Shows / The Twin Wisdoms
The Twin Wisdoms
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…
Episodes
- The Twin Wisdoms
Can You – Really – Handle the Truth?
By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms What we do when a hard question is put to us, and why the gaze has to turn inward first. I have come across…
- The Twin Wisdoms
A Name to Work With
By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Popper’s two ways of reading a definition, and why the names I give on these pages stay open to revision I…
- The Twin Wisdoms
A Thumb on the Fret
Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On 21 September my colleague Rehana Virani filmed me at the Institute playing two short pieces…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Three Days at the Rostrum
Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Pezeshkian, Netanyahu and King Abdullah answering Washington at the eighty-first General…
- The Twin Wisdoms
A Verdict Without a Court
Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On a call to arrest Iran’s president in New York, and the law it will not apply beyond him On…
- The Twin Wisdoms
If You Are a Solid Rock
Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast On Saturday, 19 September, supporters of the restoration of monarchy held a large gathering at…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Atheist’s Soul
Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast My wife, Elahe, noticed something in the way some atheists argue about artificial…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Calm Down
Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast This morning I sent a friend a short video. No note, no comment, nothing. In it Navīd…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Thirty Days
Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast We use the same platforms. Beyond that we have almost nothing in common, and the difference…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Angels Were Right
Podcast By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin Wisdoms Podcast Artificial intelligence, the objection to creation, and what a myth can and cannot settle…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Widening Circle
Podcast Ask an Iranian exile why a mosque in Hamburg should be closed and you may be told about Evin prison. The chain feels unbreakable from the inside. The…
- The Twin Wisdoms
A Ladder Is Not a Home
Podcast On the declaration of qiyāma at Alamūt, the doctors who stopped seeing, and the one gift we cannot afford to hand over Across four endoscopy centres, a…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Compliance Is Not Innocence
Podcast On the two ways an institution abuses its own rules, and why following the process is not the same as being right. Nobody installs a handrail before…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Chain Above the Chair
Podcast On what Imam Ali asked of a governor, the rules an institution writes and then steps around, and why a charitable intention repairs nothing. An…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Word on the Placard
Podcast On Assal Rad’s Don’t Say Palestine, the memo that told reporters which words to avoid, and the test the book does not set for itself On 11 November…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Riding on the Shoulders of the Machine
Podcast AI, ego, and the question the warnings skip For some months I have been turning over a hope. People routinely outgunned before bureaucratic systems –…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Remigration Includes You
Podcast On the Iranians cheering Europe’s far right, the word sitting in its manifesto, and the people that word names Iranians demonstrating outside the Alte…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Nobody Argues From Nowhere
Podcast The charge turns up again and again: a scholar is not independent, because his faith enters his work. Behind it sits an old and appealing idea, that a…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Far From the Mast
Podcast On the mast at Kuhestak, the map that put Tehran under a blast radius, and the test Iran International will not take A telecommunications mast stood…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Borrowed Eyes
Podcast On the two machines that manufacture Iran, the eighteen years that keep me from checking, and what Yaser Mirdamadi found when he went back. Fourth in…
- The Twin Wisdoms
No Licence for Slander
Podcast On the difference between criticism and abuse, and what the Iranian diaspora has done with it It sounds like an obvious thing to say, and it is not…
- The Twin Wisdoms
A List Is Not a Law
Podcast On the hundred names compiled in Tehran, the accusation waiting at the other end of the flight, and the guarantee neither side is offering On Thursday…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Two Kinds of Certainty
On the seventy-third anniversary of the 1953 coup, a reflection on the arrogance that ended Mohammad Mossadegh’s government, and the different arrogance that…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Breaking the Mirror
Podcast A Verse, and a Warning Nizami Ganjavi wrote, in the Makhzan al-Asrar eight centuries ago, that when the mirror has shown your reflection true, you…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Neither Rogue Nor Obedient
Podcast Two positions on artificial intelligence, and the question both leave standing In Brief The alarm has hold of something the reassurance waves away…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Middle Nobody Counts
Podcast On Radio Farda’s Pārāgrāf-i Avval, the Madani–Bayat correspondence, and the part of Iran that no one has counted Radio Farda’s programme Pārāgrāf-i…
The Twin WisdomsIslam or Muslims?
Podcast Image: folio from a manuscript of the Quran, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto An argument is circulating, and it deserves a straight answer. It runs like this…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Who Holds the Rope
Podcast On capital punishment in Iran, the argument the opposition will not make, and the one the Muslim tradition already supplies An iron scaffold went up in…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Rock and the Library
Podcast Date: 13/09/2003 | Photo: Mohammad Mahmoudi |Copyright: © ACHB On the inscription of Alamut, and the inheritance the citation does and does not name…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Three Thousand Five Hundred
Podcast On 25 July 2026, Morad Vaisi published a number. Vaisi is senior Iran analyst at Iran International and host of its flagship politics programme. Since…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Love of the Microphone
PodcastOn Masih Alinejad’s theatre of grief, the platforms that reward it, and the war she now says she never wanted. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Somebody Else’s 1945
PodcastOn the Nazi analogy, the Iranians who reach for it from abroad, and the state that made it plausible Aftermath of overnight US strikes on a bridge in…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Nobody Wants to Go to War
Podcast On a corridor interview of 21 July 2026, and the verb that carries a war A journalist puts one question to three United States senators: the President…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Table and the Ledger
Podcast On Sada Cumber’s ‘Iran at the Crossroads’ (National Security Institute), and what would tell us the turn is real A crossroads implies a traveller…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Ledger of Ali Khamenei
Podcast Ali Khamenei held the office of Supreme Leader for thirty-six years. He inherited a republic that was bruised, broke, and at war, and he left behind a…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Nobody Is Free to Stay
Podcast The programme opens in Istanbul, at a reading of the Shahnameh. Fifty thousand couplets, a thousand years old, recited aloud by Iranians far from home…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Grief You Can Afford
PodcastOn Reza Pahlavi’s sudden mourning for the conscripts of Bampour, and the children of Minab he was willing to call a price This week you asked Iran’s…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Bargaining by Fire
Podcast The funeral has ended, the firing has resumed, and the next fortnight will decide whether the June understanding can be rebuilt. It can, and it…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Flag in the Stands: On the Monarchist Abuse of the Lion and Sun
PodcastThe Lion and Sun has been systematically claimed by Iran’s monarchist restoration movement, which deploys it as a pre-Islamic or anti-Islamic identity…
- The Twin Wisdoms
A Proxy for Thought
Podcast The word arrives early and does its work quickly. In almost every account of the latest exchange of fire between Iran and Israel, “proxy” appears…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Not by the Back Door
Podcast Pluralism, universalism, and the difference that both relativism and perennialism would erase When I argued recently that pluralism is not relativism…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Pluralism Is Not Relativism
Podcast Sada Cumber is right that Magnifica Humanitas is “a strategic signal,” and right again that “societies cannot be secured by capability alone.” Where I…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Trading in Pain, After the Ceasefire
Podcast Revisiting the Moral Market Where I Started In March, before the ceasefire, I argued that the gap between Iranians inside the country and those abroad…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Whose Infrastructure, Whose Celebration?
Podcast On Reza Pahlavi’s Odesa narrative and the laundering of a war’s human cost In Odesa last week — at a forum convened on the principle that bombing a…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Dead Air: A Throne on Subscription
Podcast Manoto, Foreign Money, and the Constituency That Was Never There When Manoto television ceased satellite broadcasting on 31 January 2024, the event…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Built from Scratch
Podcast On the Equation That Turns a Nation Into Acceptable Rubble Do we distinguish between Iran and the Islamic Republic? Are they one and the same? It…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Abdication of Critical Thinking: Why Scholars Abandon Rigour in Politics
Podcast A paradox haunts contemporary intellectual life, one that demands we examine ourselves with uncomfortable honesty. Here stands a senior scholar in the…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Architecture of Cruelty
Podcast SAVAK, State Torture, and the Dangerous Nostalgia of Forgetting In cities across the West—Los Angeles, London, Munich, Regensburg—a strange phenomenon…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Thesis Without a Scaffold
Podcast A Critique of the Iran Ledger’s “Sanctions as Market Control” I have spent the better part of a decade building an analytical framework that demands…
- The Twin Wisdoms
When Language Fails: Vulgarity, Silence and the Unfinished Conversation
Podcast I was there—present online—when Dr. Fatemeh Sadeghi and Hossein Hamdieh, speaking from London and Tehran respectively during Iran’s internet blackout…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Signal Through the Blackout
Podcast In a recent ninety-minute conversation with Sobhan Yahyaei for the Farsi Panorama podcast — the inaugural episode of a season titled Life in a Time of…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Finding Light in the Darkness
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…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Our Future Is Not Their Past
Podcast Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, MS arabe 5847, folio 1v. Illuminator: Yaḥyā ibn Maḥmūd al-Wāsiṭī. Baghdad, 634 AH / 1237…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Beyond the Pause
Podcast Image: Delegates during the Islamabad talks on the US–Iran track, April 2026. Credit: Reuters. A Dialogue with Ambassador Sada Cumber Ambassador Sada…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Voice to What End?
Podcast The placard is simple, humane, and emotionally irresistible: “Be their voice.” At first glance, who could object? If people are censored, jailed…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Iranian Abroad: A Shift the Diaspora Has Not Registered
Podcast A pro-monarchy demonstrator in Glasgow holds a placard that includes a reference to SAVAK. The event, on February 28, 2026, was a rally celebrating…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Normalcy We Must Defend
Podcast Hazrati Alley in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, April 2011—captured just before the most stringent international sanctions were imposed. The image shows the…
- The Twin Wisdoms
The Algorithmic Militia
Podcast Photo: Getty Images / CNN How Curated Certainty Replaces Political Consciousness in the Digital Diaspora A message arrived recently on social media—the…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Authority Without Territory
Podcast Source: Originally published in The Ismaili UK, July 2015. | View at The Institute of Ismaili Studies Author: Dr Daryoush Mohammad Poor, Interim Head…
- The Twin Wisdoms
Nizārī Ismailis: History, Geography, and Beliefs
Podcast Source: Illinois Geographer, Vol. 65 (Fall/Spring 2023, No. 1-2) Abstract: This article examines the history, geographical distribution, and doctrinal…