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PODCAST

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

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13:05

A Thumb on the Fret

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/27

By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcastOn 21 September my colleague Rehana Virani filmed me at the Institute playing two short pieces on the setār, the Persian lute whose name means ‘three strings’. The first is Murgh-i Saḥar, the ‘Bird of Dawn’. The tune is by Murtaḍā Nay-Dāvūd, and the words, by the poet Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār, blame a tyrant and a hunter for a nest scattered to the wind. When Qamar al-Mulūk Vazīrī sang it at the Grand Hotel in Tehran in 1924, it was the first time a

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8:22

Three Days at the Rostrum

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/26

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Pezeshkian, Netanyahu and King Abdullah answering Washington at the eighty-first General Assembly, held to a single measure On Tuesday 22 September the President of the United States stood at the rostrum of the General Assembly and put a question to the world. Would there be a deal with Iran, ‘or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly?’ Then, in case anyone had missed it: ‘Do I drive them into hell with no chance of

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6:59

A Verdict Without a Court

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/23

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcastOn a call to arrest Iran’s president in New York, and the law it will not apply beyond him On 22 September, as delegations gathered for the General Assembly, Masih Alinejad posted an open challenge to the mayor of New York on her Facebook page. Zohran Mamdani, she wrote, had said that war criminals who set foot in the city should be arrested, and here was one: the president of the Islamic Republic, sleeping ‘five miles from your

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6:53

If You Are a Solid Rock

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/21

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcastOn Saturday, 19 September, supporters of the restoration of monarchy held a large gathering at Meridian Hall in Toronto, billed as ‘Cyrus the Great II’, to hear Reza Pahlavi; its organisers had announced a crowd of more than three thousand. The veteran singer Nooshafarin sang Ey Iran and made a terrible mistake in misreading one line, a particularly important one. Where the poem sets the enemy’s granite, khāra, against the singer’s

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7:55

The Atheist’s Soul

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/21

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast My wife, Elahe, noticed something in the way some atheists argue about artificial intelligence: a claim about human uniqueness that only a theology can pay for. The conversation happened at home, over tea, in a week when we had talked of little else. Elahe put an argument to me that I have not been able to set down since, and let me say at the outset that the point is hers and only the prose is mine. Her target was the strict camp, the

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7:00

Calm Down

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/20

By Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcastThis morning I sent a friend a short video. No note, no comment, nothing. In it Navīd Wahrāmān, a Pakistani writer, asks whether the Iranian diaspora’s hatred of Islam is justified. Pakistan had Zia-ul-Haq making prayer compulsory in government offices, and Afghanistan has a Taliban he calls less tolerant than the Islamic Republic, and neither diaspora turned on the religion in the same way, so repression does not explain it. Then, in his

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4:44

Thirty Days

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/20

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast We use the same platforms. Beyond that we have almost nothing in common, and the difference is not one of opinion. When I write about Iranian politics I am writing from somewhere. I have read the material and taught it for years, and I hold degrees in it. The positions I take are not moods. They are arguments I have made in public and can be made to defend in public, and I disagree with people openly because that is what an argument

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6:18

The Angels Were Right

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/19

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcastArtificial intelligence, the objection to creation, and what a myth can and cannot settleMichelangelo, The Creation of Adam, c. 1511, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican City. Photograph: Burkhard Mücke, 18 October 2017, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The objection arrives before the creature does. God tells the angels He is placing a khalīfa on earth, a deputy holding authority on another’s behalf, and they answer back before the

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5:51

The Widening Circle

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/18

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast Ask an Iranian exile why a mosque in Hamburg should be closed and you may be told about Evin prison. The chain feels unbreakable from the inside. The state that jailed my cousin calls itself Islamic; Islam is therefore the thing that jailed my cousin; anything Islamic anywhere is therefore the enemy. Each step feels like fidelity to the dead. At the last step the argument stops being one. I was asked to find the name for this. The

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6:29

A Ladder Is Not a Home

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/17

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast On the declaration of qiyāma at Alamūt, the doctors who stopped seeing, and the one gift we cannot afford to hand over Across four endoscopy centres, a piece of software was switched on. It watched the live feed of a colonoscopy and drew a box around anything that looked like a polyp. It worked. Then the researchers looked at what happened when the same doctors worked without it. In the three months before the software arrived they

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8:00

Compliance Is Not Innocence

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/16

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast On the two ways an institution abuses its own rules, and why following the process is not the same as being right. Nobody installs a handrail before somebody falls. That is the first thing to understand about an institution’s rules. Policies, procedures, declarations of interest: none of it was drafted by anyone with a taste for paperwork. Each clause is scar tissue. Behind it is an occasion when a decision went wrong, or was thought

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7:22

The Chain Above the Chair

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/15

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast On what Imam Ali asked of a governor, the rules an institution writes and then steps around, and why a charitable intention repairs nothing. An institution that will not keep the rules it wrote for itself is not being flexible. It is taking itself apart, quietly, with its own hands, and it will not notice until the work is done. Start with the puzzle rather than the outrage. Regulations, policies, processes, procedures: an institution

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7:25

The Word on the Placard

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/14

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast On Assal Rad’s Don’t Say Palestine, the memo that told reporters which words to avoid, and the test the book does not set for itself On 11 November 2023, on the march from Hyde Park to the American embassy, a family stood in the road holding a sheet of card. Someone had written on it by hand: ‘We’re watching a massacre.’ Two months later The Intercept published Adam Johnson’s count of more than a thousand articles in the New York

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9:53

Riding on the Shoulders of the Machine

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/13

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcastAI, ego, and the question the warnings skip For some months I have been turning over a hope. People routinely outgunned before bureaucratic systems – who lose for want of the right form of words rather than the right case – might climb onto the shoulders of these machines and see over the wall. Level the ground. Open a little more room for democratisation. Put a brake, perhaps, on the appetites of the firms that built the machines. I

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4:06

Remigration Includes You

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/09

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcastOn the Iranians cheering Europe’s far right, the word sitting in its manifesto, and the people that word names Iranians demonstrating outside the Alte Oper, Frankfurt, 17 February 2024. One placard reads ‘Die AfD ist keine Alternative für Deutschland – AFD Wählen ist so 1933’; the Persian placards call for the end of the Islamic Republic. Photograph: conceptphoto.info, via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. On Sunday the

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7:11

Nobody Argues From Nowhere

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/06

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcastThe charge turns up again and again: a scholar is not independent, because his faith enters his work. Behind it sits an old and appealing idea, that a mind stripped of its beliefs would simply see the truth laid bare. Karl Popper called this the doctrine of manifest truth: the notion that truth, once put before us plainly, announces itself.[1] Francis Bacon believed something close to it when he pictured nature as a book anyone could

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7:47

Far From the Mast

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/09/03

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcastOn the mast at Kuhestak, the map that put Tehran under a blast radius, and the test Iran International will not take A telecommunications mast stood near the shoreline at Kuhestak, in Sirik county, on the Hormozgan coast. On the evening of 1 September it was struck and came down across the road. A few paces away, in a private house, a wedding was in progress. A missile went through the roof and left a hole a metre and a half deep in

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8:22

Borrowed Eyes

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/08/30

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcastOn the two machines that manufacture Iran, the eighteen years that keep me from checking, and what Yaser Mirdamadi found when he went back. Fourth in the Narrating Iran series, drawn from Yaser Mirdamadi’s account of his return and argued by Daryoush Mohammad Poor I write about Iran from a position that is not the state’s, not the opposition’s and not the diaspora’s. It is an awkward place to stand, and I am asked often enough why I

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5:40

No Licence for Slander

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/08/29

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast On the difference between criticism and abuse, and what the Iranian diaspora has done with it It sounds like an obvious thing to say, and it is not. Telling criticism apart from cynicism takes training. It takes education. It takes a degree of self-discipline that nobody is born with and few of us are ever taught. Most of what follows is obvious in the same way, which is to say obvious once stated and almost universally ignored in

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8:08

A List Is Not a Law

The Twin Wisdoms ·

2026/08/27

PodcastBy Dr. Daryoush Mohammad Poor | The Twin WisdomsPodcast On the hundred names compiled in Tehran, the accusation waiting at the other end of the flight, and the guarantee neither side is offering On Thursday morning Mohsen Namjoo put out a video saying that by the time anyone watched it he would either be in the air or already on the ground in Tehran. He had been gone the better part of twenty years. Being near his family and his friends, he said, now mattered more to him than whether he

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