In an Iranian digital landscape increasingly fractured by partisan vitriol, vulgarity, and the fog of fake news, this space is a commitment to restrained, academic rigor and clear-headed policy analysis. It is more than a blog; it is a response to a crisis of critical thinking. It is time to heed the call of reason. The Twin Wisdoms (twinwisdoms.org) is the English-language home for Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor’s essays and critical observations. Its sister site, Malakut (malakut.org), is his long-established Farsi-language platform, where he has published commentary and analysis for a Persian-speaking audience for many years. Both sites are authored by Dr Mohammad Poor and reflect his commitment to thoughtful, rigorous engagement with the political, intellectual, and spiritual questions of our time. The views expressed are those of the author in a personal capacity and do not represent any affiliated institution.
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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 remaining true to my humanist sensibilities.
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 put it down at the outset rather than build up to it. Our future is not their past. Our future is the intelligent use of our past and of anybody else’s past, the responsible and critical creation and invention in the present, and the intelligent prediction of what is to come. That is the formula. Everything else in this essay is commentary on it.
I write the sentence in this compressed form on purpose, because the temptation in our public conversations is to surrender to a much shorter slogan: that to be modern is to follow Europe. The slogan is so well established that even those who reject it tend to argue against it on its own terms. They concede the geography of modernity even as they protest its content. They assume that someone has reached the destination and that the rest of us are still on the road, and they then quarrel about how quickly to walk. The first task of any honest reflection on a non-Eurocentric modernity is to refuse this picture entirely.
There is no destination. There never was. What is called modernity in the European story is itself a particular history, with its own losses, its own injustices, and its own unresolved questions. To take it as the universal template is not to honour it; it is to flatten it. The intelligent thing is neither to imitate that history nor to pretend it never happened. The intelligent thing is to read it carefully, to learn what can be learned from it, to refuse what should be refused, and to set it alongside our own history with the same critical attention.
How the Linear Story Was Imposed
To understand why the slogan has had such a grip on us, we need to recall how it entered our intellectual life. It did not arrive as a gentle suggestion. It arrived together with the military, financial, industrial and scientific might of European colonial expansion. The encounter, for most Muslim societies and for much of the wider world, took place under conditions of subjugation. The first impressions were of overwhelming material superiority. Cities were bombarded; economies were rearranged; institutions were dismantled or made subordinate; languages were displaced from the offices of state. People who had thought of themselves as inheritors of a great civilisation found themselves addressed as backward children who needed to be brought up.
In that situation, the natural human response was a wound to dignity, and the natural response to such a wound is to want to prove oneself. The reformist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew out of this. Its founders were brilliant and serious people. They took the measure of the imbalance and tried to do something about it. They wanted to show their interlocutors, and themselves, that they too could think, that they too could organise, that they too could legislate, that they too could be modern.
But the manner in which they tried to demonstrate this had a hidden cost. It accepted, as the very ground of the demonstration, the framework that the conqueror had set. The questions to be answered, the criteria of progress, the markers of seriousness, the timeline along which one’s society was to be assessed: all of these were borrowed from the very civilisation whose dominance was the original wound. The result was a curious kind of mirror politics, in which the ambition was to do, in the twentieth or twenty-first century, what Europe had done in the eighteenth or nineteenth. Our future was to become their past. The arrow of history pointed in only one direction, and our task was to walk it as quickly as we could.
Why the Linear Story Misleads
The first problem with this picture is that it is empirically wrong. There is no single line called modernity along which all societies are travelling at different speeds. There are, instead, many entangled processes, technological, economic, political, religious, aesthetic, that have unfolded differently in different places and that continue to unfold. To call only the European version of these processes modern is to mistake one example for the genus. It is, ironically, a provincial mistake disguised as a universal one.
The second problem is that the picture is ethically corrosive. If we accept that our future is their past, we accept by the same gesture that we are behind, that our traditions are obstacles, that our languages are quaint, that our forms of authority are at best transitional, and that the only respectable destination is the one already mapped by someone else. This is not a posture compatible with self-respect, and it is certainly not a posture from which one can contribute anything new to the world. It is a posture of permanent apology.
The third problem is intellectual. The linear story disables the very faculty by which a civilisation renews itself, namely the patient, critical reading of its own resources. If those resources are by definition pre-modern, there is nothing to read; one’s only work is to clear them away. Whole generations have been raised on this assumption, and the result has been a strange amnesia in which our libraries are full of books that no one has been trained to engage.
A Different Picture
Against this picture, I want to set another. To be modern, in the sense that I find defensible, is not to occupy a place on a line. It is to inhabit one’s time intelligently. That has three components, and the order in which I name them matters.
The first is the intelligent use of the past, both our own and anyone else’s. Use is the operative word. We are not asked to worship the past, nor to repeat it, nor to put it on a museum shelf and bow before it. We are asked to use it, which means to read it for what it can teach us about the questions we are facing now. Some of what we will find will still be alive and applicable; some will be dead and best laid to rest; some will be alive but only on condition that we revise it for new circumstances. Discrimination of this kind is itself a high intellectual virtue, and it is the opposite of nostalgia. It also extends across borders. The intelligent use of the past does not stop at the boundary of one’s own civilisation. It includes the European past, the Indian past, the Chinese past, the African past, the indigenous pasts of the Americas. To insist that we draw on our own history is not to refuse other histories. It is, on the contrary, to acquire the standing from which one can engage other histories without flinching.
The second component is responsible and critical creation in the present. This is the moment that the linear story most reliably erases, because it cannot imagine that anything new could come from outside the path it has already mapped. But invention does not require permission. The Persian poets did not ask permission to invent the ghazal; the Arab grammarians did not ask permission to invent the science of naḥw; the Iranian filmmakers of the last half-century did not ask permission to make the cinema they have made. Where these inventions have flourished, they have done so by drawing on local resources while engaging the wider world, and by holding themselves to a high standard of craft. There is no reason we cannot do the same now in law, in education, in finance, in architecture, in technology. The question is not whether we are allowed to create; it is whether we are willing to do the work.
The third component is the intelligent anticipation of the future. By this I do not mean futurology, which is mostly entertainment. I mean the disciplined imagination that reads present tendencies and asks where they are pointing, what they will demand of us, and what we ought to be preparing for. Climate disruption, demographic change, the next revolution in computation, the reorganisation of work, the migration of authority away from the territorial state: these are not science fiction. They are the conditions in which the next generation will live. To be modern in any non-trivial sense is to be already thinking about them, and to be thinking about them with our own concepts and our own commitments rather than borrowing the worry list of someone else’s commentariat.
Pluralism Without Relativism
Notice what happens when these three components are taken together. The picture they draw is not of a single arrow but of many traditions, each engaged in its own version of intelligent use, critical creation and disciplined anticipation. This is what writers on the subject have come to call multiple modernities, and it is the only honest description of the world we actually inhabit. It is also the only description that allows us to honour both the unity of human experience and the irreducibility of its plural expressions.
It is important not to confuse this pluralism with relativism. To say that there are several modernities is not to say that anything goes, or that all arrangements are equally good, or that judgement has been suspended. It is to say that the standards by which we evaluate human flourishing, justice, knowledge, beauty, are themselves not the monopoly of any one civilisation, and that any serious conversation about them has to be conducted with humility on every side. Some inventions of the European modern period are durable contributions to the human inheritance and should be received as such. Some are local solutions whose universalisation has done more harm than good. The task is to tell the difference, and the only way to tell the difference is to do the patient work of comparison rather than reach for the slogan.
The Self–Other Trap
The linear story has a habit of producing self–other binaries that, once produced, are very hard to dismantle. East against West, tradition against modernity, faith against reason, authenticity against borrowing: each pair, on inspection, turns out to be a way of organising the question so that whichever side one chooses one has already lost. To be on the side of the East is to accept that one is not on the side of modernity. To be on the side of tradition is to accept that one is not on the side of progress. To be on the side of faith is to accept that one has surrendered the rights of intellect.
The argument I am pressing here is that none of these binaries is real. They are the after-effects of a particular history, and they can be undone by the same instrument that built them, which is sustained intellectual work. To use one’s past intelligently is already to refuse the binary between tradition and modernity. To create critically in the present is already to refuse the binary between East and West. To prepare for the future with one’s own commitments intact is already to refuse the binary between authenticity and engagement. The synthesis of the two wisdoms, philosophical and revelatory, of which I have written elsewhere, is precisely a refusal of the binary between faith and reason. None of these refusals is a piece of theory. They are practices, sustained over time, by which a community demonstrates that it does not need anyone’s permission to be itself.
What This Asks of Us
What follows from this for those of us who write, teach, design institutions, raise children, or simply try to live well in our particular corners of the world? Three things, perhaps, are worth naming.
First, we owe our past more attention than we have been giving it. Not the sentimental attention of identity politics, which uses the past as a costume, but the demanding attention of the student, who reads slowly, asks hard questions, and is prepared to be surprised by what he finds. The library is much larger than we have been told. It contains resources we have not begun to inventory.
Second, we owe the present our courage. The most important inventions of the next decades will not be made by those who are waiting for permission. They will be made by those who have noticed a problem in their own setting, gathered the relevant tools from wherever the tools are to be found, and set to work. This requires a particular kind of confidence that is neither arrogance nor mimicry. It is the confidence that comes from knowing one’s resources and being willing to use them.
Third, we owe the future our seriousness. The ease with which the linear story has been accepted is partly a symptom of a deeper unwillingness to think long. To prepare for the conditions of the next generation requires that we lift our heads from the cycle of headlines and ask the harder questions about what kind of human beings, what kind of communities, what kind of institutions we want to be. This is the work of generations, and it begins with declining the offer to be only consumers of someone else’s plans. It also requires institutions that can carry the work, that is, schools, universities, professional bodies, civic associations, networks of patronage for the arts, and the quieter spaces in which ideas are tested before they are launched. Such institutions are not built by accident. They are built by people who have decided, in advance, that the improvement of the quality of life of those around them is a responsibility worth shouldering and that no one is coming to do it for them. There is, in this commitment, an old and quiet dignity that no slogan can imitate.
A Closing Note
The entire argument can be compressed into the sentence with which we began. Modernity is not a place to which some have already arrived while others lag behind. It is not a terminus to be reached by walking in someone else’s footsteps. It is a practice, and the practice is threefold: the intelligent use of the past, ours and theirs; the responsible creation of new solutions to present problems; and the disciplined anticipation of what is coming. Each of these requires that we refuse the small story we have been told. The small story says we are late. The true story says we are exactly on time, provided we do the work.
That work is not glamorous, and it does not announce itself with slogans. It is the slow accumulation of knowledge about our own tradition, the patient invention of new forms that answer to present needs, the building of institutions that can carry the work forward, and the raising of a generation confident enough to use what it inherits. There is, in this commitment, an old and quiet dignity that requires neither permission nor applause. It simply gets on with living intelligently in one’s time, and that is modernity enough.
Our future is not their past. It cannot be. The clock does not run backwards, and the world has more than one centre. Our future is what we will make, by drawing wisely on our inheritance and on the inheritance of others, by creating with care in the present, and by preparing for what is coming with our eyes open. It is the work of intelligent people who know who they are. There is no shortcut to it, and there is no substitute. There is only the work.
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 centre of the Iran conflict with a fundamental contradiction. Pakistan now simultaneously serves as a military guarantor of Saudi security and positions itself as a potential mediator between Riyadh and Tehran. This duality, while diplomatically precarious, reflects a strategic logic rooted in Pakistan’s unique regional position.
Pakistan’s Mediating Capital
Few states possess Pakistan’s combination of mediating assets. As a nuclear-armed Islamic republic with deep ties to both Saudi Arabia and Iran, Islamabad carries a legitimacy that Western brokers cannot replicate. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar’s March 2026 visit to Tehran—where he candidly warned Iranian counterparts of Pakistan’s SMDA obligations—demonstrated a transparency that may enhance rather than undermine credibility. The collapse of US–Iran negotiations in Islamabad on April 11–13 underscores the vacuum Pakistan could fill. Notably, it is Islamabad—not Muscat—that hosted this round. In previous cycles, Oman served as the default mediator. That the geography of diplomacy has shifted signals recognition by all parties that Pakistan’s position—straddling both sides of the Gulf divide—gives it leverage Oman does not possess. Pakistan is now mediating not merely between Tehran and Washington, but between Tehran and Riyadh.
What Is Really at Stake
The question Pakistan faces is not merely whether it can maintain good relations with both Saudi Arabia and Iran simultaneously. That is the short-term challenge. The deeper calculus concerns the long-term equilibrium of power across West Asia. Israel’s conduct—from its operations in Gaza and Lebanon to strikes on Iranian nuclear sites and open threats of wider war—has established it as the region’s principal destabilising actor. Pakistan’s planners understand that this is not an isolated Iran–US dispute; it is a structural contest in which an unchecked Israel, armed with undeclared nuclear weapons and shielded by American vetoes, threatens any state that resists its regional primacy. Islamabad is therefore seeking to prevent the Saudi–Iranian rivalry from becoming a permanent fault line that Israel and its allies can exploit indefinitely.
The SMDA Complication
Impact on Iranian Strategic Calculations
The Limits of This Round—and Why It Does Not Matter
The Path Forward: Stress-Testing Pakistan’s End-State Vision
Members of the Iranian diaspora in Perth, Australia, holding a solidarity rally on 10 January 2026 against the Islamic Republic | Source: Wikimedia Commons | Credit: Gnangarra
Listen to this essay:
I have watched the Iranian diaspora move deeper into an information war that rewards certainty over truth. In that war, social media does not merely transmit opinion; it manufactures moral weather. Anger is packaged as analysis, repetition as evidence, and algorithmic virality as legitimacy. The result is a predictable compression of political judgment: every event is forced into a binary script where one camp speaks for freedom and the other for barbarism. In that script, complexity is treated as betrayal.
I often hear the claim that the Islamic Republic’s military spending proves total indifference to ordinary life because wartime infrastructure—sirens, shelters, civil defense systems—remains inadequate. The criticism sounds intuitively powerful, and parts of it are valid. But I reject the hidden premise that preparedness failures automatically identify the principal moral culprit in a conflict. This framing can displace responsibility from aggressor to target, treating civilian vulnerability as evidence against the victim before it is evidence against the attacker. It is a rhetorical move with a familiar history: structural suffering is blamed on those who endure it, not those who produce it.
At the same time, I do not consider civil defense morally trivial. States owe populations practical protections regardless of who fired first. So my argument is not that preparedness is irrelevant; it is that preparedness cannot be the sole diagnostic of legitimacy. A government may be negligent in protection while external actors remain culpable for unlawful escalation. Reducing this layered reality to a single accusation—”if people die, the local state is the only enemy”—is analytically lazy and politically dangerous.
I also see a related inflation in our discourse: the claim that the regime is not merely oppressive or incompetent, but the singular and absolute threat to all Iranian life, such that almost any external violence becomes morally tolerable if it weakens Tehran. This logic converts despair into permission. Once the domestic state is rebranded as an existential totality, legal categories blur: sanctions that devastate households become strategic necessities; assassinations become technical corrections; preemptive war is reframed as humanitarian surgery. The rhetorical endpoint is not liberation but moral deregulation.
A narrative essay drawn from a dialogue between Hossein Hamdieh and Daryoush Mohammad Poor
The Polarised Mirror
In the spring of 2026, Iran and the United States were engaged in careful, tentative diplomatic contacts—first talks in Islamabad, Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir travelling to Tehran, a fragile ceasefire still holding. That was the larger backdrop. In a quieter register, a different kind of conversation was taking place: scholars and young researchers working inside Iran—people who invite such exchanges at genuine personal risk—had arranged a dialogue with those of us in the diaspora, and they deserve full credit for kick-starting it. Hossein Hamdieh, speaking on behalf of this circle, put a question to me that I initially thought was straightforward but turned out to be far harder than expected: does Iran possess a common point of departure from which all its citizens can begin the journey toward development? Over the next half-hour I tried to answer it. What follows is my attempt to reconstruct that conversation and, in the process of writing it down, to sharpen arguments that were necessarily compressed in speech.
The question itself was not new. Since at least the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, Iranian thinkers have wrestled with the problem of where “we” begin. I built on themes from a previous conversation on the “Copernican Revolution of the Iranian Mind”—drawing on Hamid Dabashi’s analysis of how that revolution diagnosed the shattering of the West as Iran’s fixed reference point—and turned the lens inward: what remains once the mirror of Western validation is broken? The answer is not a triumphant nativist identity but something more demanding: the irreducible fact of shared humanity. Whether this framing is adequate to the full scale of the problem is a question that can only be tested by pressing it as far as it will go—which is what this essay attempts.
The Anatomy of the “White Camp”
The Obsolescence of Old Frameworks
The Only Honest Starting Point
Pluralism as Struggle, Not Nature
Agency Within Structures
The Entanglement of Cultures
Droplets Becoming a River
The Reflexive Self
Toward the Unfinished Project
On Crossing Borders, Hearing Bombs, and the Stubborn Normality of a Nation at War
Based on a first-hand wartime account from Iran by Kazeroun (@mkazeroun) on X
“The evidence for a nation’s endurance is not found in its monuments but in the behaviour of its people when the monuments are burning.”
The Decision to Go
I travelled to Iran in the middle of a war. I returned almost exactly as a temporary ceasefire was announced. What follows is an attempt to set down what I saw, heard, and understood—written primarily for the Iranian diaspora in the West, with the frank admission that for those who remained inside the country throughout, there may be nothing here they do not already know. That asymmetry itself is part of the story.
The decision to go was not impulsive, though it may appear so. Beyond private reasons, there was a conviction—one I hold with increasing firmness—that a portion of what constitutes Iranian identity is formed by the accumulation of shared experience. We are not merely the inheritors of a civilisational archive; we are also the sum of what we have endured together, in the same air, under the same sky. One of the deepest distortions afflicting the diaspora’s understanding of Iran is precisely the absence of such direct participation. To watch a war on a screen and to hear its percussion in your own chest are not the same act of knowing. I wanted to know.
The Strangeness of Normality
I entered through the Turkish border at Van, by train. I left weeks later overland into Armenia. The passenger crossings, on both ends, were eerily deserted. Cargo traffic, by contrast, moved with its usual indifferent rhythm—trucks laden with goods grinding across frontiers as though the concept of aerial bombardment were an abstraction that applied to other categories of existence. This was the first lesson, and perhaps the most enduring: the machinery of commerce does not pause for the machinery of destruction. It merely reroutes.
Tehran: A City in Two Registers
The Two Nations
The Texture of Fear
The Information Architecture
The Northern Escape and the Road to the Border
What the War Revealed
After the Crossing
Without the Adjectives: What the Evidence Reveals About Pahlavi’s Political Project
In my previous assessments of Reza Pahlavi’s political project, published on this blog during the 2026 US–Iran conflict, I employed polemical and emotionally charged language—characterizing Pahlavi as driven by a personal “vendetta with a flag” and deploying the postcolonial epithet “comprador intellectual” to describe his supporters. An independent methodological review of my work found that these critiques, while intellectually sophisticated in their theoretical apparatus, suffered from systematic source omissions, rhetorical overreach, and unfalsifiable framing, arguing that some aspects of my assessment are compromised unless they can be revisited rigorously. As a critical rationalist, my commitment is to constantly subject my own claims to rigorous falsification. This essay represents that process: I have critically assessed my own arguments, exposed them to refutation, and collected the evidence that either corroborates or challenges my initial positions. This is not a defense but a test—a deliberate attempt to see whether my core concerns about Pahlavi’s leadership can withstand methodologically rigorous scrutiny when stripped of polemical rhetoric. I remain open to any further criticism and refutation.
This essay therefore sets aside rhetorical devices in favor of documented evidence, inline citations, and verifiable claims. My central argument is straightforward: Pahlavi’s leadership of the Iranian opposition poses measurable dangers to Iran’s future, not because of who he is, but because of what the evidence reveals—a chief strategist embedded in a neoconservative think tank aligned with foreign military interests, a social media support base substantially manufactured by Israeli intelligence operations, and a pattern of contradictory public statements that undermine his credibility as an independent leader. Each claim that follows is accompanied by its source.
The Ghasseminejad Factor — Architect of a Foreign-Aligned Agenda
Saeed Ghasseminejad occupies a unique and consequential position in Iranian opposition politics. He serves simultaneously as Senior Advisor on Iran and Financial Economics at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington-based neoconservative think tank, and as the chief architect of Reza Pahlavi’s political transition plan. Pahlavi himself confirmed this role, stating that Ghasseminejad “has been leading the process to select individuals for a transitional government” (Times of Israel, January 2026). As Project Director of the Iran Prosperity Project at the National Union for Democracy in Iran, Ghasseminejad prepared a 200-page blueprint for replacing the Tehran regime, encompassing a referendum on constitutional monarchy, elections for a constitutional assembly, and subsequent parliamentary elections (Israel Hayom, January 17, 2026).
Israeli Influence Operations and Manufactured Consent
Contradictions in Pahlavi’s Public Positions
Why This Matters — The Danger to Iran’s Future
References
On Dutch Collaboration, Iranian Compradors, and the Price of Borrowed Salvation
Still from Black Book (Zwartboek, 2006), dir. Paul Verhoeven. Rachel Stein, a Jewish resistance operative, navigates a world where collaborators and liberators wear indistinguishable faces.
Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (2006) opens a wound the Dutch spent sixty years bandaging. Set in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, it follows Rachel Stein—a Jewish woman who infiltrates the Gestapo for the resistance—only to be betrayed by the very patriots she served. When liberation arrives, the crowd does not distinguish between genuine collaborators and the falsely accused. Rachel is stripped, doused in excrement, forced to sing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” Verhoeven’s point is surgical: the collaborator’s sin is not merely tactical betrayal—it is a spiritual migration into the oppressor’s universe, and its cost is paid not only by the traitor but by the entire society that must reckon with the contamination.
Now imagine this: a British citizen, mid-Blitz, takes to the BBC to explain that the real threat to London is not the Luftwaffe but Churchill’s war cabinet. A Polish professor in 1940 argues from a New York lectern that the Wehrmacht is, on balance, a modernising force. The stomach turns. Yet this is precisely the posture of a recognisable character type in the Iranian diaspora—what I have described elsewhere as the comprador intellectual, borrowing Malcolm X’s sharper coinage: the house slave. When the homeland burns, this figure does not reach for a fire hose. They reach for the master’s microphone and say: “What’s the matter, boss—we sick?” The grammatical collapse from “they” to “we” marks the spiritual border crossing.
Photographer/Creator: Levi Meir Clancy / Source: Unsplash
The loudest war drums in the diaspora are often beaten by people with no skin in the game at all. No mother in Tehran waiting through blackouts. No brother in Isfahan tracking sirens. No daughter in Shiraz sleeping under glass that could shatter at dawn. Yet they speak with theatrical certainty, as if missiles are aimed at their own roof. This is not courage. It is performance.
What we are watching is shameful hypocrisy: political cosplay disguised as principle. Some commentators have long ago moved every intimate tie out of Iran, but still speak with feverish enthusiasm about escalation, retaliation, and cleansing violence. They borrow grief they do not carry. They convert distance into authority. They narrate catastrophe with the comfort of people who know their own family WhatsApp groups are quiet tonight.
Call it what it is: nostalgia and romanticizing, not real pain. They are in love with an imagined homeland frozen in heroic memory, not with the living country that bleeds. They romanticize sacrifice because they will not be asked to make it. They rehearse hatred because they will not bury the dead. They pretend to stand inside the fire while speaking from climate-controlled safety.
Alireza Abiz’s Facebook post names this hypocrisy with a clarity that slices through euphemism. He writes, War is decisive, it is the winner, it is the blade’s edge. That line is not poetic decoration; it is a warning that once war enters, it overrules everyone else’s script. Those who fantasize about controlled violence forget that violence has its own command chain.
Abiz then grounds the warning in concrete reality: one strike does not politely stop where analysts draw circles on maps. He asks us to see how a port becomes a power station in the next round, how logistics collapse into energy collapse, and energy collapse into civilian punishment. This is the anatomy of escalation: infrastructure first, daily life second, political imagination last.
On the Comprador Character in the Iranian Diaspora and the Collapse of Borrowed Salvation
A Character Type, Not a Person
Every imperial project produces its own native chorus—voices from the colonised world who sing the coloniser’s hymn in an accent the metropole finds authentic and therefore useful. Hamid Dabashi, in Brown Skin, White Masks (2011), calls them comprador intellectuals: a structurally produced character type whose function is to provide ideological cover for the power dismantling her homeland. Malcolm X named the same figure with greater economy: the house slave who, when the master’s house catches fire, fights harder to extinguish the blaze than the master himself. “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” The we is the tell—the grammatical signature of a consciousness that has relocated itself entirely into the normative universe of the master.
On 8 April 2026, as Iran smouldered under five weeks of bombardment by the United States and Israel, Illinois Public Media’s The 21st Show offered a near-perfect specimen of this type. An associate professor of information systems at a Midwestern university—Iranian-born, long settled in America—declared: “I still maintain that the greatest threat to Iranian life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not this war or any foreign intervention. It’s the regime itself.” The phrasing is diagnostic: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—the sacred trinity of the American Declaration of Independence, deployed without irony while compatriots were being bombed by the nation that authored those words. The individual is incidental. The type is what demands scrutiny.
The Selective Arithmetic of Suffering
The comprador character’s most reliable instrument is what the historian Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh, speaking on the same programme, called the selective presentation of facts. When confronted with the destruction of a school in Minab that killed over 145 children, the comprador voice does not deny the atrocity. It changes the subject—pivoting to the regime’s executions, its poisoning of rivers, its engineering of poverty. Every horror from without is met with a horror from within, as though American missiles and Iranian state violence existed on a balance sheet in which the latter would always tip the scales.
The One-Percent Wager
Brown Skin, White Mask
The Mirage of Whiteness
Beyond the Binary
The Reckoning
Apple Podcasts
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The deployment constrains mediating potential. The SMDA was activated by real threats following Iran’s strikes on Saudi energy infrastructure and US bases during the February–April conflict cycle. With Pakistani fighter jets integrated into Saudi air defence, Tehran cannot view Islamabad as disinterested. Pakistan’s $4.8 billion in external obligations, offset by $5 billion in Saudi–Qatari support, means strategic autonomy is materially circumscribed. Mediation requires perceived independence, and financial dependency erodes precisely that perception.
For Tehran, the deployment alters the conflict calculus measurably. A nuclear-capable state’s conventional forces in the Saudi defence architecture raises escalation risks Iran must now factor into military planning. An attack on Saudi Arabia could draw a nuclear power into direct confrontation. The fragile ceasefire following the February 28–April 7 hostilities may be stabilised, counterintuitively, by this escalation of stakes.
The likelihood that this round fails to produce a lasting settlement is not low. Structural spoilers—Israel’s preference for permanent Iranian isolation, Washington hawks, Tehran hardliners—remain formidable. But failure here does not mean failure in perpetuity. The Islamic Republic will not collapse under military pressure. Its institutional depth, mobilisation capacity, and regional strategic depth make regime-change a fantasy. The monarchist exile faction, rallied around a prince who collaborated with forces threatening war crimes against over 90 million Iranians, commands negligible domestic legitimacy. The notion that a population would embrace a figure associated with those who threatened to obliterate their country requires a suspension of political logic no serious analyst can endorse. Peace is therefore inevitable—because the alternatives are permanent war or the collapse of a state that refuses to collapse.
Three speculative end-state objectives emerge for Islamabad: a demilitarized region, the withdrawal of US forces from West Asia, and a denuclearised region with Pakistan and Iran as anchoring powers. Each deserves scrutiny. Demilitarisation faces the obstacle that Persian Gulf monarchies have built security around foreign military presence; removing it requires a replacement framework that does not yet exist. US withdrawal is plausible only if Washington concludes that the cost of regional hegemony exceeds the benefits—a calculation that shifts with every administration. Denuclearisation is the most ambitious: Pakistan itself is a nuclear state, and asking Iran to forgo nuclear ambitions while retaining its own arsenal creates an asymmetry Tehran would exploit. Yet the logic holds if the framework is mutual—a regional compact in which both states cap and eventually reduce arsenals in exchange for guaranteed sovereignty. This is generational work. What remains clear is that Pakistan will stay an active partner regardless of how the current round concludes. The strategic imperatives—geographic proximity, shared borders, sectarian bridge-building, and the existential threat of an unchecked Israel—guarantee Islamabad cannot disengage. Whether it possesses the institutional discipline to navigate this narrow corridor remains the critical variable.
Geopolitically, I believe this discourse relies on selective memory. Iran’s post-1979 record includes repression, regional proxy warfare, and interventions that deserve robust criticism. Yet I cannot analyze the regional order without parallel scrutiny of U.S.-Israeli coercive strategy: covert sabotage, recurring strikes, maximal sanctions, and repeated pressure campaigns that weakened diplomatic off-ramps. The collapse of the JCPOA after U.S. withdrawal in 2018 did not simply end a treaty; it strengthened hardline security logics on all sides. When diplomacy is repeatedly undermined, militarists inherit the stage.
Timing matters. Attacks launched during negotiation windows do not merely produce immediate casualties; they alter the argument structure of politics. They teach publics that compromise is naive, that institutions are decorative, and that force is the only reliable language. This does not exonerate Tehran’s authoritarian machinery. It shows, instead, how regime securitization and external militarization are mutually reinforcing systems. Each side harvests the violence of the other as domestic proof of its own necessity.
I want to be equally clear about legal rhetoric, because legal rhetoric is often where political manipulation hides. Terms like “self-defense,” “deterrence,” and “preemption” are now used as moral shortcuts rather than legal tests. In my view, if imminence is undefined, evidence is withheld, and proportionality is post hoc storytelling, then legal language has been reduced to branding. We cannot build credible anti-authoritarian politics by borrowing the most elastic justifications of militarized statecraft. Precision is not a luxury here; it is the minimum ethical duty.
I see diaspora media ecosystems intensify this cycle through three mechanisms. First, emotional monetization: trauma-rich narratives outperform careful reporting, so outrage becomes an economic model. Second, epistemic tribalism: users learn to trust identity proximity over verification, producing sealed interpretive communities. Third, performative absolutism: visibility is awarded to maximal claims, not defensible ones. In this environment, disagreement is recoded as collaboration, and policy questions collapse into loyalty tests.
A fourth mechanism also deserves attention: moral outsourcing. Instead of testing claims against documents, timelines, and legal standards, we outsource certainty to charismatic accounts that mirror our pain. I understand why this happens; communities under prolonged injury seek emotional coherence before analytical coherence. But when political judgment is outsourced, accountability disappears. The loudest narrator becomes the temporary court of appeal, and facts become decorative props in a drama whose ending is already written.
This produces a striking mirror effect. Opposition echo chambers accuse state media of propaganda while reproducing propaganda form: decontextualized footage, inflated casualty rhetoric, and strategic omission of inconvenient facts. Regime channels, for their part, weaponize every diaspora excess to discredit legitimate criticism, presenting dissent as foreign orchestration. Both narratives depend on the same cognitive technology—fear plus simplification—and both punish nuanced speech. The citizen becomes either a slogan or a suspect.
The framework I advocate begins with symmetry in moral method, not symmetry in political power. I reject both apologetics for authoritarian repression and romanticism about coercive foreign policy. I ask the same questions of every actor: Who initiated force in this instance? What legal authority exists? What civilian costs are foreseeable? What diplomatic alternatives were available, and by whom were they blocked? Which claims are evidenced, and which are emotionally outsourced to collective grievance? Without this methodological discipline, analysis degenerates into factional mythmaking.
For the diaspora, the central task is epistemic adulthood. To me, that means distinguishing opposition to the regime from consent to war, and anti-war critique from regime loyalty. It means refusing the intoxicating fantasy that bombardment can perform democratic pedagogy. It means acknowledging that a population can be simultaneously oppressed by domestic autocracy and endangered by external punishment regimes. Most of all, it means resisting the conversion of legitimate rage into a permanent marketplace of distortion.
That epistemic adulthood has practical consequences. It asks us to cite better, pause longer, and speak with fewer theatrics when evidence is uncertain. It asks academics, journalists, and activists—including me—to separate interpretation from assertion and to mark the limits of what we know. It also asks institutions in exile to reward correction instead of punishing it. A political culture that cannot revise itself cannot democratize itself. Humility, in this sense, is not weakness; it is infrastructure.
I believe the future of Iranian political imagination depends less on who shouts the loudest than on who restores standards of argument under pressure. If our public sphere remains hostage to algorithmic panic and geopolitical ventriloquism, diaspora politics will continue mistaking amplification for insight. But if analytical rigor, historical memory, and moral consistency are reintroduced into debate, a different possibility emerges: criticism that neither flatters power nor licenses catastrophe. In that narrower and harder space, truth becomes less theatrical, but far more useful.
Hamdieh opened the conversation by sketching a portrait that many observers of Iranian diaspora politics would recognise immediately. He described a segment of Iranian society—both inside the country and abroad—that has constructed what he called a “white camp” mentality. This is the worldview encapsulated in the Pahlavi-era aphorism that Iran’s location in the Middle East is a “geographical mistake.” For those who inhabit this mental geography, Iran belongs not with its Arab, Afghan, or Central Asian neighbours but with the civilisational West. Their “whiteness” is less a biological claim than a status marker: it signifies membership in the club of modernity, a seat at the table of progress.
Yet Hamdieh noted a corrosive irony at the heart of this self-image. The camp that claims kinship with modernity does not necessarily embrace modern values—freedom, human rights, feminist principles—except instrumentally, as a rhetorical weapon against the Islamic Republic. The “Aryan we” at the centre of this identity constructs an “other” that is Arab, Muslim, ethnically marginal, and expendable. This dynamic produces grotesque distortions: victims of violence in the southern port city of Minab can be dismissed as part of a “project,” their deaths unworthy of the communal grief reserved for “our own.” At its most extreme, this worldview can even welcome an external military attack on Iran, reasoning that “we”—the real Iran, the white Iran—are merely attacking the aberrant regime that has occupied our proper civilisational space.
I recognised the portrait Hamdieh was drawing—it describes a syndrome visible in many diaspora communities. Rather than contesting it, I widened the frame. The polarisation Hamdieh identified is not an Iranian peculiarity. It is a structural feature of human societies under stress. The United States has its own version, made visible in the rise of Trumpism; Britain has its version, legible in the Brexit vote; Israel is living through yet another variant, as citizens who identify with the state find themselves increasingly uncomfortable in international company. To claim polarisation as uniquely Iranian would be as misleading as the exceptionalism it aims to critique. But there is a genuine tension here worth naming: by universalising the problem, one risks evading what is distinctive and urgent about the Iranian case. The more productive question is not “why are Iranians like this?” but rather: “under what conditions does any society intensify its bipolar space?” What economic pressures, what educational failures, what media distortions converge to push a population toward the extremes?
The intellectual frameworks that once organised our understanding of the world—the tradition-versus-modernity binary, the Euro-centric narrative of linear progress—have been dying since the start of the twenty-first century. The events of September 11, 2001 were not merely a security catastrophe; they inaugurated an era in which the West’s confident prescription of democracy-by-force collided with the intractable realities of sectarian demography, regional power, and civilisational depth.
Consider the tragicomedy of Iraq. The Western coalition overthrew Saddam Hussein and introduced elections, only to discover that democratic majority rule in a Shia-majority country would produce a government sympathetic to Iran. “We handed the meat to the cat,” I said, borrowing a vivid rural idiom. The ensuing cascade—Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, Iran’s 2009 Green Movement—did not merely rearrange geopolitical furniture; it dismantled the very room in which the old conversations about modernity and tradition had taken place. The thoughtful European intellectual already understands that the singular, Euro-centric modernity is an exhausted discourse. Whether Iranians can internalise the same lesson without falling into the opposite trap of reactionary nativism remains an open and consequential question.
This is the terrain on which the “white camp” mentality flourishes. When old frameworks collapse but new ones have not yet been built, people reach for the most accessible source of meaning: identity. And identity, unmoored from critical reflection, devolves rapidly into exceptionalism—the comforting fiction that our suffering is unique, our civilisation is sui generis, and the rules that govern other nations do not apply to us.
The position I advanced tries to sidestep both the nativist and the cosmopolitan camps in Iranian intellectual life. The common starting point is neither a glorious Aryan past nor an imported Western modernity. It is the bare, unglamorous fact of shared human need. “Even the person who says, ‘Come drop a bomb on my head so this misery ends,’” I observed, “what do they want at the end of the day? A roof that doesn’t leak. Food for their children. A decent school.”
The originality of this claim should not be overstated—it is, in many ways, a restatement of ideas that development economists and human rights thinkers have articulated with greater rigour. But the specific application to the Iranian debate is worth pressing. The development indicators—education, shelter, healthcare, the right to happiness—are pre-ideological. They precede and undergird every argument about identity, religion, ethnicity, and political system. A woman in childbirth suffers the same regardless of her skin colour. A cancer patient’s agony does not discriminate between Shia and Sunni, Iranian and American. “Have you ever heard a white person say, ‘My cold is different from a black person’s cold’?” I asked. The question sounds almost absurdly simple—but the absurdly simple is precisely what gets lost in the fog of civilisational posturing.
If this position has any force, it comes from refusing to privilege any culturalist starting point. It sidesteps the entire debate about whether Iran is “really” Eastern or Western, Muslim or secular, Aryan or Semitic, by asserting that none of these categories is the foundation on which a just society is built. The foundation is the human being and that human being’s non-negotiable need for dignity, safety, and flourishing. Everything else—every grand narrative of civilisational belonging—is a superstructure erected atop this base, and it must be judged by whether it serves or obstructs those elementary needs. This framing has an obvious limitation: it does not tell you what to do when those needs conflict with each other, or when reasonable people disagree about what dignity requires. That is where the hard work of politics begins—but it begins on the right foundation.
If shared humanity is the starting point, pluralism is the discipline required to stay on the path. And here the conversation moved to genuinely difficult terrain: pluralism is not natural. Human beings are not born pluralists; they are born monists. The default setting of the human ego is to regard its own identity—white, black, Muslim, Shia, Kurdish, Tehrani—as a source of special privilege. “You must constantly struggle with yourself,” I said, “to train your own mind so that you slowly get to a place where you say: take it easy, you are just a person like all other people.” I include myself in this diagnosis. The impulse toward monism is not something any of us has overcome; it is something we contend with.
This argument sits uneasily with an era that celebrates diversity as an intrinsic good. I was not dismissing diversity; I was warning against the assumption that tolerance is an automatic product of exposure. Left to its own devices, the ego will exploit difference—race, religion, ethnicity, language—as a ladder of hierarchy. Only education, in the broadest sense of the word, can interrupt this cycle. And by education I mean not merely schooling but the entire apparatus of cultural formation: family, media, public discourse, and—crucially—the daily practice of self-examination. I invoked the mystic Ayn al-Quzat Hamadani’s compulsive need to write, and the Persian poet Saye’s admonition never to believe one’s own flattery, as examples of traditions within Iranian culture that already contain the resources for this kind of critical self-reflection.
The implications for Iran are stark. If pluralism must be taught, then the absence of pluralism in Iranian public life is not a failure of character but a failure of institutions. The educational system, the media landscape, the political structure—all have conspired, whether by design or by neglect, to reinforce the monist default. The “white camp” and its mirror image—the regime’s insistence on a monolithic Islamic identity—are two symptoms of the same disease: an untrained ego projecting its anxieties onto the body politic.
There is a risk that everything said so far collapses into a structuralist determinism in which individuals are merely the puppets of historical forces. That conclusion must be resisted. Structures matter—the Islamic Republic is a structure, American hegemony is a structure, colonial history is a structure—but within every structure, individuals retain what I called “agency.” “Every person in a specific situation can act differently,” I said. The question “under what conditions does a society vote for Trump, or for Brexit, or produce the convulsions of Iran in 2009?” is not an invitation to fatalism but to forensic curiosity: what economic, cultural, and educational pressures converged to produce this particular outcome, and what might be done to alter the conditions next time? The tension between structure and agency is not a problem to be resolved in the abstract; it is a tension that must be held and worked through in each concrete case.
This emphasis on both structure and agency should make it harder to simply condemn those Iranians who wave Israeli flags in the street to celebrate the bombing of their compatriots, or who shout for foreign intervention. These are not evil people. They are people trapped in what I called an “artificial situation,” an emergency mindset so total that it suspends normal moral reasoning. They have put their own humanity on hold because the crisis seems to demand it. The task of the intellectual is to ask what conditions produced their despair, and to work patiently toward changing those conditions.
Hamdieh reinforced this point by drawing attention to the dangers of Iranian exceptionalism—the belief that what befell Syria or Afghanistan cannot happen to Iran because Iran possesses some intrinsic civilisational essence that renders it immune to historical forces. I agreed, and wanted to add something that matters. The long civilisational memory of Iran—its millennia of history, its vast literary and philosophical heritage—is a genuine asset, but it becomes a liability the moment it curdles into arrogance. “The fact that you have a civilisational history of four thousand years shouldn’t cause arrogance in you,” I said plainly. “If you know this, you’re on the right track. You can move forward.”
The fantasy of cultural purity kept coming up in the conversation. Responding to the slogan popular in certain nationalist circles—“We are Aryan, we do not worship Arabs”—I pointed out that the very concept of a “pure Arab” is an invention. There is no such thing. Lebanon’s Arabic-speaking population is not the same as Egypt’s, which is not the same as Syria’s. I recounted a conversation with a Syrian friend who described how some Syrians had attempted the identical manoeuvre: “We are not Arabs, we are Phoenicians.” The parallel was both comic and instructive—a reminder that the impulse to escape the burden of a stigmatised identity by retreating into an invented ancestral purity is a human universal, not an Iranian monopoly.
The deeper point was about entanglement. Persian poetry cannot be separated from its Arabic antecedents. Islam flows through every fibre of Iranian culture, whether any given Iranian practises it or not. The name on your birth certificate—Ali, Hossein, Mohammad—is a testament to this entanglement, and changing it to John or Jason, as I wryly noted, does nothing to alter the cultural substratum that shaped your consciousness. A Syrian claiming Phoenician ancestry does not thereby escape the Arabic that structures his daily thought. None of this means Iranians must embrace Islam uncritically; it means that any honest reckoning with Iranian identity must begin by acknowledging the irreducibly composite nature of that identity. There is no pure Iranian culture waiting to be excavated beneath layers of Arab contamination. The project of purification—stripping away the Arab, the Islamic, the non-Aryan—is not a return to authenticity. It is a flight from it.
Toward the end of the conversation, Hamdieh asked me a personal question: why do I write so prolifically? Part of the answer is compulsion—a kind of addiction, the same irresistible urge described by the medieval Persian mystic Ayn al-Quzat, who said that if he did not write, his body ached and his night never became day. But the larger reason was captured in these words: “We are not alone.”
I described how I had recently begun writing in English, not for the Iranian diaspora—who largely ignored these pieces—but for my European and Western colleagues who knew Iran only through the distorting lens of CNN, the BBC, or the recycled reports of exile media. Some of these pieces found readers I had not expected. There was, it turned out, a “grey area” in Iranian reality that neither the regime’s propaganda nor the opposition’s counter-propaganda acknowledged: a vast, silent, thoughtful middle that had no name and no symbol, but that undeniably existed.
I offered a metaphor that captures something of the idea: “We are like droplets that have fallen apart from each other. These droplets find each other through writing, through talking, through dialogue. They connect, they form a roaring river that, when the space is provided, will suddenly turn Iran upside down with astonishing speed.” The image combines humility with ambition—each individual is only a droplet, yet the cumulative force of connected droplets is a torrent capable of reshaping the landscape. It rests on what I called an “optimistic view of human beings”—the belief that people, despite their capacity for violence, corruption, and ignorance, contain within them a potential for good that only needs the right conditions to flourish. The human being, in the Qur’anic language I alluded to, is indeed capable of bloodshed and ignorance, but also of something luminous that justifies the divine gamble of creation. Optimism about human nature is itself a position that requires defence, not an axiom—but it is the position I hold, and this essay is part of that defence. The task is to keep the conversation alive, to keep writing even when no one seems to be reading, and not to fear the voices that shout, like the “call from the haunted mosque,”* that the effort is futile.
Writing, for me, is less a form of expression than a form of self-correction. I drew an analogy between intellectual life and the practice of calligraphy or learning the setar. In all three, mastery is not a destination but a process—an infinite process. “You have to play in such a way that you think, until the Day of Judgment, your whole life is just about playing the instrument, nothing else,” I said. The same applies to the life of the mind: you must write as though doing calligraphy, or writing essats, were the only occupation left in the world. And because you will write badly (in art or in prose), often, and publicly, you will be corrected—and that correction is the point. “You become human right there,” I said of the moment a colleague points out a sentence that makes no sense. “Being reflexive means this. Critical thinking means this.”
This principle extends to the scale of a nation. If the individual must examine themselves in the mirror every morning and ask whether they were a scoundrel or a decent person, so too must a society subject itself to relentless self-scrutiny. This is the authentic core of the practice of faith—the nightly accounting of the soul—but it requires no particular creed. To be a decent human being, one need not follow only one specific faith; one need only be true to one’s conscience. The Quran itself affirms this in Surah Al-Baqarah (2:62): “Indeed the faithful, the Jews, the Christians and the Sabaeans—those of them who have faith in Allah and the Last Day and act righteously—they shall have their reward from their Lord, and they will have no fear, nor will they grieve.” This is another way of returning to the common starting point of shared humanity, now understood not as an abstract principle but as a daily discipline.
If there is a thread running through these reflections, it is not a political programme but something prior to one: an attempt at an ethical infrastructure. I am not prescribing a constitution or a party platform. I am arguing that before any of those things can be meaningful, Iranians must agree on a few preliminary truths. First, that they are human beings before they are Iranians, and that their development needs—education, shelter, healthcare, dignity, joy—are the non-negotiable starting point. Second, that the diversity of Iran’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic landscape is not a defect to be homogenised but a reality to be negotiated through the hard, unnatural work of pluralism. Third, that the long civilisational memory of Iran is a resource, not a throne—a starting capital of wisdom that must be invested wisely, not displayed as proof of superiority. And fourth, that the way forward is not a single heroic act of revolution or liberation but the patient, unglamorous, daily labour of writing, talking, correcting, and being corrected. Each of these claims is contestable, and I advance them as propositions to be tested, not as axioms to be accepted.
The geopolitical backdrop—the fragile Iran-US ceasefire, the shuttling of intermediaries, the shadow of war—gave this conversation a particular urgency. The concerns I was addressing operate on a different timescale altogether. I opened the conversation by greeting not only those listening at the time but those who might hear these words in years to come, “from beyond the centuries.” A single conversation is only one deposit in a much larger account. The droplets may be scattered today. The river may be decades away. But the act of seeking each other out—through a conversation recorded between London and wherever Hamdieh sat, through essays written for whoever happens to read them, through the stubborn refusal to stop putting pen to paper—is itself the beginning of something.
Iran’s unfinished project is not a problem to be solved by the next regime or the next revolution. It is a conversation to be sustained across generations, carried forward by people who understand that they are neither the saviours nor the audience of history, but its participants—flawed, compulsive, and inexhaustibly human. The droplets are scattered, but they are not still. Across Tehran and London, across Los Angeles and Mashhad, in the grey areas that neither government media nor opposition broadcasts acknowledge, they are finding each other—through a conversation like this one, through an essay, through a sentence that someone in the next room reads and says, “This doesn’t make sense; fix it.” And in that small, unglamorous act of correction lies the seed of something larger: a nation that has learned to look in the mirror not to admire a mythic Aryan reflection but to ask, honestly and without flinching, “Was I a decent person today?” That question, asked often enough, by enough people, is how droplets become a river.
—–
These are the words of Ayn al-Quadat Hamadani:
Do you not see that the hand and the pen stand accused of being the scribe, yet know nothing of the true intent? And the paper is charged with being that upon which and into which words are inscribed — yet alas, alas! Every scribe that is not the heart is ignorant, and every surface written upon that is not the heart is just the same.
O noble soul! Think of these poems as mirrors. Surely you know that a mirror holds no image of its own, yet whoever gazes into it may behold their own face. Know, then, that a poem in itself carries no meaning — yet each person may see reflected in it whatever is the true coin of their time and the measure of their attainment.
And should you say, “The meaning of a poem is what its author intended, and others who read other meanings into it are merely inventing,” this is as if one were to say that the image in the mirror is the face of the polisher who first made it shine. There is a subtle and profound truth here, but were I to hang upon its elaboration, I would stray from my purpose.
* In Book III of Rumi’s Mathnawi, a mosque on the outskirts of Rayy is known to kill any guest who sleeps there. A traveler arrives who has already made peace with death, understanding the body as a cage from which the spirit longs to escape. He spends the night unharmed. The story suggests that what destroys us is not external circumstance but our own grip on survival—the very fear we cannot release.
The first thing that struck me upon entering Iran was how aggressively normal everything appeared. This was not the apocalyptic landscape that weeks of satellite footage and breathless diaspora commentary had led me to expect. Public services—transport, fuel distribution, food supply chains—were functioning at or near their ordinary capacity. In the smaller cities and villages, the war was an abstraction. People went about their lives. Occasionally, the roar of a fighter jet on its way to or from a larger target would intrude upon the quotidian, a momentary sonic reminder that the country was, in fact, under sustained military assault. Then the sound would pass, and the village would return to itself.
This resilience is not stoicism in the romantic sense. It is not a performance of bravery for an audience. It is something more mundane and, for that reason, more extraordinary: the refusal of eighty-odd million people to permit their daily existence to be fully colonised by someone else’s war. The grocer opens his shop. The metro runs—free of charge during the conflict, though with longer intervals between trains. Children go to school where schools remain open. The war is real, but so is breakfast.
Tehran told a more complicated story. The capital operated at roughly twenty per cent of its normal commercial capacity—offices skeletal, businesses muted, the usual anarchic traffic replaced by an almost pastoral calm. By day, the city wore a mask of serenity. The air, mercifully, was clean—one of the few perverse gifts of reduced industrial activity. The streets were quieter than I had ever experienced them: Tehran without traffic is Tehran estranged from itself.
The sounds of war punctuated the daytime hours intermittently. A fighter jet overhead. A distant detonation. If the explosion was not close, life continued without interruption. If you were in the metro or in a car, you might not register the bombing at all. Without checking the news, it was often impossible to know where a strike had landed. This peculiar informational fog—living inside a war whose specific coordinates required a smartphone to locate—produced a dissonance I had not anticipated. War, I had imagined, would be omnipresent. In practice, it was strangely intermittent, like a storm that announces itself in irregular thunder and then retreats behind a deceptive blue sky.
By night, the city transformed. From sunset until well past midnight, the major squares—Ferdowsi, Tajrish, and others—filled with gatherings. Some were state-organised; others were more spontaneous. The Iranian flag was the centrepiece. Convoys of cars draped in flags and blaring martial music or religious hymns circulated through the streets. The anthem of the moment—a rousing number whose refrain translates roughly as “Strike, for you strike well”—became the sonic wallpaper of the nocturnal city. Security checkpoints multiplied after dark: armed vehicles, masked faces, the unmistakable choreography of a state asserting control over the visual and acoustic space of its capital.
I attended several of these nightly gatherings as an observer. The dominant crowd was unmistakably Hezbollahi—the loyalist base of the Islamic Republic—with its familiar slogans, its religious cadences, its condemnation of traitors and its pledges of allegiance to the Supreme Leader. In some areas, such as Tajrish Square, the demographic composition was marginally broader, but the discursive space remained firmly monopolised. No dissonance was tolerated. The street, in those hours, belonged to one narrative and one narrative only.
And yet, away from the squares, a different country breathed. I encountered many people who considered participation in these rallies a patriotic duty—and just as many who cursed them, though usually in whispers, behind closed doors, or in the privacy of a shared taxi. This, I believe, is the most important observation I can offer: unlike the war of 1980–1988, when the existential threat produced something closer to genuine national cohesion, this conflict has exposed a profound and perhaps irreconcilable duality within Iranian society. The surface is solidarity. Beneath it, two nations coexist in the same geography—speaking the same language, breathing the same air, and understanding almost nothing of each other’s interior lives.
The noise of the rallies—sometimes persisting until one in the morning—was itself a source of friction. Residents of central Tehran, whatever their political sympathies, do not universally appreciate martial hymns at midnight. But this is a minor irritation against the larger canvas. The deeper fracture is ideological, generational, and existential. It will not be healed by a ceasefire.
Between cities, security patrols were frequent—typically at the entry and exit points of towns. I was stopped several times. Most interactions were professional and courteous. Some were not. I will not detail the exceptions, except to say that the experience of being questioned by armed men in a country at war sharpens one’s awareness of the fragility of civility. When power is concentrated and fear is ambient, the space between politeness and menace narrows to a membrane.
The attacks could come at any time, but during the days I spent in Tehran, the northeast of the city bore the heaviest burden. There was a rough pattern: one wave in the early evening, around seven or eight o’clock, and another in the small hours, between three and five in the morning. But patterns are treacherous things in war. They offer the illusion of predictability where none exists. The only honest thing to say is that at any moment, in any place, the sky could open.
Close explosions were genuinely terrifying. I experienced two at proximity, and on both occasions the smell of cordite hung in the air afterwards—an acrid, chemical presence that no amount of descriptive language can adequately convey. It is a smell that rewrites your relationship with the atmosphere. The air you breathe is no longer neutral; it carries evidence.
After a day or two, I found that I had begun to habituate. I could distinguish the sound of an incoming missile from the roar of a jet engine from the percussion of air defence systems. This adaptation is not courage. It is the body’s bureaucratic response to sustained threat—a biological filing system that categorises danger into degrees, the better to permit continued function. The people of Tehran have been living inside this filing system for weeks. Their composure is not indifference. It is survival organised into routine.
The day President Trump issued his infamous message—the one that spoke of erasing a civilisation—I was in Tehran. The effect was palpable. Fear intensified. The spectre of a nuclear strike, which had until then occupied the realm of the hypothetical, suddenly migrated into the domain of the plausible. And yet, even then, I witnessed no panic. No stampede. No irrational collective behaviour. People were afraid—visibly, quietly afraid—but they metabolised the fear without surrendering to it. There is a word for this in Persian that resists easy translation: a kind of dignified endurance that is neither passive acceptance nor active defiance, but something woven from both.
Access to the global internet was severely restricted—expensive, unreliable, and for most people effectively impossible. The information environment was almost entirely channelled through domestic platforms, primarily curated messaging channels that reproduced the same narratives in an echo of near-perfect uniformity. Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp—the tools that had once served as the nervous system of Iranian civil discourse—played virtually no role. The most significant external news source was satellite television, which retained its stubborn relevance precisely because it could not be firewalled.
The management of the war’s narrative was, I must concede, considerably more sophisticated than in previous conflicts. The propaganda apparatus had learned from its predecessors. The billboards and posters plastering the city were uniformly political-ideological in content, and the streets were saturated with AI-generated images of the new Supreme Leader—images whose synthetic quality was immediately apparent but whose sheer volume created a kind of visual fait accompli. When a face is everywhere, its artificiality ceases to matter. Presence substitutes for authenticity.
The cities of Mazandaran, along the Caspian coast, were swollen with population—internal refugees of a sort, though the word feels too heavy for people who had simply driven a few hours north to breathe. Businesses were functioning, petrol stations were crowded, and the traffic was heavier than in Tehran. The flight path of the jets that bombed the capital and its surroundings ran largely over the Caspian, likely via Azerbaijani airspace, and I heard the sound of fighter aircraft echoing through the Alborz Mountains several times—a surreal intrusion of industrial violence into one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth.
I had a train ticket to Tabriz, intending to cross into Armenia from there. But when key bridges along the highway and railway were struck, plans changed with the abruptness that war imposes on all itineraries. On the advice of a friend—Erfan Khosravi, whose companionship through those days I record here with gratitude—I left Tehran earlier than planned. We drove together to Astaneh-ye Ashrafiyeh, then onward to Bandar-e Anzali, Astara, and Ardabil. We spent one night on the banks of the Aras River, that ancient border between worlds. The next morning, Erfan accompanied me to the frontier, and I crossed—becoming, as I described it to myself at the time, the friend who leaves halfway.
It was approximately three in the afternoon. The passenger border was nearly empty. The only other travellers were a handful of Asian nationals—Indian, most likely—making their own quiet exit. The solitude of the crossing was its own commentary. A nation at war, and its borders almost deserted: not because people could not leave, but because the overwhelming majority had chosen, or been compelled by circumstance, to stay.
Several observations crystallised during those weeks, and I set them down here not as conclusions but as provisional readings of a situation that remains, in every sense, unfinished.
First: the solidarity against the war was broader and deeper than I had expected. I did not encounter a single person—not one—who defended the war or wished it to continue. This is remarkable in a society as factionalised as Iran’s. But a crucial caveat attends this observation: in the hyper-securitised atmosphere of wartime Iran, where the smallest note of dissent is met with immediate and disproportionate force, silence must not be read as consent. The quiet half of society—the millions who neither rally nor shout—are not necessarily aligned with the state’s narrative. They are simply surviving within the narrow corridor that power has left them.
Second: the Hezbollahi base was in a state of intense emotional and eschatological agitation. Some among them viewed the war through an explicitly apocalyptic lens—not as a geopolitical event but as a prelude to a cosmic reckoning. The nightly rituals of flag-waving and hymn-singing must be understood within this emotional register: not merely as political mobilisation but as collective catharsis, a liturgical performance enacted under the open sky of a besieged city.
Third: confidence in eventual victory was surprisingly high, even among those critical of the government. But this confidence was shadowed by a more sober and material fear: the economic aftermath. The bombing of steel plants and petrochemical facilities—the vertebrae of Iran’s industrial economy—portended inflation, unemployment, and a contraction of living standards that would outlast any ceasefire by years, perhaps decades. People knew they would survive the war. They were far less certain they would survive the peace.
Fourth: the notion of regime change through external pressure or popular uprising—still circulated with embarrassing confidence in certain diaspora salons—is, inside Iran, understood as a fantasy. Anyone who has spent even a week in wartime Tehran grasps that the overthrow of this government without civil war, massive bloodshed, and infrastructural devastation is not a serious proposition. It is a bedtime story told by exiles to exiles, and it deserves the analytical weight of one.
Fifth: outside the Hezbollahi core, the new Supreme Leader commands virtually no recognition, no trust, and no respect. Even among regime loyalists, the precise architecture of leadership remains opaque. People have adapted to this ambiguity—accommodated it, as Iranians accommodate so much—but accommodation is not legitimacy. The centre of power is felt everywhere and understood nowhere. For now, society has made its peace with a leadership that is, in the deepest sense, absent.
I left Iran carrying two things that do not pass through customs: a revised understanding of my country and an anger that has not yet found its proper form. The revised understanding is this: Iran is neither the triumphant fortress of regime propaganda nor the broken victim of diaspora lamentation. It is something far more complex and far more alive—a society fractured along every conceivable axis and yet held together by forces that resist easy naming. Call it habit. Call it stubbornness. Call it love, if the word does not embarrass you. Eighty million people do not endure sustained aerial bombardment because they approve of their government. They endure it because the country is theirs—theirs in a sense that no regime, however authoritarian, can fully expropriate.
The anger is directed at those who made this war possible and at those who cheered it on from the safety of distance. At the architects of maximum pressure who imagined that bombs could produce democracy. At the exile politicians who traded their compatriots’ bodies for the fantasy of a restoration that history has already refused. At an international community whose conscience stirred not when Iranian children were pulled from rubble but when the price of oil twitched upward at European pumps. These failures of strategy, of empathy, and of elementary political imagination are the war’s true casualties—not the Iranian people, who have been wounded but not defeated, not silenced but not yet heard.
Distinguishing between suffering and defeat is not an academic exercise. It is, for Iranians, a matter of existential clarity. A people may be bombed, impoverished, censored, surveilled, and lied to—and still retain the capacity for future reconstitution. Nations are not reducible to the damage done to them in a single cycle of violence. They carry memory. They carry contradiction. They carry, beneath the rubble and the propaganda and the exhaustion, the unarticulated premise of a tomorrow that does not yet have a name.
I think of the clean Tehran air—a gift of reduced industry, of silenced factories, of a wartime economy running at a fraction of its capacity—and I think of it as an inadvertent metaphor. When the noise stops, when the traffic disappears, when the ordinary machinery of a dysfunctional normality is suspended, something else becomes visible: the city itself, the mountains behind it, the sky above it. Perhaps that is what war discloses, beneath all its horror. Not the fragility of a nation, but its obstinate, irreducible presence.
The road from Tehran to the Aras is long, and I drove most of it in silence. At the river’s edge, the night before the crossing, the water moved with the indifference of something that has seen every empire come and go—Achaemenid, Parthian, Safavid, Qajar, Pahlavi, Islamic Republic—and expects to see the next. The Aras does not take sides. It merely continues. Perhaps that is the most Iranian thing of all: to continue, not because the future is assured, but because stopping was never really an option.
April 2026
This essay is based on a first-hand account originally published as a Twitter/X thread by Kazeroun (@mkazeroun) on April 13, 2026. The observations, experiences, and reflections are his; the interpretation and prose are the author’s.
The FDD’s website documents Ghasseminejad’s institutional role. The organization was a prominent opponent of the JCPOA nuclear agreement, advised the Trump administration on Iran strategies, and has received funding from pro-Israel donors including Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus. Iran sanctioned FDD and its CEO in 2019, viewing it as an instrument of hostile foreign policy. FDD publications have contemplated scenarios involving “the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities and the killing of key Iranian leaders, including Khamenei and numerous military commanders” (FDD Long War Journal, 2026). This is the institutional home of Pahlavi’s chief strategist.
Ghasseminejad’s own statements go further than his institution’s published analyses. On April 8, 2026, he tweeted: “If the US decides to put boots on the ground, the regime’s ground forces will collapse pretty quickly. What we saw in the rescue operation showed a ground force that is both incompetent and demoralized.” This constitutes an explicit endorsement of a US ground invasion of Iran by Pahlavi’s most senior advisor. On April 13, 2026, he welcomed a naval blockade: “Great to see that President Trump has asked the US Navy to impose a blockade. This should have happened long ago.”
Perhaps most troublingly, Ghasseminejad has employed language that dismisses civilian casualties. On April 10, 2026, he wrote: “When they get killed, human rights organizations count them as minors and civilians. These ‘children’ have killed thousands of Iranians so far and they will kill more.” Placing “children” in scare quotes while dismissing human rights documentation represents a deeply problematic stance for someone designing a country’s democratic transition. He has also labeled Pakistan the “HQ of Sunni terrorism,” characterizing an entire nation of 230 million people with inflammatory rhetoric. The conflict of interest is structural: an employee of a think tank funded by pro-Israel donors and aligned with neoconservative US foreign policy priorities is simultaneously selecting personnel for a future Iranian government. As critic Jessica Emami argued in the Times of Israel, this dual role demands his resignation from the transition planning role.
Two major investigative reports published in 2025–2026 documented the extent of Israeli involvement in manufacturing support for Pahlavi’s political project. The first, published by Al Jazeera on January 15, 2026, analyzed the #FreeThePersianPeople hashtag campaign using Tweet Binder data analytics. The investigation found that 94 percent of 4,370 analyzed posts were retweets generated by a small network, while only approximately 170 accounts produced original content—yet the campaign reached over 18 million users. This massive disproportion between content sources and reach is the signature of astroturfing, not organic activism.
The campaign’s narrative was pre-packaged: it reframed Iranians’ economic and social grievances into a geopolitical binary (“The People vs. The Regime,” “Freedom vs. Political Islam”) and promoted Pahlavi as the sole political alternative. Israeli government figures participated directly—Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir posted in Persian calling for “the fall of the dictator,” and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s tweets were widely circulated within the network. Al Jazeera concluded that the campaign was “not a spontaneous digital expression of internal Iranian anger” but “a politicized information operation constructed outside Iran and led by networks linked to Israel.”
The second investigation, published by Haaretz on October 3, 2025, in collaboration with the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, provided even more granular evidence. Based on five sources with direct knowledge of the project, the investigation revealed that a large-scale digital influence campaign in Persian was operated out of Israel, funded by a private entity receiving government support. Native Persian speakers were recruited to operate hundreds of fake accounts on X and Instagram, posing as Iranian citizens. AI tools generated content including deepfake videos—one titled “Next Year in Free Tehran” depicted Netanyahu, Gila Gamliel, Pahlavi, and their spouses walking through Tehran’s streets.
The most damning evidence concerns the Evin Prison strike of June 23, 2025. At approximately 11:15 AM, Israel struck Tehran’s Evin Prison. By 11:52 AM—before Iranian media had reported the attack—network accounts began posting about “explosions in the prison area,” designed to appear as eyewitness reports from nearby residents. A fabricated video of the explosion was distributed; the New York Times later confirmed it was not authentic footage. Citizen Lab concluded: “We believe that while it is technically possible, it is highly unlikely that any third party without advance knowledge of the IDF’s plans would have been able to prepare this content and post it in such a short window of time.” Additional disinformation included a fake BBC Persian news report about senior Iranian officials fleeing the country, which BBC Persian confirmed it never published. This was the apparatus that Pahlavi pointed journalists toward when he said, “Don’t take my word for it, search on social media… The answer is right before your eyes”—social media that was being systematically manipulated by Israeli intelligence operations.
A chronological examination of Pahlavi’s public statements reveals contradictions that extend beyond normal political evolution into territory that raises fundamental questions about credibility. The most consequential concerns foreign military intervention. In April 2024, Pahlavi declared military action against Iran a “red line” (NCRI report). By February 2026, he told ABC News that he supported a “targeted attack” on Iran’s nuclear facilities and repressive apparatus, characterizing this as “humanitarian intervention to protect more lives.” On Fox News on February 28, 2026, he described US–Israeli strikes as “aid” to help Iranians topple the regime. Yet just weeks earlier, on January 6, 2026, he told the Wall Street Journal: “I don’t think it’s a matter of any kind of outside intervention, either a military or a special ops kind, because I think the regime is collapsing” (Jerusalem Post).
The monarchy question presents a parallel ambiguity. Pahlavi consistently states that the future form of Iran’s government must be decided by referendum (POLITICO). He has said, “I really don’t have any expectations because I think the most honorable label is no label… I am Reza Pahlavi” (Reddit, r/NewIran, April 2023). Yet he has never disavowed the possibility of monarchical restoration, his supporters chant royalist slogans at demonstrations, and the Israeli-operated social media campaign documented by Haaretz used the hashtag #KingRezaPahlavi. Meanwhile, his transition plan—authored by Ghasseminejad—pre-designates Pahlavi as head of the transitional government, with Ghasseminejad himself selecting its members. Critics, including a Times of Israel blogger, described the plan as creating “a vast power vacuum during the transition” while concentrating decision-making authority in the hands of an FDD employee.
On foreign government relationships, Pahlavi’s 2023 Israel visit—facilitated by then-Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel, who referred to him as “the Iranian crown prince”—occurred against the backdrop of what Haaretz would later reveal as an Israeli intelligence operation to manufacture support for his political project. As Israeli analyst Raz Zimmt of the Institute for National Security Studies observed, most Iranians want change but “are dreaming about leading a normal life, not the restoration of the monarchy,” and Israel’s open alignment with Pahlavi “reinforces Ayatollah Khamenei’s narrative that Israel and the U.S. want to turn Iran back into a monarchy and client state.” Publicly observable developments also suggested a pattern of fraying alliances: Masih Alinejad, Hamed Esmaeilion, and Nazanin Boniadi each took distance from Pahlavi’s political line, while his remaining circle appeared increasingly reliant on a narrower group of hardline advisers.
The evidence presented in this essay does not rest on speculation or rhetorical framing. It draws on two major investigative reports (Al Jazeera, Haaretz/Citizen Lab), verified social media statements with URLs, Pahlavi’s own interviews with mainstream outlets, and documented analyses from his chief advisor’s institutional platform. The picture that emerges is of an opposition leader whose political infrastructure is compromised at multiple levels: his chief strategist serves a foreign think tank whose institutional interests may diverge from Iranian welfare; his social media support base has been substantially manufactured by a foreign intelligence operation; and his public positions shift in ways that suggest responsiveness to external patrons rather than internal constituency.
For Iran’s future, the stakes are existential. A transition led by figures selected by an FDD employee, amplified by Israeli intelligence operations, and legitimized through manufactured social media consent would not constitute genuine self-determination. It would reproduce, under democratic branding, the very pattern of foreign-imposed governance that has defined Iran’s modern tragedy—from the 1953 coup to the present. The Iranian people deserve leadership whose independence is not a rhetorical claim but an observable fact, whose advisors serve Iranian interests rather than foreign institutional agendas, and whose popular support is organic rather than algorithmically fabricated. The methodological rigor of this assessment—every claim cited, every source verifiable—is itself the argument: when the evidence is allowed to speak without rhetorical embellishment, the case against Pahlavi’s leadership is stronger, not weaker, than the polemics suggested.
Investigative Journalism
Al Jazeera. (2026, January 15). “Network linked to Israel pushes to shape external Iran protest narrative.” Al Jazeera article
Megiddo, G. & Benjakob, O. (2025, October 3). “The Israeli Influence Operation Aiming to Install Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran.” Haaretz/TheMarker, joint investigation with Citizen Lab, University of Toronto. Haaretz article
Citizen Lab, University of Toronto. (2025). “Prison Break” report on pro-Israel Persian-language influence campaign. Published in tandem with Haaretz investigation.
Mainstream Media Interviews and Reports
ABC News Australia. (2026, February 27). “Crown prince Reza Pahlavi on US military intervention in Iran.” ABC News article
Fox News. (2026, February 28). “Reza Pahlavi calls US-Israel strikes aid to help topple Iran regime.” Fox News article
The Jerusalem Post. (2026). “Iran’s exiled prince: ‘The real threat is the regime itself.’” Jerusalem Post article
POLITICO Europe. (2025). “Reza Pahlavi: Iran’s exiled prince has a plan for regime change.” POLITICO article
El País (English). (2026, April 6). “Iranians respond to US threats to send them back to the Stone Age.” El País article
Iran International. (2026, February 14). “Pahlavi Urges West To Tighten Sanctions As Iran War Rages.” Iran International article
Social Media Sources (X/Twitter)
Ghasseminejad, S. [@SGhasseminejad]. (2026, April 8). “If the US decides to put boots on the ground…” View tweet
Ghasseminejad, S. [@SGhasseminejad]. (2026, April 10). “When they get killed, human rights organizations…” View tweet
Ghasseminejad, S. [@SGhasseminejad]. (2026, April 8). “As the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, HQ of Sunni terrorism…” View tweet
Ghasseminejad, S. [@SGhasseminejad]. (2026, April 13). “Great to see that President Trump has asked the US Navy…” View tweet
Ghasseminejad, S. [@SGhasseminejad]. (2026, April 10). “As long as the regime exists it will use Iran’s wealth…” View tweet
Emami, J. (2026). “The agenda behind FDD employee Saeed Ghasseminejad’s ‘Iran Regime Change’ booklet.” Times of Israel Blogs. Times of Israel blog
Atlantic Council. “The hidden friction with Reza Pahlavi and the Iranian opposition.” Atlantic Council article
Malakut Blog. (2025, May 26). “نگونبختی سیاسی رضا پهلوی” (The Political Misfortune of Reza Pahlavi). Malakut blog post
Foreign Policy in Focus. “The Pahlavi Mirage.” FPIF article
Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Team page: Saeed Ghasseminejad. FDD team page
——– Image: Iranian protest scene — solidarity demonstration for democratic self-determination in Iran. Photo credit: Unsplash (free to use under Unsplash License). Source: unsplash.com/iran-protest
The comprador’s primary instrument is a selective arithmetic of suffering. Confront them with 145 children killed in a school bombing, and the pivot is instantaneous: “But the regime hangs dissidents. The regime poisons rivers.” The deflection is not factually wrong—it is morally catastrophic. It implies that no colonised people may protest imperial violence until their own house is spotless—a logic that, applied consistently, would have justified every colonial occupation in history. As I noted in an earlier reflection on the emotional market of diaspora politics, this is suffering traded as currency—atrocities balanced on a ledger where foreign bombs always weigh less than domestic sins.
The type reveals itself most nakedly in moments of candour. A one-percent chance of regime change through war, the argument goes, is worth the near-certainty of mass death. This is not strategy. It is theology—a sacrificial economy in which compatriots’ bodies are tithed to a foreign saviour. Verhoeven would recognise the structure: in Black Book, the Dutch resistance leader Hans Akkermans sells Jewish refugees to the Nazis while posing as their protector. The comprador intellectual performs the same operation at a higher altitude—selling not bodies but legitimacy, furnishing imperial violence with an “authentic native voice.”
And yet. The human dimension cannot be amputated from the analysis. Many in the diaspora carry genuine scars: exile, dispossession, family severed by an authoritarian state. Their rage against the Islamic Republic is not theatre. The tragedy is that this legitimate grief has been instrumentalised—hijacked by a geopolitical machinery that cares nothing for Iranian lives. The comprador does not represent the diaspora’s pain; they monetise it. The distinction between criticising one’s government and providing air cover for its annihilation is not a fine academic line. It is the difference between the French Resistance seeking Allied arms to fight Nazism and a Vichy official handing Paris’s keys to the Wehrmacht while calling it liberation. As I have argued before, the regime’s imperfections do not grant anyone a licence to cheer for their own people’s destruction.
Verhoeven’s film ends with Rachel in a kibbutz—alive, but unredeemed. The collaborators have been punished; the righteous have not been vindicated. The zwartboek—the black book—is the ledger no one wanted opened. The Iranian diaspora faces its own black book now. The old paradigm—anchored to an imaginary West that promised deliverance—is collapsing. Those who lent their faces and voices to the machinery of destruction will find, as the Dutch collaborators found, that the master does not protect the house slave once the house burns down. The question is not whether Iran endures. It has, for three millennia. The question is whether those who traded in their people’s suffering can live with what they purchased.
And then comes his mocking reference to camel-riding bravado, aimed at those who confuse historical costume with contemporary strategy. He ridicules the macho pageantry of distant commentators who speak in epic tones while others count body bags. The point is brutal and simple: war is not a stage for identity theater. It is a machine that grinds ordinary people first and intellectual vanity second.
Abiz is equally unsparing toward another class of voices: those who took money and wrote about sanctions as if strangling civilians were sophisticated policy. For years they sold collective punishment as realism. They published pain with footnotes. They translated hunger into leverage. Now that open war has widened the damage, they want to re-enter the conversation draped in moral language.
He calls this posture pathetic, and the word fits because the smallness is moral before it is rhetorical. They helped normalize harm when harm could still be framed as pressure. Now they ask to be trusted as guardians of restraint. But reputations cannot be laundered with a softer tone. If you profited from cruelty in one register, you do not become humane by changing vocabulary in another.
This is why the outrage at hypocrisy matters beyond personal disgust. Political memory is part of political accountability. A discourse that forgets who advocated what, and for whom, will keep recycling the same architects of disaster. The pathetic move is not merely being wrong; it is insisting on moral authority after financing, narrating, or legitimizing policies that made civilians disposable.
So the necessary pivot is this: if we are against this cycle, what are we for? My answer starts with sequence. Until a permanent ceasefire exists, politics does not begin. Commentary begins. Branding begins. Tactical signaling begins. But politics, in the serious sense of negotiated, revisable, institution-bearing action, does not begin under active bombardment.
Ceasefire-first is not naivete and not cowardice. It is procedural realism. You cannot build credible bargaining while people are running for shelters, while emergency rooms are triaging by generator light, while every actor calculates only the next forty-eight hours. War rewards speed, fear, and spectacle; politics requires duration, trust gradients, and repeat interaction across disagreement.
That is why I reject the seductive lie that violence clears the ground for meaningful change. Violence clears people, not problems. It can topple structures, but it cannot by itself build legitimate replacements that outlast the adrenaline of victory narratives. A permanent ceasefire is the doorway, not the destination: the minimum condition under which hard political work can even be attempted.
War compresses time into impact, reaction, funeral, retaliation. It shrinks the horizon of thought to survival and revenge. Under that compression, every institution becomes an emergency instrument, every message becomes propaganda, and every critic is pressured to choose camp over truth. Compression is useful for generals and demagogues; it is lethal for social repair.
Reform expands time. It asks citizens and institutions to think in budgets, school years, court calendars, municipal plans, and constitutional horizons. It turns panic into procedure and rage into negotiable conflict. Reform is not the opposite of urgency; it is urgency disciplined by design. Where war demands immediate obedience, reform requires sustained accountability.
In diaspora language, people often say sustainable development when they are actually describing reform. Fine. Keep the phrase if it helps build coalitions. But be honest about substance: sustainable development without legal reform, administrative capacity, and political rights is branding, not transformation. The durable future everyone claims to want has a political architecture, and that architecture must be built deliberately.
My commitment is to long-term solutions that can survive beyond personalities, news cycles, and exile-era fantasies: institutions that function, rights that are enforceable, and a rule of law that binds both rulers and rivals. Anything less is temporary management of recurring crisis. Anything less leaves the country vulnerable to the next round of romanticized destruction from afar.
Institutions mean courts that can check power, municipalities that can deliver services, and budgets that can be audited by the public. Rights mean speech that does not require permission, association that is not treated as conspiracy, and due process that is not conditional on political loyalty. Rule of law means predictable limits, not selective punishment dressed up as national necessity.
This agenda is slower than revolution and less glamorous than war footage, which is precisely why it deserves trust. Slow work is how societies stop reliving the same catastrophe under new slogans. Long-term reform is not emotional retreat; it is strategic seriousness. It refuses to confuse catharsis with progress, and refuses to treat civilian suffering as a transitional cost.
So yes: put the blade down. Not because injustice is acceptable, but because the blade cannot build what justice requires. End the war, secure the ceasefire, and then begin the real labor of political reconstruction. The day after the guns fall silent is not epilogue; it is chapter one of responsibility.
When war ends, the performance must end with it. No more borrowed grief from safe distance, no more nostalgic fantasies marketed as destiny, no more moral laundering by yesterday’s sanction hawks. The task is sober and collective: build institutions, defend rights, enforce law, and keep doing it when cameras leave. That is how a country lives past war.
This is deflection elevated to a worldview. “I do not condone Mr President’s Stone Age comments,” the voice concedes, before adding: “but IRGC was already systematically driving us there.” The grammatical structure tells the story: the threat to annihilate a civilisation is a subordinate clause; the regime’s crimes are the main sentence. The bombed are made responsible for their own bombing. By this logic, no colonised people could object to colonisation so long as their own leaders were imperfect—a standard that would justify the bombardment of every nation on earth.
The type reveals itself most nakedly in moments of candour. On the programme, the following calculus was offered: if there is even a one-percent probability that this war could topple the Islamic Republic, one should take it—over “the guaranteed destruction that IRGC has been imposing on my country.” A one-percent chance of regime change is worth the near-certainty of mass death. This is not politics; it is theology—a sacrificial logic in which the faithful offer up their compatriots’ bodies for redemption by a foreign saviour who has explicitly promised to reduce the offering to rubble.
Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’ called this condition aborted modernity: the machinery of Western modernity imported without the critical consciousness to operate it autonomously. The comprador type absorbs the vocabulary of American liberalism—freedom, democracy, human rights—but severs these concepts from any analysis of the power structures that determine who gets to enjoy them. Human rights become a weapon against Tehran but never against Washington. Democracy means regime change from without, not a people’s sovereignty over its own fate.
Dabashi’s taxonomy, drawing on Fanon, Said, Malcolm X, and Memmi, traces the pathology of the colonised subject who internalises the coloniser’s gaze so thoroughly that she sees her own people through it. Memmi’s diagnosis deserves to be quoted:
The recently assimilated place themselves in a considerably superior position to the average coloniser. They push a colonial mentality to excess, display proud disdain for the colonised and continually show off their rank… Still too impressed by their privileges, they savour them and defend with fear and harshness; and when colonisation is imperilled, they provide it with its most dynamic defenders, its shock troops, and sometimes instigators.
The specimen on display in this broadcast was a professor of information systems—a discipline as remote from the philosophy of sovereignty as one could imagine. This is precisely the point. The native informer’s authority derives not from expertise but from identity: she is from there, she is now here, and she is willing to say what the bombers need said. The empire does not need her knowledge. It needs her face.
Multiplied across the diaspora, the comprador character constitutes the terminal stage of a paradigm whose bankruptcy is now undeniable. Vali Nasr has diagnosed it: a significant segment of exiled Iranians has been consumed by the desire “to be white”—to claim kinship with the civilisational mainstream of the West, to distance itself from the Global South to which Iran structurally belongs. The aspiration manifests in specific alignments: the embrace of Zionism, support for American military adventurism, the revival of pre-Islamic Aryan mythology as a credential for respectability.
But the order to which these figures pledge allegiance is itself in moral decomposition. We live in a post-Epstein era—an era in which Western liberal democracy has been exposed, from its intelligence agencies to its philanthropic networks, as harbouring predatory corruption at its core. To seek recognition from this order is not merely futile, as Dabashi argues via Dussel; it is self-negation in the service of a mirage. The imaginary whiteness collapses the moment the American president promises to bomb their homeland “back to the stone ages, where they belong.” No flag-waving, no alignment with the American right can purchase the ticket to civilisational belonging that was never on offer.
Dabashi’s distinction between hokoomat (the state apparatus) and hakemiyat (sovereignty residing in the nation) offers the exit from the paralysing binary in which the comprador character remains trapped. One can be fiercely critical of the Islamic Republic and simultaneously proud of national resilience under bombardment. The comprador type cannot hold both ideas because its intellectual operating system does not permit it. To criticise the regime is to endorse its destruction from without; to oppose the war is to support the regime. This is the most corrosive legacy of the self-other dichotomy.
Farzaneh exposed this on air with a single correction. When the comprador voice claimed ninety percent of Iranians supported the war, he responded: “The great majority of people inside Iran do not support bombs being dropped on their heads.” The statement is so obvious that its necessity reveals the depth of the delusion. The comprador has travelled so far from the field that she can no longer hear its voice—or, hearing it, dismisses it as regime propaganda.
The Copernican Revolution of the Iranian mind, as Dabashi calls it, has begun. The old centre—the imaginary West that once organised every axis of self-understanding—no longer holds. The comprador character belongs to the exhausted paradigm: not its architect but its symptom, the terminal expression of a borrowed modernity that could not survive contact with the reality it served. The stone ages to which Trump promised to consign Iran are the stone ages of his own moral imagination—a landscape in which entire civilisations can be reduced to rubble and their people called animals without consequence. The real question is not whether Iran will survive. It already has. The question is whether those who cheered for their own negation will have the honesty to reckon with what they endorsed—and what they failed to think.
And if you, the reader, recognise yourself in this character type—if you hear your own voice in its cadences, your own rationalisations in its logic, your own silence where condemnation of the bomber ought to have been—then the task before you is not defensive indignation. It is the far more difficult and more dignifying labour of rethinking, from the ground up, the entire edifice of assumptions upon which you have constructed your understanding of yourself and of the world. The hour is late, but the door is not yet closed.
• •
This essay draws on the transcript of The 21st Show (Illinois Public Media, 8 April 2026); Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks (Pluto Press, 2011); Hamid Dabashi, Iran Without Borders (Verso, 2016); Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’, Contemporary Arab Thought (Pluto Press, 2004); and the public remarks of Vali Nasr on the Iranian diaspora’s aspiration to whiteness.
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