The Twin Wisdoms

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast The funeral has ended, the firing has resumed, and the next fortnight will decide whether the June understanding can be rebuilt. It can, and it probably will be. Ayatollah Khamenei was buried in Mashhad today , at the close of a six-day procession through Tehran, Qom, Najaf and Karbala that his state mounted, at great cost, as a demo...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast The Lion and Sun has been systematically claimed by Iran’s monarchist restoration movement, which deploys it as a pre-Islamic or anti-Islamic identity marker — a visual shorthand for the proposition that authentic Iranian identity is secular and fundamentally in tension with Shi’i Islam. This is not an interpretation of h...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast The word arrives early and does its work quickly. In almost every account of the latest exchange of fire between Iran and Israel, “proxy” appears within the first breath — Iran’s proxy forces, its proxy militias, its proxy war waged through others while its own people go neglected. The word is meant to settle the matter. A state that...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast   Pluralism, universalism, and the difference that both relativism and perennialism would erase When I argued recently that pluralism is not relativism, a reader replied with a smile: “Unless you bring in universalism through the back door.” The objection is sharp, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one. I...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Sada Cumber is right that Magnifica Humanitas is “a strategic signal,” and right again that “societies cannot be secured by capability alone.” Where I want to press him is on the post-fact ground he names so well. He warns that AI-generated disinformation “attacks the social fabric,” that it &#8220...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Revisiting the Moral Market Where I Started In March, before the ceasefire, I argued that the gap between Iranians inside the country and those abroad isn’t really a political disagreement. It’s a clash of two lives that don’t translate into each other. What I called the “moral market” was the result: a place where pain becomes a kin...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On Reza Pahlavi’s Odesa narrative and the laundering of a war’s human cost In Odesa last week — at a forum convened on the principle that bombing a nation’s grid, ports and apartment blocks is a crime against that nation — Reza Pahlavi reportedly told his hosts that the Iranian people celebrated when “the regime’s infrastructure” was...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast  Manoto, Foreign Money, and the Constituency That Was Never There When Manoto television ceased satellite broadcasting on 31 January 2024, the event was widely read as a financial failure, and the channel’s subsequent history did little to dislodge that reading. A diminished online operation followed; then, in February 2026, e...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast  On the Equation That Turns a Nation Into Acceptable Rubble Do we distinguish between Iran and the Islamic Republic? Are they one and the same? It sounds like a pedant’s quarrel, a hotspot for social media. It is not. And you may be surprised which side of it you find yourself on. Begin with the historical fact, because it set...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast  A paradox haunts contemporary intellectual life, one that demands we examine ourselves with uncomfortable honesty. Here stands a senior scholar in the humanities—trained in textual analysis, ethics, even mysticism—whose political views are so flawed, so deeply troubling, that we find ourselves asking: where did the critical thinkin...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast SAVAK, State Torture, and the Dangerous Nostalgia of Forgetting In cities across the West—Los Angeles, London, Munich, Regensburg—a strange phenomenon has taken root. At demonstrations ostensibly calling for a free Iran, young men and women don SAVAK T-shirts, wave the emblem of the Shah’s secret police, and chant slogans glori...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast A Critique of the Iran Ledger’s “ Sanctions as Market Control ” I have spent the better part of a decade building an analytical framework that demands one thing above all else: that claims earn their keep. Every concept I deploy—the emergency mind, the occupation myth, the algorithmic militia—is coined, defined, stress-tested against...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast I was there—present online—when Dr. Fatemeh Sadeghi and Hossein Hamdieh, speaking from London and Tehran respectively during Iran’s internet blackout, began discussing something that has haunted me for months. An interrogator assigned to question young protesters arrested during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising had confessed h...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast In a recent ninety-minute conversation with Sobhan Yahyaei for the Farsi Panorama podcast — the inaugural episode of a season titled Life in a Time of War — I tried to think aloud about the trilateral confrontation involving Iran, the United States and Israel, the predicament of the Iranian diaspora, and the cultural sediment from wh...

The following is the full text of my talk delivered at the 13th Annual Iftar at Alyth Synagogue in North London on 8th March. It was offered in the moments before Jewish, Christian, and Muslim guests broke bread together at Iftar — an occasion made particularly poignant by a broader climate in which conflict had created an atmosphere of suspicion and unease. I endeavoured to speak candidly, while...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, MS arabe 5847, folio 1v. Illuminator: Yaḥyā ibn Maḥmūd al-Wāsiṭī. Baghdad, 634 AH / 1237 CE. On a Pluralist, Non-Eurocentric Modernity A Sentence That Carries the Argument There is one sentence that has come to carry the whole of my argument about modernity, and I want to...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Image: Delegates during the Islamabad talks on the US–Iran track, April 2026. Credit: Reuters.  A Dialogue with Ambassador Sada Cumber Ambassador Sada Cumber’s recent essay for the National Security Institute, “ Dialogue to Truce: Pakistan’s Role in Reshaping the Regional Structure ,” reads, at its best, as a quiet warning. He argues...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast The placard is simple, humane, and emotionally irresistible: “Be their voice.” At first glance, who could object? If people are censored, jailed, beaten, or killed, should they not be heard? Of course they should. But politics begins precisely where sentiment ends. The real question is not whether Iranians should be heard. The real q...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast A pro-monarchy demonstrator in Glasgow holds a placard that includes a reference to SAVAK. The event, on February 28, 2026, was a rally celebrating US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Over the past year, the global perception of Iranians has shifted in a direction that neither passport indices nor the slogan-politics of a loud exilic faction...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Hazrati Alley in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, April 2011—captured just before the most stringent international sanctions were imposed. The image shows the bustling daily commerce and the civilian economic fabric whose protection is at the heart of the argument that follows. On Sanctions, the Temptation of a War Economy, and the Quiet...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Photo: Getty Images / CNN How Curated Certainty Replaces Political Consciousness in the Digital Diaspora A message arrived recently on social media—the kind that has become ordinary in certain corners of the Iranian diaspora. It was a response to someone questioning an unverified claim about alleged government infiltration. The reply...

By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Source: Originally published in The Ismaili UK , July 2015. | View at The Institute of Ismaili Studies Author: Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Interim Head of the Constituency Studies Unit and Associate Professor at The Institute of Ismaili Studies. Abstract: This article explores the concept of authority without territory as embodied by the Isma...

By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Source: Illinois Geographer , Vol. 65 (Fall/Spring 2023, No. 1-2) Abstract: This article examines the history, geographical distribution, and doctrinal evolution of the Nizārī Ismāʿīlī community, tracing their succession through Ismāʿīl ibn Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and the establishment of the Fatimid Caliphate. The study explores key historical peri...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Credit: Haidar Mohammed Ali / Anadolu via Reuters Connect [Note: The Reuters Connect page itself says the asset is provided by Anadolu Agency and that Reuters Connect “has not verified or endorsed the material.”] One of the lazier slogans in recent Iranian political discourse is the claim that Iran has been “occupied” because the Isl...

Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Source: PBS NewsHour / Reuters An Assessment of Strategic Contradictions and Diplomatic Opportunities The Dual-Role Paradox Pakistan’s deployment of 13,000 troops and fighter jets to Saudi Arabia on April 11, 2026—executed under the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA) signed in September 2025—has thrust Islamabad into the centr...