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 page...

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...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Pezeshkian, Netanyahu and King Abdullah answering Washington at the eighty-first General Assembly, held to a single measure 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,...

Podcast 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...

Podcast 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 lin...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast This morning I sent a friend a short video. No note, no comment, nothing. In it Navīd Wahrāmān , a Pakistani writer, asks whether the Iranian diaspora’s hatred of Islam is justified. Pakistan had Zia-ul-Haq making prayer compulsory in government offices, and Afghanistan has a Taliban he calls less tolerant than the Islamic Republic,...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast  We use the same platforms. Beyond that we have almost nothing in common, and the difference is not one of opinion. When I write about Iranian politics I am writing from somewhere. I have read the material and taught it for years, and I hold degrees in it. The positions I take are not moods. They are arguments I have made in public...

Podcast 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 plac...

Podcast 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...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On the declaration of qiyāma at Alamūt, the doctors who stopped seeing, and the one gift we cannot afford to hand over Across four endoscopy centres, a piece of software was switched on. It watched the live feed of a colonoscopy and drew a box around anything that looked like a polyp. It worked. Then the researchers looked at what ha...

Podcast On the two ways an institution abuses its own rules, and why following the process is not the same as being right. Nobody installs a handrail before somebody falls. That is the first thing to understand about an institution’s rules. Policies, procedures, declarations of interest: none of it was drafted by anyone with a […]

Podcast On what Imam Ali asked of a governor, the rules an institution writes and then steps around, and why a charitable intention repairs nothing. An institution that will not keep the rules it wrote for itself is not being flexible. It is taking itself apart, quietly, with its own hands, and it will not […]

Podcast On Assal Rad’s Don’t Say Palestine, the memo that told reporters which words to avoid, and the test the book does not set for itself On 11 November 2023, on the march from Hyde Park to the American embassy, a family stood in the road holding a sheet of card. Someone had written on […]

Podcast AI, ego, and the question the warnings skip For some months I have been turning over a hope. People routinely outgunned before bureaucratic systems – who lose for want of the right form of words rather than the right case – might climb onto the shoulders of these machines and see over the wall. […]

Podcast On the Iranians cheering Europe’s far right, the word sitting in its manifesto, and the people that word names Iranians demonstrating outside the Alte Oper, Frankfurt, 17 February 2024. One placard reads ‘Die AfD ist keine Alternative für Deutschland – AFD Wählen ist so 1933’; the Persian placards call for the end of the […]

Podcast The charge turns up again and again: a scholar is not independent, because his faith enters his work. Behind it sits an old and appealing idea, that a mind stripped of its beliefs would simply see the truth laid bare. Karl Popper called this the doctrine of manifest truth: the notion that truth, once […]

Podcast On the mast at Kuhestak, the map that put Tehran under a blast radius, and the test Iran International will not take A telecommunications mast stood near the shoreline at Kuhestak, in Sirik county, on the Hormozgan coast. On the evening of 1 September it was struck and came down across the road. A […]

Podcast On the two machines that manufacture Iran, the eighteen years that keep me from checking, and what Yaser Mirdamadi found when he went back. Fourth in the Narrating Iran series, drawn from Yaser Mirdamadi’s account of his return and argued by Daryoush Mohammad Poor I write about Iran from a position that is not […]

Podcast On the difference between criticism and abuse, and what the Iranian diaspora has done with it It sounds like an obvious thing to say, and it is not. Telling criticism apart from cynicism takes training. It takes education. It takes a degree of self-discipline that nobody is born with and few of us are […]

Podcast On the hundred names compiled in Tehran, the accusation waiting at the other end of the flight, and the guarantee neither side is offering 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 […]

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.

Podcast A Verse, and a Warning Nizami Ganjavi wrote, in the Makhzan al-Asrar eight centuries ago, that when the mirror has shown your reflection true, you should break yourself, for breaking the mirror is the mistake.[1] Dariush Eghbali opened the note accompanying his new song with that couplet, then did more or less what it […]

Podcast Two positions on artificial intelligence, and the question both leave standing In Brief The alarm has hold of something the reassurance waves away. Artificial intelligence is an invention rather than a discovery, and the opacity is real. That is a reason to bind the makers, and it is no evidence that nobody is in […]

Podcast On Radio Farda’s Pārāgrāf-i Avval, the Madani–Bayat correspondence, and the part of Iran that no one has counted Radio Farda’s programme Pārāgrāf-i Avval, presented by Muhammad Zarghami, put the correspondence between Saeed Madani and Asef Bayat to Jalal Idjadi and to me. The exchange has run in Naqd-i Iqtiṣād-i Siyāsī since Urdībihisht 1403, begun […]