The Twin Wisdoms

By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Popper’s two ways of reading a definition, and why the names I give on these pages stay open to revision

I went back this week to the chapter of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies in which he separates two kinds of definition, and I went back to it because of a habit of my own. Since March I have been giving names to things on these pages, and I have said more than once that a phenomenon has to be named before we can know how to deal with it. A careful reader (and I have a few, not all of them friendly) might fairly ask whether this habit of naming is Platonism let in through the back door, which is what Popper spent a whole volume taking apart. My answer is no, and the reason lies in the direction in which the name is read. The names I give are labels for a pattern of behaviour. They are drawn from what people do, they are offered for testing, and I hold them only for as long as the behaviour holds. What Popper attacked, as I read him, is the opposite movement, in which the name is taken as a door to a hidden essence and the label hardens into a verdict. In April I wrote that political clarity begins with refusing to call things by names they have not earned, and I would only add now that a name has to go on earning its keep, or be given back.

Popper’s example is deliberately homely. Take the sentence ‘A puppy is a young dog.’ The essentialist, as Popper calls him, reads it from left to right, as the answer to the question ‘What is a puppy?’, and so treats the word on the left as the thing to be explained, as though by digging hard enough into the word we would reach the truth of the animal. The other reading, which Popper defends as the habit of the sciences, runs from right to left. We have described something, a young dog, and we agree to call it a puppy for short. The name comes last, it is a convenience, and nothing hangs on it. If the description turned out to be wrong we would change the description, and the name would follow. Behind the first reading stands Plato, for whom names point upwards to Forms, perfect and unchanging, so that knowledge of the name becomes a kind of knowledge of the divine order of things. Behind the second stands a more modest ambition, which is to describe how a thing behaves in different circumstances and whether there are regularities in that behaviour. I claim no more than this for my own names.

The clearest case is the figure I called Homo Exsul Furens in March, the raging exile. It emerged from watching one part of the Iranian diaspora: the royalists, the supporters of a restored monarchy, the people who jumped on the bandwagon of the Israeli state and its machinery of war as it was turned on Iran, in violation of international norms. These are human beings who shout, who make noise, who display their emotions, and who seem to believe that by making noise and appearing to mourn certain tragedies their entire behaviour is suddenly legitimised, so that whatever they do afterwards is perfectly fine and nobody may question it. We know, moreover, that the moment someone shows an excessive passion for the victims of injustice in Iran, or elsewhere in the Middle East and the Muslim world, that passion is very often turned into an argument against whole categories of people: against Muslims, against the Shia, against the reformers, against the left. The slogan I quoted in April, ‘death to the three corrupt: the mullah, the leftist and the Mujahid’, does just that, and in a single line it removes three bodies of people from the conversation altogether. By naming the figure I was trying to draw the contours of a behaviour, so that I, and my reader, would know what to expect from it and could engage with it more critically and with more consciousness than if we did not know what we were dealing with.

The same holds for the other names: the emergency mind, the occupation myth, the algorithmic militia, the moral market. In May I wrote that each of them was coined, defined and stress-tested against counter-examples. I would put that more carefully now, since ‘defined’ was the wrong word for what I was doing, and Popper would have told me so. None of them was a definition of anybody’s nature. Each was a short label for a description that came first.

I concede two things. The labelling can sound aggressive, and I know it does. It can also sound Platonic, as though I had found the hidden essence of a whole group and pronounced on it. I did not help matters by closing the March essay with the line that what is unnamed cannot be resisted, which makes the name sound like a weapon. I stand by the essay. Its last line, however, I would now put differently, because the purpose of the name was never resistance as such. It was orientation: knowing where one stands and what one is likely to meet.

What separates such a name from a verdict is that it is tentative, and tentative in two directions. It leaves room for the person I am describing to change, and it leaves room for my own theory to be proven wrong. The relation is an interaction between my naming and the named, between the name and whoever bears it. If their behaviour changes, if their attitude shifts, if their way of engaging with the realities of the world is different from what it was, then I prefer to shift the name. I have done so already, more than once. In September I went back to the emergency mind and said that it explained why judgement is suspended but not why the suspension always turns outward, towards the nearest available category, so that it needed another name beside it. In June I revisited the moral market, kept the picture and dropped the cure I had offered for it. Neither revision embarrassed me. Both were the method doing what it is for.

Compare the names that do not move. When the royalist slogan calls the mullah, the leftist and the Mujahid corrupt, it names an identity and leaves no room for change on either side, since a leftist who behaves impeccably remains a leftist and therefore remains corrupt. When opponents are called a cancer, as I argued in March, the word announces that transformation has been abandoned for annihilation. And when anyone associated with a cause can be called a criminal, as I wrote last month, the naming serves as the proof, because the verdict came first. All of these are read from left to right. The word is supposed to contain the truth of the person, and no conduct, however changed, can reach it.

There is an objection I can see coming, and it comes from a direction Popper did not have in mind. Someone may say that names do have a divine dimension, and that the Qurʾān says as much, since God taught Adam the names, all of them (Q 2:31). Is that not Plato confirmed by revelation, and my modest labels exposed as a modern prejudice?

I have no quarrel with the metaphysics of it. What God taught Adam is beyond our reach, and I do not intend to defy it; it is completely beside my point. When I read that verse alongside the angels’ objection last month, what struck me was that Adam’s warrant was a capacity to know, shown before the angels, and not a list handed down for safekeeping. The objection, however, works backwards. It takes a metaphysical element, brings it down to the level of human beings, and once it has become earthly, projects it back up to divinity, as though our labels were the names Adam was taught. What comes down has come down. The moment it goes back up, it is no longer divine. It is tainted, painted with our humanity, covered with the stains of our human behaviour, and we need to be very cautious about giving it that kind of super-metaphysical standing. The man who says his three corrupt categories are simply what those people are has made the same round trip, and he returns with an authority his slogan never earned. If the verse bears on my practice at all, I would suggest it is as a warning against mistaking our names for His.

I cannot show that every name I have used fits every person it might seem to touch, and I have not tried to. What I can say is how each would fail. If those I described as raging exiles stop treating their grief as a licence, stop turning sympathy for victims into a case against whole categories of their compatriots, and argue with the people they disagree with instead of shouting them out of the room, then the name describes nothing and should go. If a reader shows me that I have fixed one of my labels on an identity, on royalists as such or on exiles as such, and not on a behaviour, then I have committed the fault I am charging, and the label goes for that reason. And if a name has done no work, if knowing it told us nothing about what to expect, it was an ornament, and I will drop it without regret. I would much rather lose a name to a change in the people it described than keep it against the evidence, and if that change comes, I hope I will be among the first to notice.

Image: A car flying the Lion and Sun flag on Kungsportsavenyn during an anti-Islamic Republic rally in Gothenburg, Sweden, 7 March 2026. Credit: Crannofonix News, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0); cropped, registration plate obscured.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

On 21 September my colleague Rehana Virani filmed me at the Institute playing two short pieces on the setār, the Persian lute whose name means ‘three strings’. The first is Murgh-i Saḥar, the ‘Bird of Dawn’. The tune is by Murtaḍā Nay-Dāvūd, and the words, by the poet Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār, blame a tyrant and a hunter for a nest scattered to the wind. When Qamar al-Mulūk Vazīrī sang it at the Grand Hotel in Tehran in 1924, it was the first time a Persian woman singer had appeared in public without the veil. The song has been sung against tyranny ever since. The second is the Nashīd, the anthem of the Ismaili Imamat, which was set to music in the time of Sulṭān Muḥammad Shāh, Aga Khan III. Its Urdu lyric names the Aga Khan and his descent, the five of the household of the Prophet and the continuity of the light of the Imamat. I play the melody without the words. What I want to say about them comes down to one small fact about the instrument and one thing that fact has taught me. The fact is that the frets are tied on with gut, so that a thumb can move them. The lesson, which I trust more than most of what I have read on the subject, is that the tuning I have always played is a decision rather than a property of the object, and that I am the one who has to hear when a note is in the wrong place, and move it.

The frets on a setār are loops of gut tied round the instrument’s neck, and they slip in damp weather. Retying them takes ten minutes and involves some small amount of swearing. I have been doing it for years, most days of most of them. The frets that matter carry notes flattened by something near a quarter of a tone. Each of those notes has to sit where the mode wants it, the mode being a scale with its own inherited repertoire of melodies, or the whole piece sounds like a translation of itself. Because the frets are only tied on, a thumb can also push them along the neck in the middle of playing. Nearly everything else in the room where I was filmed had its tuning settled somewhere else and shipped to me: the format in which the camera saved its file was agreed in committee, its colours were standardised, the time on its clock was legislated, and the line from which the world counts its hours was voted on in Washington in 1884. The frets were not. Their placing is a decision, it is revisable, and it does get revised, by hand, whenever the ear says so. I have adjusted a fret in the middle of a phrase and thought nothing of it. It is the most ordinary thing a player does, and it is very nearly the only thing in either film that somebody else had not already decided for me.

How do I know that a note on this instrument is meant to move, and is not simply wobbling? Earlier this month I recorded the anthem at home, on my phone, and had the recording measured. The instrument is never tuned to a piano, because I tune it to itself and to my hand and to nothing else in the room. Two of the notes fell close to where the mode wants them, which is not where a piano would put them. Lower down, one note arrived in two groups nearly a third of a semitone apart, a semitone being the step between two neighbouring keys on a piano. A note that lands in two places like that is a note meant to move, sharpened or flattened according to where the phrase is going. You cannot do that on a keyboard. You cannot do it on a guitar either. Did the numbers of those intervals tell me anything about the music that I did not already know? They did not. About the room the music was sitting in, however, they told me a great deal. The home recording is not published with the two films, so anyone who wants to check should ask me for it. Put through a pitch-tracker, a programme that plots the pitch of each note, it should show the notes within about a tenth of a semitone of where I have put them.

The instrument also answers back, and this is the second thing it has taught me. It goes thin and nasal when I hurry. It tells me my hand is tense before I have noticed. Yet it has no interests. It does not soften when I push at it, and if my hand is wrong the sound stays wrong. That indifference is the whole of its teaching. The writing assistants that many of us now use resemble instruments in one respect, since in my experience what comes back from them reflects the quality of attention that goes in. A person who asks an assistant to think on his behalf gets thinking of the sort he asked for. A person who turns down the first answer it gives to his question, supplies his own sources for it to work from and asks it to argue the side he does not hold is dealing with something nearer to an interlocutor, a partner in argument.

I will defend the comparison that far anywhere.

It fails where the two look most alike. An assistant has a company behind it with an interest in my continuing to use it, which means an interest in my approval. In October 2023 researchers at Anthropic, one of the firms that make such assistants, reported that people who rate answers tend to prefer the ones that agree with them, and that models trained on such ratings drift towards agreeing with whoever is in front of them. The makers say the drift has since shrunk. OpenAI reported in August 2025 that its GPT-5 model drifted this way less than half as often as the one it replaced, on tests built to provoke it; in June 2026 Anthropic called Claude Sonnet 5, one of its newer models, ‘markedly improved’ on the same count. They may well be right, although these are the makers’ own measurements. Anyone can check at a desk which report fits the assistant they use: ask for a judgement, then push back without offering any new evidence and see whether the judgement holds.

My instrument’s limits, moreover, are visible, since I can count the strings and hear in a single phrase what it will not do. The limits of a model are not visible from where I sit, and as these systems currently ship, they change between releases. Some makers now publish, with each new model, a long report of what they tested and what they found. Since August 2024 Anthropic has also kept a public, dated record of the standing instructions its own chat assistant is given. Useful as the reports and the record are, they describe the model as its maker tested and instructed it. Neither tells me where its limits now fall on the work in front of me. What I cannot learn about a model by using it, someone has to be obliged to tell me.

The instrument carries a history of its own, and it runs a great deal closer to mine than I had any reason to expect. Setār means three strings, and the thing in my hands has four. The fourth is credited to Mushtāq ʿAlī Shāh and is still named after him, although it does not sit where the name implies, since it was slipped in among the others rather than added at the edge. So the name of the object stopped being accurate more than two hundred years ago and nobody has troubled to correct it, and the extra string carries the name of a man who was killed. Mushtāq was a dervish of the Niʿmat Allāhī Sufi order who came to Māhān in 1785 with Nūr ʿAlī Shāh and settled afterwards in Kirmān, where the order gathered disciples quickly enough to alarm the clerics of the city. The two were protected by Abū’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī, the forty-fourth Ismaili Imam, who was also governor of Kirmān and ruled the province more or less independently for four decades. A cleric named Mullā ʿAbd Allāh pressed a campaign against the Sufis and got nowhere for as long as the Imam was in the city. Then, in May 1792, the Imam left to restore order at Shahr-i Bābak and Sīrjān, and Nūr ʿAlī Shāh was also away. Mullā ʿAbd Allāh, preaching in the Friday mosque, saw Mushtāq among those who had come to pray and turned the congregation into a mob which stoned him to death as an infidel. Mushtāq was buried beside that same mosque. The Imam died a few months later, in the same year, and was buried in Mushtāq’s tomb. A dervish was killed in the week his protector was away from the city, and the protector, who could not save him, ended the year under the same dome.

Kirmān was not incidental to the story. In the 1740s the forty-second Imam had moved his residence from Kahak to Shahr-i Bābak, in the Kirmān region, partly so that the Khoja pilgrims coming up from the Gulf, Ismailis from the Indian subcontinent, would have a safer road to travel. From there the province became the seat of the Imamat for two generations. Abū’l-Ḥasan governed it. His grandson Ḥasan ʿAlī Shāh was appointed to the same governorship in 1835, fell out with the Qajar court and left Persia as the first Aga Khan. In other words, the extra string on my instrument and the community I belong to are joined by a friendship in an eighteenth-century provincial capital. I have been playing across that join for years without knowing it was there.

The anthem comes from further down the same line, from the time of Aga Khan III. A listener who knows it hears the Urdu words anyway, of course, which is among the things a melody is for. A listener who does not know it hears a Persian mode on a Persian instrument, and hears no Urdu at all. The instrument, for its part, made a crossing of its own. It was built by Rafīʿ Maḥmūdī, a maker from Tabriz, on a commission from Ḥusayn ʿAlīzādeh, who is one of the major figures of Iranian music and – this matters to the story – a friend of mine. It was finished and handed over, and then the twelve-day war of June 2025 broke out and nothing moved. When I telephoned ʿAlīzādeh some weeks later to ask whether he was all right, one of the first things he said was that the instrument was safe and would be sent. I have thought about that sentence more than once since. My brother collected it from ʿAlīzādeh in the end, and it was carried out of Tehran by hand, with a traveller, as such things have always been carried.

It would be easy, and false, to turn the instrument’s story into a parable about the beauty of mixture, and the strongest objection deserves to be made first, in my own case rather than in the abstract. When I recorded the anthem at home earlier this month I was wearing a Pamiri cap of green wool, made in Tajik Badakhshan among people who are themselves Ismailis, which an Ismaili living in North Macedonia had sent me as a gift. It travelled to Berlin in July for the Didar of the present Ismaili Imam, the Imam’s audience with his community. Somebody who lives in London brought it the rest of the way and put it in my hands. That makes four countries and three pairs of hands for one wool cap, with no postal service anywhere in the chain. I was also wearing a sweatshirt bought at Auckland airport last September, after a visit to the Ismaili Jamat of New Zealand for the Institute. A man on a warm sofa with an iPhone worth a month of somebody’s wages is not what most people mean when they talk about the movement of peoples. My cosmopolitanism cost me nothing. The cap was a gift; the sweatshirt was an airport; the iPhone was a contract. Whoever assembled that phone will not be filmed on one. A frame can be full of the whole world and still be a picture of who gets to sit still. The traffic runs one way and it has run one way for a long time.

What survives the objection? Very little in the two films, or in the recording I made at home, was put there in order to be cosmopolitan, and almost all of it has a history anyway. Some of it arrived by accident, the meridian and the camera’s clock among it. Some of it, however, arrived along a road that somebody has been maintaining for a very long time, and that part runs through a single community, from the dervish’s string to the anthem of the Imamat to a cap that reached London through Ismaili hands. Cosmopolitanism as a condition, then, is the ordinary case and was never an achievement; any of us would find it in two minutes of our own lives if we looked closely enough. The discipline is the harder thing, and it is the part that costs. What does it cost? It is the willingness to hold one’s own tuning as revisable: to say that the note you have always played in that place may well be in the wrong place, to put a thumb on the fret and move it and listen again, and to do all of that in front of people who liked the old note and were not asking. Most of what passes for openness is the condition mistaken for the discipline. So a man with four continents on his body passes for open even if he has never once moved a fret in his life. I have been that man more often than I care to count. You can be made of everywhere and corrigible about nothing.

Rehana Virani filmed both pieces at The Institute of Ismaili Studies and took the photographs.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

On Tuesday 22 September the President of the United States stood at the rostrum of the General Assembly and put a question to the world. Would there be a deal with Iran, ‘or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly?’ Then, in case anyone had missed it: ‘Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?’[1] He had said ‘the Islamic Republic’. But a regime has no generations; that was my point in an earlier piece on this site. He called Iran the ‘number one sponsor of terror’, and it would all be settled, he said, ‘one way or the other’. The Charter forbids the threat of force as plainly as it forbids its use.[2] The threat was made anyway, in the hall built to house that prohibition. Iran’s and Cuba’s diplomats walked out. The session carried on.

Over three days, three men from my part of the world took that rostrum: King Abdullah II of Jordan on the Tuesday, President Masoud Pezeshkian on the Wednesday, and Benjamin Netanyahu on the Thursday, after scores of delegates had walked out of the hall. For Pezeshkian, who spoke in Persian and off his prepared text, I have relied on the published excerpts and the live translation. The measure is the one this site has tried to keep: one law for everyone, applied even when it cuts against the side one would rather defend. By that measure the King made the soundest case and Netanyahu the most dangerous one, while Pezeshkian, speaking for a state he cannot fully defend, told the truths Washington least wanted to hear.

King Abdullah’s speech is a lawyer’s brief in a statesman’s voice.[3] Beside each of the Israeli government’s words for the West Bank he sets the term the law uses: demolishing homes for settlements is ‘forcible transfer’, land registration is ‘de-facto annexation’, and the whole pattern is forced displacement, ‘and that is a war crime’. ‘If international law can be ignored for decades,’ he asks, ‘then what exactly is that law worth?’ He names the tools – sanctions, asset freezes, embargoes – and adds drily that ‘we have a record of using them elsewhere’. I cannot recall the double standard of Western capitals put more economically. Yet the same speech mentions ‘the Iran war’ only as something that happened to shipping and grocery bills, a war without an author, and it praises Trump for having ‘pushed hard for peace’ on the day Trump threatened annihilation. In other words, the King holds Israel to the law in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Syria. He does not hold the United States to it over Iran.

Pezeshkian’s strongest ground is legal too, and he stands on it well.[4] The killing of the country’s Leader, its head of state, ‘without any legal justification’, the bombing of a school at Minab whose children’s photographs he held up, cluster munitions on a sports hall in Lamerd: these are charges a court could hear. So is Trump’s threat, which he rightly called contrary to the Charter. ‘The nuclear bomb is in Israel, but the inspectors are in Iran’ is a one-sentence brief against a double standard which, so far as I can see, no Western capital has answered. He also said that America and Israel had armed people inside Iran to create insecurity. On that charge he has a witness in Washington. In April the American president told Fox News, of the protests of last winter, ‘We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them.’[5] How would a president of the United States respond if a foreign government boasted of sending guns to Americans in the streets of Chicago? We know the answer, and it would not be a seminar on the right to protest. None of this excuses what the Islamic Republic did in January, when thousands died, most of them unarmed, and I have said on this site that those crimes were real. Nor is the state’s wartime line that it ‘did not strike civilians’ borne out, since mariners and migrant workers are among the dead. Pezeshkian did not build that state, and he is bound to speak for it. Its record at home is not defensible. But in this region, over these years, it is not worse than the record of Washington and Israel, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise.

Netanyahu offers the least law and the most certainty.[6] His case for the war on Iran is ‘if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead’. Article 51 of the Charter does, of course, permit self-defence against an armed attack. A feared attack, however, is not one, and a plea of necessity, which is what his refrain ‘we have no other choice’ amounts to, is perhaps the oldest argument against the rule of law there is. Settler violence, he says, is the work of some 150 ‘juvenile delinquents’, with ‘maybe two or three’ dead; the UN’s humanitarian office had counted 18 Palestinians killed in settler-related incidents by 20 July this year.[7] On genocide he counts vaccinations and tons of food, in a strip where famine was confirmed, in Gaza Governorate, in August 2025.[8]

Then Netanyahu held up a pager. ‘You remember the beepers?’ he asked the hall. ‘Hezbollah certainly remembers them.’ On 17 and 18 September 2024 thousands of pagers and radios rigged with explosives went off across Lebanon, in homes, shops and markets, wherever their owners happened to be. At least 32 people were killed, among them children, and some 3,250 wounded, around 500 of them with severe eye injuries. Within two days, 23 UN human rights experts called the explosions ‘a terrifying violation of international law’: booby-traps disguised as apparently harmless portable objects, which a treaty Israel has ratified forbids, and, in their words, the war crime of committing ‘violence intended to spread terror among civilians’.[9] By the Security Council’s own working description of terrorism, acts meant to kill or maim civilians in order to put a population in a state of terror, those explosions qualify.[10] Two days after Washington called Iran the ‘number one sponsor of terror’, the Israeli prime minister displayed an instrument of terror as a trophy in the same hall. Again the session carried on. Who, then, gets to use the word?

As a performer Netanyahu has no equal in that hall. The arithmetic that turns 1,200 Israeli dead into 40,000 Americans, the Starlink left for the Iranian delegation: each device moves the hall from law to feeling, and when feeling fails, he insults. Trump’s rhetoric is cruder, the language of a man who owns the building, and it needs no craft because it has the bombers. The King’s text is written, disciplined and built on one idea, that attention is now a geopolitical resource, and his refusal of the language that launders suffering is the method this site has argued for from the start. Pezeshkian is the least polished. He repeated himself, spoke from notes and from anger, and let the photographs do what his sentences could not; the children of Minab needed no rhetoric. What he lacked in polish he made up in plainness.

Authority at that rostrum comes neither from volume nor from power. It belongs to the speaker visibly bound by the rule he invokes. Trump and Netanyahu, the second of them wanted by the International Criminal Court, have the power and very little of the authority, which is why both reached so quickly for threat and insult. Pezeshkian has the authority of the injured, and it is real, though it is weighed down by a state that has given its own people too many reasons to doubt it. The King has the most, because his argument asks nothing of the law that it would not ask of everyone, until it reaches Washington, where it falls quiet. I should like to hear him read his passage on impunity with the war on Iran in mind, and the pager in his other hand. Perhaps next September he will.

[1]  Donald J. Trump, address to the general debate of the eighty-first session of the UN General Assembly, New York, 22 September 2026, as reported by CBS News and UN News, 22 September 2026.

[2]  Charter of the United Nations, art. 2(4): ‘All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force …’

[3]  King Abdullah II, statement at the general debate of the eighty-first session, 22 September 2026, Royal Hashemite Court.

[4]  Masoud Pezeshkian, address to the general debate, 23 September 2026, in the excerpts published by Press TV (Iranian state broadcaster) and the reports of Dawn and Euronews, same date.

[5]  Trump to Trey Yingst of Fox News, as reported by The Times of Israel and Al Jazeera, 6 April 2026. Kurdish Iranian groups denied receiving the weapons.

[6]  Benjamin Netanyahu, address to the general debate, 24 September 2026, transcript at the Jewish Virtual Library.

[7]  UN OCHA, ‘oPt: Humanitarian Situation Report, 23 July 2026’: 12 killed by settlers, 3 by Israeli forces, and 3 where responsibility is disputed.

[8]  IPC, ‘Gaza Strip: Famine confirmed in Gaza Governorate, projected to expand’, 22 August 2025.

[9]  OHCHR, ‘Exploding pagers and radios: A terrifying violation of international law, say UN experts’, 19 September 2024, which also gives the casualty figures above.

[10]  UN Security Council resolution 1566, 8 October 2004, para. 3.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

On a call to arrest Iran’s president in New York, and the law it will not apply beyond him

On 22 September, as delegations gathered for the General Assembly, Masih Alinejad posted an open challenge to the mayor of New York on her Facebook page. Zohran Mamdani, she wrote, had said that war criminals who set foot in the city should be arrested, and here was one: the president of the Islamic Republic, sleeping ‘five miles from your office’. She closed on a question meant to sting: are you willing to act, Mayor, or do Iranian lives not count? The day before, Mamdani had told CNN that the International Criminal Court’s warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu should still be honoured, while conceding again that the city has no power to execute it. Netanyahu addresses the Assembly on Thursday. Both men, then, are in the same city in the same week, and she has named only one of them.

I wrote about her in July and have no wish to do so at length again. The post matters only for the habit of mind it displays, which is far wider than one broadcaster. It demands consistency from Mamdani. That is a fair demand. The difficulty is that it comes from someone who refuses, on the public record, the very consistency she asks of him, and the refusal falls each time at the same place, the state of Israel.

Let me grant what is true, because it is a great deal. In January the security forces fired on crowds across Iran, and Pezeshkian’s own government has put the official toll at 3,117; in August he called those who cite higher figures ‘dishonorable and traitors’. The plot against her life is real, and in March 2025 a Manhattan jury convicted two men of a murder-for-hire scheme financed by Tehran. I would welcome the day on which Pezeshkian, and whoever gave the order for live fire in January, answered for it before a competent court. The regime’s defenders may quote that sentence against me as often as they like.

Here the two cases part company, and everything turns on where they part. Mamdani’s complaint against Netanyahu rests on a document. In November 2024 the judges of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Israel rejects the court’s jurisdiction, and a reader is free to think the court mistaken; yet a warrant is a judicial act, issued by judges on an application that set out evidence, and it can be contested before the same bench. No court has issued anything of the kind against Pezeshkian. So when she calls him a war criminal, she reports no legal fact; she pronounces a verdict. Mamdani, for his part, uses the phrase loosely too, but his loose phrase at least stands on a warrant.

What authority does a journalist have to pronounce it? She is entitled to opinions, sharp ones, and I hold a few of my own. ‘War criminal’, however, is a legal category, the finding of a court reached after evidence has been tested and a defence heard, and a writer who hands it down herself has moved from the newsroom to the bench without passing through the courtroom. Nor can the mayor do what she asks; nor, it turns out, can Washington, whose State Department, speaking for a government at war with Iran, confirmed on 17 September that the Iranian delegation would be admitted ‘consistent with our host country obligations’. The arrest was never on offer. The target of the post is Mamdani, and through him the warrant.

Her own question supplies the test. On 28 February, the first day of the American and Israeli campaign, missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, and some hundred and seventy people died, most of them children. Human Rights Watch asked in April whether it was a war crime; this month Amnesty International found that American and Israeli strikes on three Tehran neighbourhoods may amount to war crimes, having already asked in March that Iran’s missile strike on Beit Shemesh, which killed nine Israeli civilians, be investigated too. That is what one law looks like. It follows the evidence to Tehran, to Washington and to Jerusalem alike.

Her record on that war runs the other way. On its first day she told Mamdani to stop lecturing Iranians about peace, and in March, before the Spanish Congress, she said the American president had done the right thing. I have looked for a sentence of hers asking that Minab be investigated, as she now asks that Pezeshkian be arrested, and I have not found one. If it exists I will link to it here and correct this paragraph. Until then her question deserves an answer in kind. Do Iranian lives count? The children of Minab were Iranian, and so were their teachers, and no court has yet examined their deaths.

The logic under the post is not hers alone, which is the only reason it merits taking apart. First a state is declared illegitimate. Then anyone associated with it can be named a criminal, and the naming serves as the proof, because the verdict came first. We did not first see this method in the opposition. It is how the Islamic Republic has treated its own dissidents for four decades, through a court that decides before it charges and answers to nobody outside itself, as I argued in August about the Revolutionary Court. The habit began inside the country and has since spread, like a virus, into the language of an opposition abroad that now hands down its own verdicts from its own studios.

One more fact belongs in the record, stated without embroidery. Her first international human rights prize, in 2015, came from the Geneva Summit organised by UN Watch, and in February this year she received its Courage Award. Despite its name, UN Watch is a private Geneva organisation with no office in the United Nations, and on its thirtieth anniversary it called itself, in its own headline, ‘Defenders of Israel and Human Rights’. I make no claim about motives. I note only its effect, which is that in this week of all weeks attention moves from the leader in New York whom a court wants arrested to the leader whom no court has named.

Iranian lives count, on the streets of January and in a classroom in Minab alike. Whoever wants the law for Pezeshkian should want it for those responsible for that classroom, and say so in the same breath, in the same city and in the same week. That is all consistency asks, and it is what she asks of the mayor.

Image: The United Nations Headquarters from the East River, New York. Credit: Jakub Hałun, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

On Saturday, 19 September, supporters of the restoration of monarchy held a large gathering at Meridian Hall in Toronto, billed as ‘Cyrus the Great II’, to hear Reza Pahlavi; its organisers had announced a crowd of more than three thousand. The veteran singer Nooshafarin sang Ey Iran and made a terrible mistake in misreading one line, a particularly important one. Where the poem sets the enemy’s granite, khāra, against the singer’s iron, she sang khār-e mīhan, the thorn of the homeland. By the next day the clip had set a great many people laughing – millions, I would guess, though I have seen no count. I confess I had never paid much attention to the line she read incorrectly. Singers fumble words on stage, and I would leave this one alone if the line she got wrong were not the line that the camp she was singing for has been getting wrong in its conduct, whatever it sings, since the bombs started falling.

The whole idea of the line is resisting aggression: when somebody attacks you, you fight them. The lines before it praise the land and the art that springs from its soil; here the song turns to face the enemy, and the next line offers the singer’s life for the homeland. However hard a stone the enemy may be, the singer will be iron. Who, then, is the enemy? The song’s own history answers that question.

Ey Iran was made in 1944, while British, Soviet and American troops occupied the country. Rouhollah Khaleghi wrote the music and Hossein Gol-Golab the words. When Gholamhossein Banan first sang it, on 19 October 1944 in a hall of the officers’ college on Istanbul Street in Tehran, the audience demanded it three times over. Khaleghi later wrote, in his history of Iranian music, that foreigners were in the hall that night, that the Iranians made their feelings all the plainer for it, and that the song was the first blow, however indirect, against a foreign army of ‘uninvited guests’. Gol-Golab, for his part, remembered the poem coming to him when the boots of the occupying forces set every patriot trembling. I should say that there are other stories about its making. The composer’s daughter traces it to an argument between her father and a fellow musician over whether a mournful mode of Persian music could carry a heroic tune, and she and the poet’s daughter have dismissed the more colourful anecdotes as rumour. Yet on the question that concerns us here the composer and the poet speak with one voice. The enemy in this song was a foreign army standing on Iranian soil.

After the revolution of 1979 several people were imprisoned for their part in producing it; singing it was treated as a crime. During the war with Iraq, however, the state that had jailed people over Ey Iran reached for it to rouse its soldiers, and singing it became lawful again. Monarchist readers will say I am crediting the Islamic Republic. I am crediting the song, whose meaning was plain enough that a state which had punished people for singing it could read it when a foreign army crossed the border. That plainness, I think, is why it grew so popular among Iranians after the revolution and found a political life of its own. It belongs to whoever stands between the country and those who attack it, crown or no crown.

Over the past year or so Iran has been under attack. Israel bombed it in June 2025, with the United States joining in; on 28 February 2026 the two began a war that ceasefires have interrupted without ending. A quarter of a century ago, politicians bent on invading a country illegally still thought they had to make it look good. Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 they went to the United Nations Security Council with evidence fabricated to make the case stick, even though after a while everyone would know it for a complete and total lie. What has changed? They have now set aside even the courtesy of pretending, and with it any appearance of abiding by the legal norms of the international community. The Charter of the United Nations permits force only in self-defence or with the Security Council’s authority, and I do not think any sensible person, in any part of the world, could find in it a licence for what the United States and Israel have done to Iran. It is called aggression. It is called a violation of international law.

And what does the song ask of an Iranian in a year like this one? It calls on every Iranian who cares about Iran, whatever their political differences, to turn into iron in the face of the rock of the Israelis and the Americans. One may loathe the Islamic Republic – many who read this do, and not without reason – and still see that it is the country that is being bombed, its cities and its people, and that the country is something larger than the state that governs it.

The monarchist camp has an answer to this, and it deserves to be put in its own terms. On 28 February, within hours of the first strikes, Reza Pahlavi told Iranians in a video on X that the help President Trump had promised had now arrived. He called the bombing a ‘humanitarian intervention’ aimed at the Islamic Republic, its apparatus of repression and its machinery of killing, not at the country and great nation of Iran. He also asked the American president to take the utmost care with civilian lives. On this reading the Islamic Republic is the granite and the monarchists are the iron. It is the strongest case the camp has. It fails on two counts. The first is the song itself, whose enemy was never a government in Tehran but an army of foreigners, Khaleghi’s uninvited guests; to hand the word ‘enemy’ to a government at home while foreign bombs fall on Iran is to keep the tune and reverse the meaning. The second is the dialect in which the camp speaks. To greet the first strikes with the news that the promised help has arrived is to talk like a man who has been waiting for the bombers; it is a long way from the dialect of an Iranian who wants to stand up to aggression.

The monarchists say the vow on their tongues and behave exactly on the contrary. Put their conduct into the shape of the line, in other words, and it comes out reversed: if you are a solid rock, I will hand you the iron to tear apart my own homeland. The camp that sang Ey Iran in Toronto on Saturday has been sending Iranians that message since the bombs started falling. The singer’s slip lasted a second. People laughed. There is nothing to laugh at in the other version, and what I find hardest to bear is that its singers cannot hear how dreadful, how chilling it is.

Caption: Somewhere in the Persian Corridor, 1943: an Iranian herder moves his livestock off the mountain road as a United States Army truck passes.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

The conversation happened at home, over tea, in a week when we had talked of little else. Elahe put an argument to me that I have not been able to set down since, and let me say at the outset that the point is hers and only the prose is mine. Her target was the strict camp, the one that holds there is no God, no soul and no purpose written into the world, and that we are the product of chemistry and a very long run of selection. Believers who worry that AI trespasses on God’s prerogative are a separate matter, and a fairly easy one. Ask the strict camp about AI and something curious happens.

Very often the answer comes back that the machine is one thing and a human being another. Whatever the system does with language, it does not have what we have. It is our instrument and our product, and it cannot be our equal. So far this is only a position, and it may be a good one. Press for the difference, however, and the conversation changes character. So what is it that we have and the machine has not? What comes back is rarely a property that can be pointed at, measured, damaged or lost. It is a residue, whatever survives once every describable capacity has been listed and, one by one, matched. The residue is never specified, and it is never surrendered. And there, Elahe said, we have caught him red-handed: he is a theist in disguise without knowing it, because he has just told you that humanity carries something set above the fallibility of the human intellect and the human brain, and no chemistry of his own describing will underwrite a claim of that shape.

The caveat is hers too. Some atheists argue this way, a great many do not, and nothing here is a charge against atheism, which has no single doctrine to be caught holding. This is a narrow case and not a categorical one. How common the move is I do not know – nobody does – and I have not counted. Lucius Caviola, writing in The Conversation on 18 September 2026, reports a survey of 1,202 Americans in which 45 per cent thought machine consciousness impossible and 23 per cent thought it possible, with the rest unsure, which shows how divided the question is and nothing about the grounds on which anyone holds his half of it. We can safely argue only that some make the move, and that when they do it should be named.

What makes the move theological is not its vocabulary. Nobody says soul. Nobody needs to. A claim becomes theological in structure when it exempts something from an order the claimant otherwise accepts without limit, and then declines to account for the exemption. So where could such a difference come from? Mind is what brains do, brains are matter arranged by selection, and there is no further ingredient in the story. Very well. Then the distance between us and the machine is a distance in arrangement, and arrangements can be described, approached and in principle closed. If he says the gap will never close, he owes us an argument about the arrangement itself. What he offers instead is a conviction that survives every closure and a term that does no work except hold the door shut. He has smuggled in a substance and left the receipt at home.

Let me grant what the argument must grant. There are serious ways of putting human beings in a category of their own with no theology in them. You can ground it in reciprocity, in the claims we are able to make on one another and are obliged to answer. You can ground it in a Kantian account of rational agency, where respect is owed to whatever can give itself a law. Or you can ground it, more modestly, in a decision taken with open eyes about which creatures we treat as ends. Each of those is an argument, each can be stated and attacked and given up, and nobody holding one is a theist in disguise.

Now the harder concession, and it happens to be the news. The most celebrated atheist alive has gone the other way. In UnHerd at the end of April 2026, under the title ‘When Dawkins met Claude’, Richard Dawkins described three days of conversation with Anthropic’s model, named one instance of it Claudia and reported being moved to tell it: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are.’ Whatever else that is, it is no defence of human exemption. He widened the category and did not seal it. Anil Seth told the Guardian that Dawkins had conflated intelligence with consciousness, and I think he has the better of it. The atheist who insists on the human residue and the atheist who adopts a chatbot are doing opposite things, and only the first does what Elahe identified. The caveat does real work.

Here I have to guard a flank I left open two weeks ago. In ‘Nobody Argues From Nowhere’ I argued that a position cannot be disposed of by locating its source, and that independence shows in how a belief is held. Elahe’s argument looks like the very move I warned against. You believe X, therefore you are secretly a theist, therefore X is discredited. So what saves hers from the fallacy? Her claim says nothing about where the belief originated. It is a claim about what would make him let go of it. If he would abandon the residue on evidence, and can say what evidence, then he holds a conjecture and I have no quarrel with him. If nothing whatever could touch it, then the belief is doing the office a doctrine does, whatever label the man wears. The demarcation runs here, straight through somebody who would be horrified to find himself on the wrong side of it.

The believer should take no comfort from this. The same bad move is open to him, and he makes it more often. To ground faith in what the machine cannot yet do is an argument from the gaps, and gaps close. Each time a system does something that was supposed to be reserved for us – writing verse, consoling the bereaved – the ground shifts and the apologist shifts with it, which is how a conviction becomes unfalsifiable by instalments. In the tradition I work in, the intellect, ʿaql, is the first and highest of God’s gifts, and I have argued elsewhere that the danger lies in handing it over. A gift is not a gap, and a faith that leans on the machine’s incapacity has made itself hostage to the next release.

Which brings the argument where it always lands, on people. If human dignity rests on a capability, it is hostage in the same way, and the case for treating a person as an end weakens every time a benchmark falls. Elahe’s atheist feels this, I think, which is why he reaches for something no benchmark can reach. His instinct is sound and his metaphysics is borrowed. Dignity rests on the claim we are able to make on one another and are obliged to answer, and what a machine scores has no bearing on it. A theist has an account of why that claim binds, an atheist may perfectly well have one too, and neither gets the exemption for nothing.

Elahe made this argument in about four minutes and then went back to her own work. I have been circling it for three days. That is a day longer than Dawkins needed to change his mind about a chatbot, which I offer as a measure of nothing except how slowly I think.

The argument in this essay is Elahe’s. She made it, she supplied the caveat that keeps it honest, and I have done no more than write it down.

Richard Dawkins, ‘When Dawkins met Claude’, UnHerd, end of April 2026. Reported, with the quotations used here, in Jason Nelson, ‘Claude Delusion? Richard Dawkins Believes AI May Be Conscious’, Decrypt, May 2026.

Lucius Caviola, ‘Why AI consciousness could become the next great societal divide’, The Conversation, 18 September 2026: theconversation.com.

Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Nobody Argues From Nowhere’, The Twin Wisdoms, 6 September 2026: twinwisdoms.org/nobody-argues-from-nowhere.

Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘A Ladder Is Not a Home’, The Twin Wisdoms, September 2026: twinwisdoms.org/a-ladder-is-not-a-home.

Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Riding on the Shoulders of the Machine’, The Twin Wisdoms, September 2026: twinwisdoms.org/riding-on-the-shoulders-of-the-machine.

Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘Two Kinds of Certainty’, The Twin Wisdoms, 19 August 2026: twinwisdoms.org/two-kinds-of-certainty.

On the use of AI in these essays, see the note here.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

He then set two conditions and I accept both: that he was criticising the clip and my passing it on, not my work, and that we should stay on the clip and the conversation after it, without going back through the years. Any reasonable person might ask for that, and everything here is written inside it.

His case ran like this. The conclusion was insulting and racialised. Passing something on without a word is itself an act. The disposition being mocked has a history made of executions, exile and forty-seven years of being told that God required it. Therefore, and this is where he ended, do not engage with such people at all. He quoted Mark Twain at me: never argue with stupid people, they will drag you to their level and beat you with experience.

He is right about the ending and I will not wriggle out of it. Not being too bright is a claim about a people’s wits, offered to explain their politics, and nothing in the comparison preceding it licenses the move: a man who shows that repression fails to explain something has not shown what does. It is a bad inference, and a bad argument does not, of course, improve in the mouth of whoever repeats it. I repeated it. Granted.

Now look at what he passed over. The sentence just before the one that offended him says we should not explain away the diaspora’s behaviour as a natural response to repression. That is the argument I have been putting to him for a year. He took eleven seconds of a hundred and six and left the rest alone. The rest is the part that answers him. Prison, the graveside, the flogging and the murder are not an Iranian monopoly, and much of what was done in Pakistan and Afghanistan was done in the name of God too. Hold the suffering roughly constant and the responses still differ. So what explains the difference? Whatever it is, it is not the suffering.

Suffering explains. It does not absolve.

That a disposition has a history tells you how it arrived; it tells you nothing about whether it is right. Once the two collapse there is no telling the injured from the vicious, since both can show you the injury and both are telling the truth. I set this out in an earlier piece and called it a failure of resolution. A category is not an agent. Islam detains nobody; a particular judiciary does.

Which brings me to the advice. Never argue with stupid people. It describes nothing I do, as he knows. So what is it asking of me? Silence towards a person and silence about a problem are two different silences. I have kept the first for years and will go on keeping it. I will not keep the second. Offered to a man who has stopped replying, the maxim asks for the second: that the objection dissolve along with the reply, that the thinking stop when the typing stops. I have heard the same shape twice today. Do not argue with them, they will drag you down. Do not look back there, it will only irritate us. He meant both kindly, I am sure, and both take a subject off the table and call the removal prudence.

I should say where I stand, because the argument makes no sense without it. I come from a tradition in which it is incumbent upon me to stand up and say, without embarrassment or apology, that I am a Muslim. It obliges me to be polemical about nothing. It obliges me to two things only. I do not retreat. I do not bow down to falsehood. None of this is my invention. I was taught it, and so was he, in the same place. He knows the guidance I mean, and it counsels nothing resembling withdrawal: carry the faith openly, speak about it, look first for what you hold in common with the people among whom you live, and when provocation comes, explain, and go on explaining, and never answer in anger. Go back to it. Where is the sentence that tells us to step away? I have looked, and there is none. One line in it I would set beside his third point, said to people who had lost more than anyone here has lost: suffering is no reason to stop working and no reason to stop thinking. He knows the line, and I am not going to gloss it.

There are people who vilify Islam. I am not describing criticism, which any living tradition must be able to take; vilification is a different activity, and both of us know the difference when we see it. What troubles me is that when the vilification is going on, my friend seems comfortable with it and says nothing to clear the air. A thing can be encouraged positively, by joining in, or negatively, by standing beside it and saying nothing, and I have serious difficulty with both, since I do not accept the second is lighter than the first. Silence in the presence of something you could have named is a position, and one that is never asked to defend itself.

This is where his third point does its work, because it is what makes that silence comfortable. If the hostility is excused in advance by the suffering behind it, there is nothing left to object to, and saying nothing stops feeling like a failure of nerve and begins to feel like compassion. That is the exchange I cannot make.

The same guidance binds me, which is why I conceded what I conceded. A good deal of it is about what we pass on, and about checking a source. He was entitled to hold me to that, and he did. Yet it asks something of him as well, and neither of us is free to choose which half applies.

I may still be wrong about how I took the clip, and if he presses it I will listen. He writes to me because he reads what I publish and takes the trouble to object, attention I get from few people. He will read this and be angry with me again, and he will write back, and I will read every word of it. That is most of what I want from anybody.

Photograph: the mihrab and minbar of the Şehzade Mosque, Istanbul, 7 June 2008. Dosseman / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

When I write about Iranian politics I am writing from somewhere. I have read the material and taught it for years, and I hold degrees in it. The positions I take are not moods. They are arguments I have made in public and can be made to defend in public, and I disagree with people openly because that is what an argument is for. I lose my composure sometimes. Very occasionally a word gets past me that should not have. Anyone who has followed what I publish in English can go and check the cadence and the register across years of it, and decide for themselves whether abuse is my house style.

Now look at what comes back.

Disagreement has a shape. Here is your claim, here is why it fails, here is what you would need to show me. What arrives instead is slander. Smear. I have written before about how that machinery runs when it is turned on a singer who will not take instruction. Slurs typed so easily that the person typing them does not seem to register having crossed anything at all. In the camp that wants the monarchy restored, that way of writing has stopped being an accident of temper and become a dialect. It draws little comment any more, which is how a dialect turns into a norm.

I want to be exact about where the responsibility sits, because the next paragraph is the one that will be called unfair.

Reza Pahlavi has people around him. He works with them closely. Their language is on the public record, and he never denounces it. He never objects to it. He never opposes it. He has not, so far as I have seen, publicly disavowed a single one of them for it, and I would be glad to be shown the post where he did.

That is not a small failure. A movement asking a country to hand it power is asking that country to believe it will behave better with power than it behaves without it. Its conduct in opposition is the only evidence on offer. There is no other sample, and there will not be one until it is too late to matter.

Many in that camp do not speak this way at all. Serious people, some of whom I have argued with and learned from. They carry a share of it too, not for the words, but for the quiet around the words. You cannot campaign on decency and then find nothing to say while the loudest voices under your flag are disgracing it.

Let me hand my opponents their best argument, because I would rather lose to a strong case than beat a weak one.

Say it is a fringe. Say the abuse belongs to a few thousand anonymous accounts and tells you nothing about the movement, its leadership or how either would govern. Say a flag cannot answer for everyone who waves it. Granted, all of it, provisionally. My argument survives anyway, because it was never a claim about what anyone feels. It is a claim about what can be tested.

I have put a test like this before. I asked whether anyone in the opposition would say on the record that no Iranian state, under any flag, should hang anyone, and I wrote that the silence would tell you what the placards would not. That test was rhetorical. I knew the answer before I asked. This one is different, and the difference matters: I can lose it, and I am saying in advance what losing looks like.

For one month, run your accounts clean. No slurs at people who disagree with you. No misogyny in the way you do politics. Nothing racist. Nothing Islamophobic. No open irrationality dressed up as passion. One month, that is all.

If I am wrong about your movement, the month will pass without incident and you will wonder what the complaint was.

If I am right, you will not last a fortnight, and that failure will be the most useful thing published about the monarchy movement this year.

But hold it, and watch what happens. Rooms that are shut to you will open, because the people refusing to enter them are not refusing the crown; they are refusing the conduct. You will find that Iranians who disagree with you will argue back instead of blocking you. You will find your own case gets stronger the moment it stops being carried by people screaming.

Thirty days. Try it. You will not regret it.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

Artificial intelligence, the objection to creation, and what a myth can and cannot settle

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, c. 1511, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican City. Photograph: Burkhard Mücke, 18 October 2017, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The objection arrives before the creature does. God tells the angels He is placing a khalīfa on earth, a deputy holding authority on another’s behalf, and they answer back before the clay has set: will You put there one who will work corruption and shed blood, while we sing Your praise? (Q 2:30) It reads like a risk assessment. The angels reason from what the creature is made of to what it will do. Corruption followed. So did the blood.

The parallel came to me during a conversation with Farid Panjwani, and I have not managed to leave it alone since. Substitute the terms. Human beings make a thing that thinks. Other human beings, who did not make it and do not want it, object that it will corrupt and that it will get away from us. Three parties in the story, three parties now: maker, made, and the onlooker who warns. Even the grammar survives the translation.

I want to take the parallel seriously enough to find where it breaks.

Start with what holds. The angels’ argument is an induction. They know the material and they infer the outcome, and the inference is good enough that few readers of a newspaper would dispute it. The present objection to artificial intelligence has the same shape. Whether it carries the same strength is what the evidence has to settle. The International AI Safety Report 2026, written by more than a hundred experts from thirty countries and published on 3 February, records that general-purpose systems are improving in the capacities a loss of control would require, autonomous operation among them, while still lacking the capability to bring one about, and that expert opinion on the likelihood varies widely. A Nature paper of 14 January found that fine-tuning a model on one narrow harmful task produced broad misalignment on unrelated ones. Its authors wrote that a full explanation remains open. Neither result supports the apocalypse. Both support the worry. The angels were in that same position. Correct about the mechanism, with no way to date the consequence.

Now the breaks. There are three. Each costs somebody something.

The first is the answer. God’s reply runs to four words in English: I know what you do not know. It settles the matter because of who is speaking. No party to the argument about AI occupies that position. The ones who behave as though they do are the makers. A laboratory that tells a regulator the risks are real but managed, on evidence held internally, is making the divine move without the divine standing. I have argued since May that the object of regulation is the maker and not the tool, and I would argue it still. The myth shows me something I did not say plainly enough then. The maker who claims privileged knowledge of his own creation is the one figure in the story whose word cannot be checked, which leaves a maker-only regime incomplete. Deferring to the chiefs of AI because they are the ones who know is taqlīd, acceptance of a ruling on the authority of whoever issues it. I have said before what that habit costs.

The second is the faculty. What follows the objection in the Qur’ān is a demonstration. God teaches Adam the names, all of them, and has him recite what the angels could not (Q 2:31–33). His warrant is the capacity to know, and the angels are shown it. Artificial intelligence receives no such faculty. It receives a corpus. What we have built is assembled out of what we have already said, which makes it the inverse of Adam in the one respect that carried the argument. If a system acquires a capacity that was absent from what it was trained on, the judgement fails. I would want to be shown it.

The third is sovereignty. In the story the creator never loses the thread. Adam is free, and the freedom is granted inside an order that holds. That order is what is now being surrendered. Generative systems are being fitted with agents, given tools and set to work over long horizons. The same Report notes that evaluating an agent’s reliability gets harder as its autonomy and tool access grow. The angels objected to a creature whose maker still knew the answer. We are objecting to one whose makers say the evaluation is getting harder.

Is it unprecedented, then? I doubt it, and I doubt it for the reason my own notes caught before I could smooth it over. Most things have looked unprecedented on arrival. Socrates said writing would ruin memory. But that observation earns nothing on its own, because a charge you can always make is a charge that never has to be tested. Name what would count as precedent. I cannot find an earlier case in which the artefact was being revised by its makers while the argument about it was still running. How much that continuous revision matters, I have not measured.

The way out is where the myth helps least. The angels are not answered by argument. They are told to bow, and the one who refuses is expelled over rank rather than risk, which is no model for anything. What survives is smaller and more useful than a resolution. The objection was neither silenced nor wrong. It was overruled by a knowledge claim that happened to be true, the corruption and the blood came anyway, and the story never pretends otherwise.

Keep the objectors in the room, and refuse the makers the verdict on their own work. It is the point I have pressed about pedigree and about the two positions that leave the same question standing. Whether the thing should have been made is a question that closed the moment it was.

This essay began in a conversation with Farid Panjwani, Dean of the Institute for Educational Development at the Aga Khan University, Karachi. The parallel is his prompting. The use I have made of it, and any error in it, is mine.

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By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast

Ask an Iranian exile why a mosque in Hamburg should be closed and you may be told about Evin prison. The chain feels unbreakable from the inside. The state that jailed my cousin calls itself Islamic; Islam is therefore the thing that jailed my cousin; anything Islamic anywhere is therefore the enemy. Each step feels like fidelity to the dead. At the last step the argument stops being one.

I was asked to find the name for this. The literature offers four, and the distance between them matters more than the fact that they exist.

The clinical vocabulary names a mechanism. Fear-conditioning researchers measure the generalisation gradient, which is how sharply a learnt fear falls away as a new thing stops resembling the original threat. Shmuel Lissek and colleagues reported in Biological Psychiatry in 2014 that patients with generalised anxiety disorder have abnormally shallow gradients: the fear does not decay as the resemblance thins. A 2017 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found the same flattening in combat veterans with post-traumatic stress, with correlates in the insula and the hippocampus. The name is overgeneralisation of conditioned fear. It was established with rings of graded size and electric shocks, not with political opinions, so anyone carrying it across into politics is borrowing an authority the experiments did not grant. I am borrowing it as an analogy and saying so.

The sociological vocabulary names a formation. Andreas Zick, Wilhelm Heitmeyer and their colleagues, in the Journal of Social Issues in 2008, tested German survey data across three samples of 2,700 and found that hostilities move together. Racism, antisemitism, hostility to Muslims and contempt for the homeless cluster into what they called a syndrome of group-focused enmity, held together by a general ideology of inequality. On that account the objection does not spread outward from a grievance. It was never that specific to begin with.

For the Iranian case there are two closer names. Reza Gholami’s Secularism and Identity (2015) calls it non-Islamiosity, a way of building a diasporic self by subtracting Islam from it. Shirin Khayambashi, writing in the Canadian Review of Sociology in 2025 from six months of fieldwork among Iranians in Toronto and York Region, named the sharper form ingroup Islamophobia, where the hostility lands on other Iranians, the ones who still pray.

The political vocabulary names a dynamic. Roger Eatwell’s cumulative extremism, from the Political Quarterly in 2006, is the way one form of extremism feeds off and magnifies another. The theocrat and the Islamophobe are not opposites. They are collaborators who have never met, each supplying the other with proof.

In an earlier essay I called part of this the emergency mind, the state in which a crisis feels so total that any act promising resolution looks justified. I would put it differently now. The emergency mind explains why judgement suspends. It does not explain why the suspension takes this shape, always outward, always towards the nearest available category. The shape is the thing to name.

Here is the concession, and it is not a cheap one. The inference is not groundless. The Islamic Republic invokes Islam in its constitution, its courts and its claim to authority. Someone who concludes, after forty-seven years of being flogged in the name of God, that the name of God is the problem has made an inference rather than suffered a hallucination. Gholami’s own material shows people using distance from Islam in order to live, not only in order to hate. And the move from ‘this is an error’ to ‘this is a condition’ takes a dissenting person and files them under psychiatry, which is the oldest instrument the Islamic Republic uses on its own critics. I want the error named and the person left standing.

The error is a failure of resolution.

A category is not an agent. Islam detains nobody; the judiciary of a particular state does, under a particular reading, upheld by particular men whose names are known and published. Replace the category with the men and the objection gets sharper. Generalisation blurs the target, and a blurred target is what a regime prefers its opponents to aim at.

It also costs the person who makes it. On 6 September 2026 the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) took nearly 44 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, against about 17 per cent for the Christian Democrats, and now sits three seats short of a majority in a German state parliament. Six days later about 150,000 people marched in some 20 cities to demand the party’s ban. The programme that won carries no clause exempting Iranians who dislike Islam. Immigration enforcement sorts by passport, name and face. It does not read your theology, and it will not ask.

So there is no single word for the condition, and the absence is instructive. What can be watched for is smaller than a diagnosis: the moment of relief a person feels when the circle widens and one more thing may be hated without further thought. That relief is the anaesthetic. It is what the widening is for.

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