A Name to Work With
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… — read more
A Thumb on the Fret
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… — read more
Three Days at the Rostrum
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… — read more
Moderation by Majority
Who decides which Shiʿis are moderate? This week I finished a paper on Asadullāh Mubashshirī’s preface to the Persian translation of Henry Corbin’s history of Islamic philosophy. In it I cited Rasūl Jaʿfariyān with gratitude, as the historian who had mapped the reformers of twentieth-century Iran who wanted an Islam purified of superstition. I closed… — read more
A Verdict Without a Court
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… — read more
If You Are a Solid Rock
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… — read more
The Atheist’s Soul
Podcast — read more
Calm Down
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, and… — read more
Thirty Days
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… — read more
The Angels Were Right
PodcastArtificial 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,… — read more
The Widening Circle
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… — read more
A Ladder Is Not a Home
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.… — read more
