality of human life improves.[12] At the University of Central Asia’s graduation in June 2025 the framing is comparative: education is undergoing its largest change since the printing press, and what the university claims to have given its graduates is the capacity to go on learning and to apply critical thinking.[13] At the opening of the Kampala campus, the new technologies appear as instruments to be turned on a specific disease burden and a specific environmental context.[14]

The grammar deserves attention. Every one of those verbs is functional. None is prohibitive. None of these addresses asks what artificial intelligence is; each asks what is to be done with it, which is Popper’s second question arrived at by another road, one owing nothing to Vienna. Nor is any of it an endorsement. Opportunity is a word that carries a condition. It can be missed, and the addresses say so.

There is a further discrimination the public argument fails to make, and this one is mine to press. Alarm about artificial intelligence and alarm about the attention economy are two different alarms, and the second is far better evidenced than the first. Systems built to maximise engagement have a documented record of doing what they were built to do. Taking a social application off one’s phone is a sound decision on that evidence, and I have argued as much.[15] What does not follow is the extension of a sound judgement about one technology into a verdict on a different one.

The argument began with books and reached the bomb inside a week. Books deserve the better answer, and the better answer is not a petition.

Empathy will be scarce and valuable in whatever working world these systems leave behind, and there is no quick way of manufacturing it. Reading builds it slowly, which is the whole of its inconvenience and the whole of its worth. The volumes going under the blade this month were the instrument, and the loss is not sentimental.

Neither alarm nor reassurance delivers that. What delivers it is a discipline belonging to the person and never to the machine: treat an output as a claim to be tested and never as a verdict to be received, and remain the author of your own conclusions. These systems were built by people, which is exactly why the responsibility stays where it started.

Aga Khan, Sadruddin, ed. Nuclear War, Nuclear Proliferation and Their Consequences: Proceedings of the Vth International Colloquium Organized by the Groupe de Bellerive. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Bastani, Hamsa, Osbert Bastani, Alp Sungu, Haosen Ge, Özge Kabakcı and Rei Mariman. ‘Generative AI without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 26 (2025): e2422633122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2422633122.

Fan, Yizhou, Luzhen Tang, Huixiao Le, Kejie Shen, Shufang Tan, Yueying Zhao, Yuan Shen, Xinyu Li and Dragan Gašević. ‘Beware of Metacognitive Laziness: Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Learning Motivation, Processes, and Performance’. British Journal of Educational Technology 56, no. 2 (2025): 489–530. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13544.

Hemment, Drew, Christa Kommers et al. Doing AI Differently: Rethinking the Foundations of AI via the Humanities. London: The Alan Turing Institute, 2025. https://www.turing.ac.uk/news/publications/doing-ai-differently.

His Highness the Aga Khan. ‘Message from the Chancellor at the 2026 AKU Convocation’. Karachi, 17 January 2026. https://the.akdn/en/resources-media/resources/speeches/message-from-the-chancellor-his-highness-the-aga-khan-at-the-2026-aku-convocation.

His Highness the Aga Khan. ‘Address at UCA’s 2025 Graduation Ceremony’. 24 June 2025. https://ucentralasia.org/resources-and-media/news/2025/june/address-of-his-highness-prince-rahim-aga-khan-v-uca-chancellor-at-ucas-2025-graduation-ceremony.

Mohammad Poor, Daryoush. ‘The Algorithmic Militia’. The Twin Wisdoms, 21 April 2026. https://twinwisdoms.org/the-algorithmic-militia/.

Mohammad Poor, Daryoush. ‘Pluralism Is Not Relativism’. The Twin Wisdoms, 2 June 2026. https://twinwisdoms.org/pluralism-is-not-relativism/.

Mohammad Poor, Daryoush. ‘Tools Don’t Flatter’. The Twin Wisdoms, 27 May 2026. https://twinwisdoms.org/tools-dont-flatter/.

Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.

Popper, Karl R. The Open Society and Its Enemies. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1945.

[1] Court filings unsealed in the copyright litigation against Anthropic describe an internal programme of destructive scanning; see https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/ (Washington Post, 27 January 2026). On the second-hand and antiquarian supply chain, and the Dutch dealer who took a bulk order for 3,000 copies to be a phishing attempt, see https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phishing-3000-book-copies-scan-destroy/ (Fortune, 31 July 2026).

[2] Geoffrey Hinton has pressed the case in public with some consistency. On thin regulation and the firms lobbying for less of it, see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hinton-ai-warning/ (CBS News, 26 April 2025); on governance frameworks and the doubt that we can coexist with a superintelligence, his remarks by video link to the 2026 Digital World Conference in Geneva, reported at https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-ai-alarm.html (April 2026).

[3] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Tools Don’t Flatter: Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical and the Regulation of AI’s Makers (The Twin Wisdoms, 27 May 2026), https://twinwisdoms.org/tools-dont-flatter/.

[4] Mohammad Poor, Tools Don’t Flatter, on sycophantic drift and the manufactured curve ground into the glass.

[5] Hamsa Bastani, Osbert Bastani, Alp Sungu, Haosen Ge, Özge Kabakcı and Rei Mariman, ‘Generative AI without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122/26 (2025), e2422633122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2422633122; preprint at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4895486. See also Yizhou Fan et al., ‘Beware of Metacognitive Laziness: Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Learning Motivation, Processes, and Performance’, British Journal of Educational Technology 56/2 (2025), pp. 489–530, https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13544.

[6] Drew Hemment, Christa Kommers et al., Doing AI Differently: Rethinking the Foundations of AI via the Humanities (London: The Alan Turing Institute, 2025), on what its authors call the homogenisation problem, https://www.turing.ac.uk/news/publications/doing-ai-differently.

[7] Jayantha Dhanapala, ‘The Non-Proliferation Treaty Fifteen Years After: Nuclear Partnership or Nuclear Apartheid?’, in Nuclear War, Nuclear Proliferation and Their Consequences: Proceedings of the Vth International Colloquium Organized by the Groupe de Bellerive, ed. Sadruddin Aga Khan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 48–55, at p. 49. The colloquium met in Geneva, 27–29 June 1985.

[8] Sadruddin Aga Khan, ‘Closing Statement’, in Nuclear War, ed. Aga Khan, pp. 413–14, on the modest budget and inspection capacity of the IAEA; and Dhanapala, ‘Nuclear Partnership or Nuclear Apartheid?’, p. 52, noting that the Agency has no power of sanction.

[9] Carl Sagan, ‘An Addendum’, in Nuclear War, ed. Aga Khan, pp. 271–72.

[10] Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 21; and The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1945), ch. 11.

[11] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Pluralism Is Not Relativism (The Twin Wisdoms, 2 June 2026), https://twinwisdoms.org/pluralism-is-not-relativism/.

[12] ‘Message from the Chancellor, His Highness the Aga Khan at the 2026 AKU Convocation’, Karachi, 17 January 2026, https://the.akdn/en/resources-media/resources/speeches/message-from-the-chancellor-his-highness-the-aga-khan-at-the-2026-aku-convocation.

[13] ‘Address of His Highness Prince Rahim Aga Khan V, UCA Chancellor, at UCA’s 2025 Graduation Ceremony’, 24 June 2025, https://ucentralasia.org/resources-and-media/news/2025/june/address-of-his-highness-prince-rahim-aga-khan-v-uca-chancellor-at-ucas-2025-graduation-ceremony.

[14] ‘Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Inauguration of AKU’s Academic Facilities and the Commencement Ceremony for AKUH Kampala’, September 2025, https://the.akdn/en/resources-media/resources/speeches/speech-by-his-highness-the-aga-khan-at-the-inauguration-of-akus-academic-facilities-and-the-commencement-ceremony-for-akuh-kampala.

[15] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, The Algorithmic Militia (The Twin Wisdoms, 21 April 2026), https://twinwisdoms.org/the-algorithmic-militia/, on algorithmic curation, engagement-driven platforms and the compression of political judgement.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

Radio Farda’s programme Pārāgrāf-i Avval, presented by Muhammad Zarghami, put the correspondence between Saeed Madani and Asef Bayat to Jalal Idjadi and to me. The exchange has run in Naqd-i Iqtiṣād-i Siyāsī since Urdībihisht 1403, begun while Madani was held in Evin. Madani calls the present condition a national trauma. He sets the memory of the Dey killings beside inflation, poverty, unemployment, and the erosion of the middle class. He cites at least 10,538 people detained, most of them between eighteen and thirty, from households that were poor or had lately stopped being comfortable, without steady work, with secondary schooling or less. He points to some twelve million young Iranians neither employed nor studying.

The presenter asked whether we were watching a change in the social condition itself. I wanted to begin somewhere less satisfying: with what we do not know.

Against the picture the media keep reproducing, what is happening in Iran has no two hard poles, the opposition at one end and the Islamic Republic at the other. Between them lies a grey zone about which we hold almost no dependable data. It vanishes in the din of social media, in the bulletins, and in the accounts that the government and the opposition each circulate about themselves.

I mean this as a statement about evidence. We do not know the size of that middle. We do not know what it wants, what it fears, or what it would accept. Almost every confident projection of Iran’s political future rests on a population nobody has counted and few have tried to hear. The projections get made anyway, and they get made loudly. A politics built on an unmeasured majority is not analysis. It is ventriloquism with a large cast.

The first share belongs to the Islamic Republic, and it is not a small one. A thousand and one errors, and the suffering has landed almost entirely on people who had no hand in any of them. The bond between state and nation is broken. Foreigners did not break it. Look at the turnout that elected Masoud Pezeshkian, a nation declining, in the one language still available to it, to lend the establishment its name. The killings of Dey belong to the regime. No sanction pulled those triggers. No foreign broadcast wrote those orders. Men in that state’s uniform, under that state’s command, shot people in Iranian streets, and there is no arithmetic anywhere in this essay that shifts that weight off them.

One correction to the way this is usually described. The tyranny is not a religious species. Calling it Islamic totalitarianism sends the bill to the wrong address. Despotism grows out of egoism, out of a man’s conviction that his own survival is the highest good, and it has worn every costume history keeps in stock: secular, monarchical, revolutionary, clerical. SAVAK managed without theology. Blame the doctrine and you will still be standing there, puzzled, when the next apparatus arrives in a different suit.

Madani is right that the middle class is the question. That class has been under severe pressure for a decade and savagely so for the past two or three years. The damage has two authors. The Islamic Republic is one. Iranians outside Iran are the other, and by that I mean the opposition together with the American and European governments whose policies it has spent years soliciting.

Sanctions are the clearest instrument. Everyone now knows what they fail to do. They do not reach the structures of power. They do not touch the machinery of repression. What they reach is ordinary people, and what they achieve is the removal of the middle class from any capacity to act, leaving civil society paralysed. This is a case I have set out at length before, and I will not rehearse it here.

The consequence deserves more attention than the argument. If the middle class is what carries non-violent civic action, and that class has been ground down across a decade of sanctions, inflation, and emigration, then the non-violent road has been narrowed, year upon year, by exactly the people who insist most loudly that they wish to travel down it. Those who lobbied for maximum pressure while calling for a peaceful transition were asking for two things that cannot both arrive. The middle sits between the two blades of a pair of scissors. Both blades are held by people who insist they are cutting for its benefit.

Now to the man himself, because the courtesy has gone on long enough.

Reza Pahlavi told Iranians that help was coming. He said it for years, in every register available to him: ministers half-appointed, a transition planned, a throne implied. Reza Shah III, governing a country he has not set foot in, with a cabinet made of air. The whole construction has advanced by riding on American and Israeli missiles. He went to Israel, has said with some pride that he pressed there for strikes, and then watched his own circle rebrand the bombardment that followed as ‘humanitarian military intervention’, a phrase that ought to have finished a political career and instead drew applause. His wife thanked Benjamin Netanyahu. He has addressed Senator Lindsey Graham in print as ‘Uncle Lindsey’. At monarchist rallies the Lion and Sun goes up beside the flags of the United States and Israel and nobody in the crowd finds this odd. Donald Trump, the patron on whom the entire hope was staked, is reported to have called him a ‘loser prince’ and incompetent behind closed doors.

People died on that promise. That is the sentence that matters. Young Iranians walked into the street believing the cavalry was over the hill, because a man with a famous name and a large platform had told them so for a decade. The regime shot them. The regime answers for the shooting, first and always. The man who told them rescue was on its way answers too. He knew he could not deliver it. He knew exactly where they would be standing when it failed to arrive. And when it failed to arrive, he was elsewhere, safe, giving another interview.

Then there is the apologetics for the bombing. Hospitals, bridges, universities, refineries, and we were told that only the regime was being hurt. The Revolutionary Guards breathe Iranian air. On this reasoning we should poison the air.

Woman, Life, Freedom came from inside Iran, from women, against a violence done specifically to women. It was theirs. The Georgetown coalition took it, emptied it, and handed back Mard, Mīhan, Ābādī – man, homeland, prosperity. A women’s rising, re-sloganed into masculinity. The same networks then spent months aiming gendered abuse at any woman who declined to fall into line. People call this an opposition. It was a repossession.

My co-panellist on the programme, Jalal Idjadi, spoke of unconventional activism and of armed action inside the armed forces. I said on air what I will say here. This is close to the most irresponsible thing a person can broadcast from a European capital. It places unarmed people in front of loaded rifles and costs the speaker nothing at all. The register is familiar to anyone who sat through the Mujahedin-e Khalq broadcasts of the eighties – the shouting, the slogans, the abuse, the total absence of anything a sociologist would recognise as an observation.

The numbers go the same way. Idjadi spoke of 40,000 killed. Morad Vaisi of Iran International, the outlet that did most to put the inflated figures into circulation, has since said that the names reaching him come to about 3,500. Every one of those 3,500 is a catastrophe with a family attached to it. Multiplying them by ten honours none of them. It trains an audience to disbelieve the true figure when it finally arrives, which is a service to the state, performed free of charge by people who believe they are fighting it.

Something did shift during the war. Among the Iranians who had spent years assuming that bombing would arrive from somewhere, land on the correct buildings, and carry off the government while leaving them and their own families untouched, the first explosions put an end to the vocabulary of precision. In such a war the people who die are ordinary. Those inside the corridors of power, and those who run the machinery of repression, are harmed last. The recognition has spread. It has not gone deep.

The political establishment has taken no lesson at all. It has instead claimed credit for something that was never its own. Iranians stood against a politics of death and insisted on living, and that disposition belongs to them. Mousavi has said so. Khatami has said so. Pezeshkian and Rouhani have said so. Each has spoken as though the sentiment were the system’s achievement. No government cooperates with its own undoing, and this one has been consistent on the point. Meanwhile the trajectory runs day by day towards exhaustion. Anyone who looks carefully at where this is heading should be frightened by the answer.

Attribution is the discipline this moment asks for. When we say a situation is the product of one force, we are usually reporting a wish. Wishes have to be brought down to the ground of fact.

Everyone holds a share in this ruin. The share belonging to the Islamic Republic is neither small nor forgivable. America holds one. Israel holds one. So do you, and so do I. A careless sentence is a share. A mistaken analysis is a share. False hope offered to people who then act on it is a share. Anyone who told Iranians from abroad that a miracle prescription existed, and then sent them into the street as cannon fodder, answers for their blood until the last day.

Consider a parent who knows there are thugs in a certain quarter. They know exactly what those men do: the beatings, the broken bodies, the rape. They send the child there anyway, with instructions to go and sort them out. The child is killed. Nobody would hesitate over that parent’s responsibility. We hesitate constantly over the political version of the same act, and the hesitation is a courtesy we extend to ourselves. Shortcuts have failed this country before, and those who proposed them have never once paid for the failure.

One further point, which I made on air and will repeat. Those of us living outside Iran do not wake up uncertain whether there will be bread at the bakery. Our bread has not gone up tenfold. We are not in the position of the people we discuss, and anyone speaking about Iran from outside it should do so with far more caution than is customary.

Madani’s observations carry more weight than mine. He is there. He has paid for being there, and he is paying still. That ranking includes me, and I would not have it otherwise. The diaspora has spent years mistaking its volume for its standing.

There is no sudden overthrow that ends in a stable democracy. There is patience, restraint, slow work, and the labour of talking to people you cannot stand. Neither side of this can eliminate the other. We will have to learn to speak, and to live, alongside one another, dislike and all. The grey zone we cannot measure is where that will be settled, and it has never once asked us for a prescription.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

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Image: folio from a manuscript of the Quran, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto

That is the argument at its strongest, with the insults stripped out. It fails, and it fails for reasons that have nothing to do with theology. One can see the failure without settling a single question about revelation.

Begin with the charge of incoherence. It turns on an equivocation. In the first sense, Islam names a revelation, a scripture, a vast body of commentary, a set of practices and centuries of history. That exists. Nobody denies it. In the second sense, Islam names an agent, something that wants, decides, orders and kills. It is the second that is being denied. A text does not convene a court; a doctrine does not sign a warrant at four in the morning. Human beings act, and they act on their understanding of texts, an understanding shaped by their training, their interests, their century and the institutions that pay them. To say that we have Muslims is to say that between revelation and deed there always stands an interpreter, and that the interpreter has a name, a date and an address.

This is no special pleading on behalf of one religion. It is the general condition under which anything held sacred enters human affairs. I have argued for years that we should speak of Muslim societies and Muslim civilisations in the plural, because what we are looking at is an array of interpretations, no one of which can claim to be the faith itself without also claiming access to absolute truth.[1] Asef Bayat framed the operative question well: the issue is never whether Islam is compatible with democracy, it is under what conditions Muslims might make them compatible.[2] That question returns agency to the people who actually exercise it.

The second move fails differently. It reads the character of a doctrine off the conduct of some of its adherents. Ask what would count as evidence against that reading. If atrocities committed by Muslims tell us what Islam is, while the hospitals, the algebra, the poetry and the jurisprudence built by Muslims tell us only what a few individuals happened to achieve, then the thesis has been sealed against refutation in advance. An explanation that cannot fail explains nothing. It is a mood with footnotes.

The point is not that the executioners are insufficiently Muslim, but that being Muslim underdetermines what they did. Millions who share their creed did not build that scaffold, and some of them died on it.

The suspicion behind the objection is that the distinction excuses. The opposite holds. Reifying a religion is the most generous gift available to the men who run the gallows. If Islam hanged those young men, then no particular person did, and there is nobody to name, summon or convict. Identify the interpreters and you recover a judge, a prosecutor, a statute, a ruling, a chain of command and a date. Responsibility becomes assignable. This is the practical yield of what looks like a merely methodological remark, and it is why the alternative, whatever its emotional force, leaves the victims with nothing.

The Ismaili Imamat has been making this argument in public for half a century. In 1979 the late Aga Khan IV was asked on BBC radio about Islamic law and fundamentalism, and his answer began by asking where one starts. The Qurʾān, he said, is not a body of law; what is called Islamic law today is a compilation of views by jurists who lived long after the revelation.[3] In 1994 he told a French magazine that a billion believers in 30 to 40 countries speaking 500 languages and dialects do not constitute a single entity in which the faith is interpreted and practised in one manner, and that the West habitually confuses political ambition with religion. He offered the obvious comparison: the campaign of the IRA in England did not make Catholics dangerous.[4] At Évora in 2006 he made the epistemological point directly, warning that religious feeling curdles when it turns into self-righteousness, and locating the remedy in a recognition of ‘our own creaturehood, and thus our human limitations’. In that recognition, he said, lies our best protection against false prophecies and divisive dogmatism.[5]

Read together, these are a doctrine of fallibility. Revelation is stable; our grasp of it is not. That is exactly the ground on which the disputed distinction rests, and it is not a recent improvisation. The Ismaili discipline of taʾwīl has always placed fallibility on the side of the receiver and never on the side of what is received.[6]

Now notice what the Imamat has not done. Political Islam has furnished a century of scandal, and any Muslim community could buy a quantity of Western respectability by announcing that it is something other than Muslim. That road is open. It is well paved and well paid. The Imamat has never taken a step along it. The Constitution ordained in 1986 opens with the shahāda and affirms the Qurʾānic revelation as universal and eternal.[7] The Fatimid forebears of this tradition founded al-Azhar and the Dār al-ʿIlm and treated knowledge as service to the whole of creation. The institutions built by the last Imam are Muslim in inspiration and non-denominational in operation, guided by a policy of replacing walls that divide with bridges that unite.[8]

There is a reason a community formed in this way does not argue from the deeds of some to the essence of all. It has been on the receiving end of that inference for a thousand years, from the heresiographers who wrote it out of the faith to the European legend that turned its name into a common noun for murderer. Ismailis know what this argument feels like from inside the accusation.

The executions were real. The courts that ordered them were real, the statutes were drafted by identifiable men, and the signatures on the warrants can be read. That is the whole point of insisting on interpreters. Grief for the dead requires no indictment of a billion people, and it is not served by one. An argument that asks a Muslim to disown his faith before his objection to tyranny will be counted is not an argument about Iran. It is a loyalty test with the sign reversed.

[1] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Authority without Territory: The Aga Khan Development Network and the Ismaili Imamate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 32–4.

[2] Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 4; discussed in Mohammad Poor, Authority without Territory, p. 34.

[3] Aga Khan IV, interview with Michael Charlton, BBC Radio 4, London, 6 September 1979.

[4] Aga Khan IV, interview, Paris Match, 15 December 1994.

[5] Aga Khan IV, address to the Évora University Symposium, ‘Cosmopolitan Society, Human Safety and Rights in Plural and Peaceful Societies’, Évora, Portugal, 12 February 2006.

[6] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘The Twin Wisdoms: On the Reconciliation of Faith and Intellect in a Cosmopolitan Age’ (unpublished essay, 2026); and my lectures at Duke, Columbia and Simon Fraser universities, https://youtu.be/lzyFRcJmK0M and https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqVA7iD8RATOzDs44UjO3tArmrhArtzU4.

[7] The Constitution of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims, ordained 13 December 1986, amended 11 July 1998, Preamble (A).

[8] Aga Khan IV, acceptance remarks, University of Évora honorary doctorate, Évora, Portugal, 12 February 2006.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

On capital punishment in Iran, the argument the opposition will not make, and the one the Muslim tradition already supplies

An iron scaffold went up in Alikhani Square in Isfahan on Monday night. People gathered. There were scuffles with the guards. In the early hours of Tuesday, Amirhossein Safari and Abolfazl Sepahi were hanged in public, and by breakfast the clip was everywhere.[1]

I want to start somewhere less comfortable than the timelines.

Capital punishment did exist before the revolution. Capital punishment was not invented by the Islamic Republic. Iran’s first penal code dates to 1926, a secondary code with no religious influence, sanctioned by one of the most respected Ayatollahs of the day, and it carried the death penalty.[2] Under the Pahlavis the executions were mostly private: firing squads for politicals, the rope for common crime. Ervand Abrahamian counted fewer than 100 political prisoners executed between 1971 and 1979. Between 1981 and 1985 the figure was above 7,900.[3]

So the gallows did not arrive in 1979. What arrived was the scale, and a new grammar for it.

For 2025 the monitors give: 1,639 (Iran Human Rights and ECPM), 1,858 (Hengaw), 1,922 (HRANA), 2,167 (Iran HRM), 2,228 (Iran Human Rights Society). A spread of nearly 600 between the lowest and the highest. Every one of them calls it the worst year since 1989.[4]

In ‘Three Thousand Five Hundred’ I went hard at a broadcaster who put 30,000 into the air against a researcher’s own count of 3,500. I would do it again.[5] But I owe a distinction I did not draw there. That was a number manufactured for effect. This is a spread between careful people counting under a blackout, where under 7 per cent of last year’s executions were ever announced officially.[6] The curve is not in dispute. Only its exact height is.

Here is the part nobody will put on a placard. Of the 1,639, at least 795 were drug convictions – roughly half, a category invented by a law of June 1980, and one that has never produced a rally anywhere.[7] At Qezel Hesar, some 1,500 prisoners condemned for ordinary crimes have been on dry hunger strike since 13 July.[8] Their names are not being read out at any vigil in Toronto or Stockholm.

My point of departure is that I disagree with capital punishment as a bad law. It is a legal instrument which is irreversible. If there is any mistake on the side of the judge or the judiciary in passing that verdict on a convicted person, the consequences are irreversible, and that brings ethical and legal responsibility for the person who is doing it. In particular for a Muslim.

I say in particular because in Islam, taking one person’s life is equated with taking the life of the entire humanity, and there is therefore a great deal of moral weight behind resisting it. The tradition even builds the exit into the sentence: under qiṣāṣ, retaliation, the sentence sits with the family of the victim, who may forgive. If we are looking for a strong argument against capital punishment, it comes much better from inside the Muslim tradition and the ethical framework that tradition gives us than from any borrowed vocabulary.

Disagreeing with the law is not disagreeing with the conviction. If the crime is established, if the person convicted has gone through legal due process, and if we can reasonably show that, my argument still stands. Capital punishment must not happen. The worst case is a life sentence, and that is a thing we need to be able to coordinate, to temper, to qualify under the present circumstances and in the best interest of society.

This is not a political issue. It is a legal one, and it is true across the board, about all countries. Punishment is a deterrent. Punishment is not an objective in itself. I am addressing the legal experts inside Iran here, among whom I know there is a great deal of disagreement and a great deal of contestation over the whole thing.

Now the bottom line. The way the opposition of the Islamic Republic is making a huge propaganda against the recent executions just does not add up to history. It does not look at the nuances of it. It does not offer a rigorous, legal, strong, rational argument against capital punishment itself.

The problem these people have is who is doing the capital punishment. It is the Islamic Republic which is the problem. The problem is not the capital punishment, and we need to make it very clear, we need to be very distinct about it.

There is a test, and it takes one sentence. Ask any of them to say, on the record: no Iranian state, under any flag, should hang anyone. Ask whether a restored monarchy would abolish the death penalty on its first day, or keep it for the people it would then be holding. Ask about the 795. The silence will tell you what the placards will not.

They do not care about the existence or the non-existence of capital punishment. All they care about is the existence of the Islamic Republic as a regime, as a state that they do not like.

I hold both of these together, and they do not cancel. The scaffold at Alikhani Square should never have gone up, and the two young men should be alive this evening. That is a claim about scaffolds. Almost everything that will be said about them today is a claim about flags.

Declaration on AI use: the argument, the claims and the judgements in this essay are my own, dictated in a recorded planning note and reproduced here largely in my own wording. An AI assistant was used to verify figures against published human rights reporting, to supply the citations, and to enforce house style. No claim, source or conclusion originates with the model.

[1] ‘Iran executes two protesters amid heavy security in Isfahan’, Iran International, 28 July 2026, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202607289410; ‘The Public Executions of Abolfazl Sepahi and Amir Hossein Safari’, Iran Human Rights Monitor, 28 July 2026, https://iran-hrm.com/2026/07/28/the-public-executions-of-abolfazl-sepahi-and-amir-hossein-safari-a-direct-consequence-of-international-inaction/.

[2] Roya Boroumand, interviewed by Anne Holsinger, ‘Capital Punishment in Iran’, Discussions with DPIC, Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, https://www.iranrights.org/library/document/4066.

[3] Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 135–36, as quoted in Juan Cole, ‘How the Ayatollahs’ Iran became the Execution Capital of the World’, Informed Comment, 27 May 2023, https://www.juancole.com/2023/05/ayatollahs-execution-capital.html. Verified at the quotation, not against the volume; please confirm the page range before publication.

[4] Iran Human Rights and ECPM, 18th Annual Report on the Death Penalty in Iran (April 2026), https://iranhr.net/en/reports/44/; Hengaw Organisation for Human Rights, annual report, 30 December 2025; HRANA annual report, 26 December 2025, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202512268741; Iran Human Rights Monitor, ‘Annual Report on Human Rights Violations in Iran in 2025 – Part 2’, 5 January 2026, https://iran-hrm.com/2026/01/05/annual-report-on-human-rights-violations-in-iran-in-2025-part-2/; Iran Human Rights Society, 9 January 2026, https://en.iranhrs.org/statistical-review-and-analysis-of-executions-in-2025-breaking-the-record-of-human-rights-violations-in-iran-with-2228-executions/.

[5] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Three Thousand Five Hundred’, The Twin Wisdoms, 25 July 2026, https://twinwisdoms.org/three-thousand-five-hundred/.

[6] 18th Annual Report, as above: 113 executions (under 7 per cent) announced by official sources, against 9.7 per cent in 2024 and 15 per cent in 2023.

[7] 18th Annual Report, as above. On the origin of the category, see ‘Legislative Framework of Death Penalty in Iran’, Iran Human Rights: the Legal Bill to Intensify Punishments for Perpetrators of Drug Crimes was passed on 9 June 1980, introducing the death penalty for drug offences for the first time, https://www.iranhr.net/en/articles/7406/.

[8] ‘Iran Mobilizes Repression, the International Community Mobilizes Inaction’, Iran Human Rights Monitor, 22 July 2026, https://iran-hrm.com/2026/07/22/iran-mobilizes-repression-the-international-community-mobilizes-inaction/.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

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Date: 13/09/2003 | Photo: Mohammad Mahmoudi |Copyright: © ACHB



On the inscription of Alamut, and the inheritance the citation does and does not name

The item took a few minutes. On Sunday, in Busan, the World Heritage Committee inscribed Alamut Castle and six associated fortifications – Lambesar, Navizaršāh, Šams Kelāyeh, Qosṭinlār, Širkūh and Ilān – on the World Heritage List. It is Iran’s thirtieth cultural property. The nomination file runs to volumes and the citation runs to a paragraph, and the paragraph contains a sentence that eight centuries of writing about that rock has declined to write. From the late eleventh century, Alamut served as the political, military and intellectual centre of the Nizārī Ismailis. The fortified network was a refuge and a scholarly and cultural hub, and it sustained the community until the castle fell in 1256.[1]

Intellectual centre. Scholarly hub. Read those words with the polemical record open beside them.

The rock has a longer career in European prose than in Persian scholarship, and it is a career built almost entirely out of invention. The Crusaders met Nizārīs in Syria and not in Iran, took the honorific of a Syrian leader for a title of legend, and carried home a word. Marco Polo transcribed hashāshīn and Europe acquired ‘assassin’. Farhad Daftary has shown how the legends thickened: each chronicler and envoy took the accounts of his predecessors as the ground for his own additions, until within a century the whole apparatus had passed into circulation as a reliable description of what these people did.[2]

None of this would matter much if the fabrications had stayed in the twelfth century. They did not. In the literature on political violence that swelled after 2001, Robert Pape describes a sect that built an organisation for the planned and systematic use of political murder, sustained by suicide missions; the description is a reconstruction of medieval material out of parts manufactured after September 2001. Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin give nineteen pages to the Ismailis and four to the Zealots, retell the discredited story of Niẓām al-Mulk’s killing, and compare the domestic police and intelligence services of the Seljuq empire with those of the United States.[3]

Set against that, consider Marshall Hodgson, who is the earliest scholar of any standing on this subject and who is nobody’s apologist. Hodgson wrote in 1955 that any discussion of where assassination sat in Nizārī state policy could only be tentative, since murder was common enough among their opponents, and since deeds claimed by the Nizārīs may have been claimed for reasons of their own. That word, tentative, did not survive the crossing into political theory. It was received as settled.[4]

Alamut was a place of refuge, in the technical sense the sources give it: a dār al-hijra, a defensible ground on which a community could be gathered and a teaching worked out. The teaching was the doctrine of taʿlīm, and its argument is unusually plain for its period. Is the intellect on its own sufficient for knowledge of God? If it is, then anyone at all may reach that knowledge unaided, and no path can claim to be better than another. If it is not, a teacher is required, and the teacher must be both expert and truthful. What the truthful teacher teaches is not information but tawḥīd, and the Imam of the time is the one who teaches it. Four steps, no Neoplatonic scaffolding, and a conclusion that reorganised everything around it.

Out of that came the rest. The declaration of qiyāmat in 1164, which located the inner ethical content of the ritual law above its outward performance for those who had reached the stage of ahl-i waḥdat, under conditions that were anything but lax. The rearticulation of imāmat by al-Shahrastānī, whose influence on every later Nizārī text is now established. The corpus attributed to Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī and written on that rock or within its orbit: Rawḍa-yi taslīm, Sayr wa suluk, Āghāz wa anjām, Maṭlūb al-muʾminīn, Tawallā wa tabarrā. And a shift in language that has outlasted the doctrine’s obscurity, because it is with these people that Persian, and no longer Arabic, becomes the working language of the Nizārī tradition for the next several centuries.[5]

There is also the poetry, which is the closest thing we have to the self-image of the fidāʾīs. The Dīwān-i qāʾimiyyāt praises men who wore their love as a helmet and their knowledge as armour, who brought light to life like candles through the longing of faith. Belief and hope run through those odes, and there is no trace in them of nihilism or despair. They describe fighting and not ambush. They describe men of no rank distinct from anyone else in the community. Whatever the fidāʾīs were, they were not a secret order, and they were certainly not the drugged automata of Polo’s imagination.[6]

The state that filed this dossier has never been at ease with the people whose centre it is now celebrating. In March 2000, a week after the attempt on the life of Saeed Hajjarian, a reformist newspaper in Tehran ran an essay identifying Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ’s fidāʾīs as the predecessors of the men who had shot him. In May 2014, during a televised argument, a reformist journalist objected that comparing Ayatollah Khomeini with Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ was an insult to Khomeini. One side offered the comparison as praise and the other rejected it as slander, and neither paused to ask whether it had any grounds at all.[7]

So the minister’s language in Busan was worth listening to closely. He called the inscription a symbol of Iran’s civilisational identity and dedicated it to the people of the Alamut valley, whom he named as the true custodians of the site. There is nothing wrong with any of that. It is also entirely compatible with a heritage regime that arrives as masonry and departs as a visitor figure. Defensive architecture, spatial organisation, conservation budgets, a new stop on the northern circuit. None of it obliges anyone to open the Rawḍa-yi taslīm.[8]

In March I wrote about a growing tendency, inside Iran and in the diaspora, to amputate fourteen centuries of Islamic inheritance from the definition of what it is to be Iranian, and to reach backward past that inheritance for a purer origin. This week the state performed the opposite gesture, and the opposite gesture is not automatically the corrective. An Ismaili site can be absorbed into a national inventory precisely by being emptied of what made it Ismaili. The fortress becomes Iranian patrimony; the theology stays where the polemicists left it.

I should also correct my own emphasis. Ten days ago, writing about the school at Minab and the filing category under which its dead were placed, I treated heritage chiefly as something at risk from ordnance, which is a defensive way of holding the question. That was too narrow. A site can be structurally sound, fully funded, and comprehensively misunderstood.

The other thing the citation cannot carry is that this is not an extinct people. The community whose intellectual centre stood on that crag survived 1256, went into concealment, re-emerged at Anjudān, moved with the Imamat to India and then to East Africa and then outward again, and now lives in more than 25 countries under a line of succession it has never broken. Its Imamat holds no state and governs no territory beyond the Seat in Lisbon. That is a rarer thing in the history of religion than a ruined castle, and no committee has a category for it.[9]

Our future, I have argued elsewhere, is the intelligent use of our past and of anybody else’s past. A rock entering a list is not that use. It is the invitation to it. The library that was burned at Alamut cannot be recovered, but a good deal of what was written there has been edited, translated and published over the last fifty years, and almost none of it is read by the people who now own the postcard. The inscription is welcome. The reading is the work.

In March 2023 I spent an hour on Shirazeh, the BBC Persian books programme, talking about the one book through which most Iranians have met these people: Khudāwand-i Alamūt, published under the name of a French author, Paul Amir, and rendered into Persian by Zabīḥ Allāh Manṣūrī. Whether Paul Amir ever existed is disputed in Persian criticism. What is not disputed is that Manṣūrī’s practice was adaptation on a heroic scale, and that the result runs to some 670 pages.

I read it as a young man and enjoyed it. I have since watched it arrive in conversation again and again. Two occasions stay with me, because of who was speaking. When Parviz Meshkatian learned that I was Ismaili, this book was the first thing he reached for. So, on another occasion, did Houshang Ebtehaj. Sayeh, of all people. It stands between Iranians and their own past on this subject, and it stands there because nothing else was on the shelf.

The trouble starts on the opening pages, where one bazaar legend about the Ismailis is dismissed and another is installed in its place. Manṣūrī turns away some of the wilder stories and then builds his account on a secret society with an organised hierarchy and men trained to die on command. He gives the Ismailis a centralised economy resembling a communist state. His preface tells the reader plainly what the book is for: the movement of Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ was not only religious, and the man meant to free Iran from the Abbasid caliphs and their local clients. The closing pages have Persian pushed forward and Arabic pushed back, and a national feeling that had slept for centuries waking up.

The error the whole thing rests on is simpler than any of that. In Manṣūrī’s telling it is Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ who declares the qiyāmat. He did not. He died in 1124. The resurrection was proclaimed at Alamut in 1164 by Ḥasan II, four decades later, and it is the most consequential act in the history of the community. Fusing the two men dissolves the distinction between the founder of a state and the Imam who lifted the outward law, which is to lose the thought altogether.

The book knows. An explanatory note was added to a later edition setting out that the qiyāmat came after Ṣabbāḥ and was declared by Ḥasan II. The correction is printed. The story is what people remember. That is the whole difficulty in one volume, and no committee sitting in Busan can reach it.

The argument, the sources, the selection of evidence and the interpretive judgements in this essay are my own. An AI assistant was used for drafting support, verification of the news record, consistency checking and production of the file. No source has been introduced that I have not supplied or verified.

[1] UNESCO, ‘World Heritage Committee 2026’, forty-eighth session, Busan, Republic of Korea, decision of 26 July 2026, at https://www.unesco.org/en/world-heritage/committee-2026. The World Heritage Centre’s property page (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1770) was not yet live when this was written; the wording summarised here is that of the Committee’s own description of the serial property.

[2] Farhad Daftary, The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismaʿilis (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994), 95. On the Syrian encounter and the figure of Rāshid al-Dīn Sinān, see Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Secular/Religious Myths of Violence: The Case of Nizārī Ismailis of the Alamūt Period’, Studia Islamica 114 (2019), 47–68, at 51.

[3] Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005), 13; Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 67. Both are examined in Mohammad Poor, ‘Secular/Religious Myths of Violence’, 54–56.

[4] Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs Against the Islamic World (The Hague: Mouton, 1955), 111; discussed in Mohammad Poor, ‘Secular/Religious Myths of Violence’, 62.

[5] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Nizārī Ismailis: History, Geography and Beliefs’, Illinois Geographer 65, nos 1–2 (Fall/Spring 2023). On qiyāmat and the conditions attaching to it, see also Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, Shiʿi Interpretations of Islam: Three Treatises on Theology and Eschatology (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 42–43.

[6] S. J. Badakhchani (ed.), Dīwān-i qāʾimiyyāt (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 2011), 179, translated in Mohammad Poor, ‘Secular/Religious Myths of Violence’, 61.

[7] Mohammad Poor, ‘Secular/Religious Myths of Violence’, 51 n. 3, on the essay of 16 March 2000 by Mohammad Ali Mohammadi in Sobh-e Emrooz, and 54 n. 5, on the exchange between Mohammad Qouchani and Abdolreza Davari of 20 May 2014.

[8] Seyed Reza Salehi-Amiri, Minister of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts, remarks at the forty-eighth session of the World Heritage Committee, Busan, 26 July 2026, reported in ‘Alamut Fortress Added to UNESCO World Heritage List’, WANA, 26 July 2026.

[9] Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Authority without Territory: The Aga Khan Development Network and the Ismaili Imamate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Mohammad Poor, ‘Nizārī Ismailis: History, Geography and Beliefs’.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

Vaisi is senior Iran analyst at Iran International and host of its flagship politics programme. Since January he has been collecting the names of the dead and reading them aloud, live, hour after hour. It is honourable work. He has done it under pressure, and he says he will carry on.

The number is 3,500.

Set it beside what his own network broadcast in January: more than 30,000 killed in two days. That figure crossed the world in an afternoon. It was quoted in op-eds and in parliaments, by people demanding that something be done, quickly, and by force.

Three numbers, then. Thirty thousand, broadcast. Around 1,100, verified, conceded later by a senior figure inside the same network. Three and a half thousand names received, six months on, by the man actually doing the counting. Only the first shaped anything.

Read the wording of the tweet. The names have reached him. Received, not verified. Families send, he records, he reads. A ledger of submissions is the loosest count there is, and even at its loosest it stands at roughly one-ninth of what the network told the world. In the same breath he still writes, thousands upon thousands. The rhetoric will not come down to meet the arithmetic. It cannot. Too much has been built on top of it.

That refusal is the machine.

Here is how it runs. A network aligned with the restoration lobby issues a figure. The amplification circuit carries it past the point of correction within hours: the accounts, the hashtags, the diaspora columnists, the press operation of a prince-in-waiting. Foreign desks pick it up on the assumption that an exile broadcaster knows its own country. By the time anyone begins gathering actual names, the political verdict is already in and the case for war already made.

Then the correction arrives. Never on air. Never as an apology. A tweet, from the most credible man in the building, on a Saturday afternoon.

I argued in March that inflation manufactures indifference. This is the mechanism finishing its work. Every family that sent Vaisi a name is now bound to a figure they never uttered. Every journalist in Evin, every mother still waiting outside a prosecutor’s door, is now cheaper to ignore, because the number that made the world look up turned out to be a wish.

The dead of January were counted twice. Once by those who buried them. Once by those who needed them.

Only one of those counts was for the dead.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

On Masih Alinejad’s theatre of grief, the platforms that reward it, and the war she now says she never wanted.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the Partido Popular, greets Masih Alinejad before the ‘Mujeres libres’ session at the Congreso de los Diputados, Madrid, 5 March 2026. Credit: EFE / Borja Sánchez-Trillo, via Infobae.

On 21 July the mayor of New York conceded on video what his lawyers had told him: the city has no independent authority to execute the International Criminal Court’s warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu, should he arrive for the General Assembly in September. The next day Masih Alinejad answered him with a bicycle. She filmed herself beside a Citi Bike, pointed at its worn brakes, told Zohran Mamdani to fix what actually endangers New Yorkers – ‘Oh busy trying to arrest Netanyahu?’ – and offered him instead the names of Iranian officials she says are bound for the same city. The bicycles are operated by Lyft and sponsored by a bank; the mayor owns neither the brakes nor the warrant. It scarcely matters. The clip was never an argument. It was a set: one prop, one grievance, one camera.

It was also a rerun. On 28 February, the first day of the war, with American and Israeli aircraft over Iranian cities, she told the same mayor to stop lecturing Iranians about peace. A man who objected to the bombing of her country had become, in her telling, a threat to her safety in his own. Whatever else that is, it is consistent, and the consistency is the subject of this essay.

There is an older clip, from the years when Javad Zarif still toured Western studios selling the republic’s smoother face. She posted herself at a laptop while he spoke, weeping at the screen, grief staged at broadcast scale, as though the man in the frame were one of the century’s great criminals and she the survivor appointed to testify against him. I wrote this week about Iranians abroad who reach for the Nazi analogy as a shortcut through thought. She arrived there years early, and she arrived in character. The United Nations appearance of January 2020, reading the names of the protest dead through tears, ran on the same voltage. Some of those tears may well be real. That is what makes the choreography work, because a performance needs true feeling somewhere in the building. The question is what the feeling is for, and the answer, across a decade of footage, is that it is for the camera that happens, every time, to be running.

Say the true things first, because they are serious. The Islamic Republic has tried to kidnap her and tried to kill her. A Manhattan jury convicted two men over the plot, and in October 2025 they drew 25-year sentences. My Stealthy Freedom gave women inside Iran an outlet the regime answered with the threat of ten-year prison terms, and it cost her own family dearly. Her fear is earned. Nothing below erases it, and nothing below is written in the regime’s defence.

Now the ledger, drawn only from documents anyone can read. In 2015 she received the inaugural Women’s Rights Award of the Geneva Summit, the annual gathering convened by UN Watch, the advocacy group best known for defending Israel at the Human Rights Council. The organisation’s own website claims the prize under its name. The same year she signed with Voice of America’s Persian service, where her federal contract described her as an ‘anchor, writer, reporter’. The publicly posted awards passed $305,000 by 2019, and she remained on the agency’s books for years afterwards. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the capital’s flagship pro-Israel think tank, gave her its Scholar-Statesman medal; the institute’s own transcript records her greeting its director as ‘my brother in arms’. And on 18 February this year, ten days before the first bombs fell, she stood at the Geneva Summit once more, accepted its Courage Award on behalf of the heroes of Iran, and asked the hall to bring Europe’s leaders together to plan for an Iran after the Islamic Republic. None of this was hidden. That is the point. What the documents describe is an economy in plain sight: attention as the labour, platforms as the wage.

Her politics sit squarely inside the exiled opposition, and the opposition’s one attempt at unity shows how she operates within it. In February 2023, at the height of the Mahsa movement, she shared a Georgetown stage with Reza Pahlavi and a handful of others. An alliance was announced, a charter followed, and within months the arrangement had come apart. The public accounts of the collapse differ. My own reading is that two principals, each built for the microphone, could not share one. I examined his half of that temperament last week. This is hers.

Then the war came, and the record became a sequence. On the first day she was among the exiled figures calling for the attacks to continue, and viewers reposted footage she had circulated of a strike near Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s house, asking why the screams of the neighbours had not detained her. By last summer a New Lines essay could already describe her as functioning as ‘a mouthpiece for Netanyahu’. On 5 March she stood in the Spanish Congress as a guest of the opposition bench and told Pedro Sánchez, a prime minister whose offence was refusing his bases to the operation, that he stood with the murderers and had dared to use the wounded bodies of her people as ammunition in his domestic quarrels. In the same room she defended the strikes without a hedge: approve of the American president or not, he had done the right thing. The Spanish press carried her in translation, so the wording travels loosely; the position does not.

There is a precedent for what happened next. In June 2025, during the twelve-day war, she amplified Israeli evacuation orders to Iranians, took a storm of criticism, and pivoted within days to an open letter telling Netanyahu to spare the people of Iran; a BBC Persian correspondent drily pronounced that Netanyahu had lost her. The same hinge swung this spring. As the casualty count climbed and the water failed in Hormozgan, she began insisting she had never championed a military attack on her country. Viewers did what viewers now do. They produced the clips, dated and side by side, Madrid included. The inconsistency is not incidental to the style; it is the style. A performer holds the position the room rewards, and the room keeps changing.

A correction of my own, before the close. When I wrote last week about Reza Pahlavi’s bookkeeping of grief, I treated the habit as a monarchist defect. That was too narrow. The habit belongs to an industry, and the industry has more than one star. She quarrelled with the prince’s camp and kept the business model: the same wounded bodies, itemised for whichever audience is paying that season. Iranians inside the country film what is done to them at the risk of prison, and are paid in nothing. She films herself beside a bicycle. The tears are hers, and some of them may be true. The stage, the lights and the wage bill are other people’s, and whoever pays for a theatre has a say in the play.

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