Rev Left Radio - From Persia to Iran: Islam, Empire, and the Politics of West Asia

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

In this episode, Breht interviews Adnan Husain -- Professor of Medieval history and Chair of the Religious Studies department at Queens college -- about the deep historical roots of today's Middle East. The conversation traces the arc from ancient Persia to the Islamic era, explores how Iran became a center of Shi'a Islam, and examines the long rivalry between Persian and Ottoman power. Along the way, they unpack the Sunni-Shia split, the political role of Turkey in the region, the ways Western narratives about Islam were forged through the Crusades and carried forward into the modern world, Zionist Expansionism, and the ongoing illegal war of aggression waged by the U.S. and Israel against Iran, and indeed, the whole region. Check out Adnan's previous appearences on Rev Left HERE Subscribe to Adnan's YouTube channel HERE Watch Adnan's 2 Part episode on Yemen HERE Listen to Guerrilla History podcast HERE --------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get bonus episodes on Patreon Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow RLR on IG HERE Learn more about Rev Left HERE

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. All right. Today we are going deep into the history of Iran slash Persia, of West Asia in general, the Ottoman Empire. We're talking about the Sunni-Shi-Shea split in Islam, going back all the way to its inaugural split and how it continues to influence and inform geopolitics in the region and throughout. We talk about the current war in Iran, trying to connect this. deep history of both Islam as well as these empires in the region two current day geopolitical maneuvering we talk about the greater Israel project the the ambiguous and influx position of modern day Turkey in relation to Iran as well as Israel we talk about Naftali Bennett's recent comment about Turkey is the new Iran and what that might portend for relations

going forward and interestingly the pressure it puts on NATO The idea that Israel and Turkey could be in any way, shape, or form in direct conflict in the future, would just be another nail in the coffin of NATO, which is already barely hanging on in so many different ways. And I just think this is a fascinating exploration of a deep history with a genuine expert. Not only is Adnan an expert. Medieval Western Asian history, but he's also an expert on Islamic history. And he weaves those two things together seamlessly. in this tour day force of historical explanation and analysis as we connected up to modern day,

the modern day situation as it were. But also he's been on the ground. He spent lots of time in Turkey and Istanbul in particular and throughout the country. And only a couple months ago, he recently had a chance to go to Tehran in between the 12-day war and the sort of protest. They got infiltrated by Mossad that occurred a few months back. In between that time. So just a couple months in between those two monumental moments in Iranian history, he was able to go and spend some time in Tehran and explore the city in depth. And so not only does he have this scholarly knowledge and expertise and background to draw on, but he's also somebody who has spent time, lots of time in the region and in these particular countries.

And as historical materialists, we have the burden, but also the joy of learning as much about history as we possibly can. to inform and fill out our analysis, right? A core claim of dialectical and historical materialism is that there is no separation between the history and the present. To understand the present, you must understand the history. And the deeper knowledge that we have of history, the better our analysis in the contemporaneous realm, right, can possibly be. And this is a great way to fill out that knowledge.

But also, and this is so important, something I say up front, we should be curious. We should fall in love with the histories of these cultures of Islam in the region and throughout the world, how these things evolved separately. The Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, learning about that stuff is fucking fascinating in its own right. And when we're led by a ruling class that is brutish and ignorant and knows absolutely nothing about nothing, right that treats Islam as monolithic that treats the people in the region as monolithic if you ask Pete Heggseth you know who are two non-Arab Muslim countries in the region could he even come up

with Turkey and Iran does he even know the difference really could he extemporaneously opine on the difference between Sunni and Shia and what it actually manifests like on the ground no Trump even understand these words that I'm saying right now no they are ignorant and they're not even curious about their own ignorance. And that is an incredibly dangerous situation when some of the most ignorant people our society could ever vomit up are also the richest and most powerful people. Not only in our country, but because of the U.S. as Hege and Monstantis, declining as it is, have run roughshot over the planet.

And Iran and the Axis of Resistance have and continue to stoically and courageously and heroically fight back against this imperialist, colonialist, brutal capitalist, U.S. Israel, Fourth Reich Empire that is trying to drown these ancient societies in blood, right? Persia is a civilization that goes back thousands and thousands of years, right? Islam is a religion that goes back thousands of years. And these young countries, these young settler colonial monstrous creations of European colonialism are stomping on the throats of these ancient civilizations in an effort to take over this entire region and subordinated to U.S. imperial interests and the fanaticism of greater Israel

advocates. And so now more than ever, we not only come to the defense of the people in the region as they fight against this brutal imperialist and colonialist machinery, but we open up our hearts in our minds to these people and we refuse to have our minds closed into this little war on terror box where Islam is a monolith and the people in the region are a monolith and they're all just underdeveloped people who have been at each other's throats forever. It's savage rhetoric, right? The colonialist narratives around savagery. It's that exact same rhetoric being employed in the 21st century under the guise of this war on

terrorism propaganda. that has been beaten into the Western mind specifically after 9-11, but even well before that, as we all know. And so this is a deconstruction of ignorance. If you can sit through two and a half hours of this fascinating rich history told by an absolute expert

with real genuine connections to the region and to the religion in question, you will come out the other end, a more informed person and a more human person because the more we know about the story of humanity, I feel like in a lot of ways, the more human we are, right? The more we understand ourselves in the context of these great civilizations and this millennia-long

civilizational history that covers the entire planet, which is our species. So, you know, lock in. This is going to be fascinating. And I can't thank Adnan enough for coming on the show and sharing all of his wisdom with us. It's really, it's stunning this episode. so it is genuinely stunning. So as always, if you like what we do here, you can support us at RevLeft. Patreon.com forward slash Rev. Left radio in exchange for $5 a month. You not only support real independent media, but you help put food on the table with me and David's families, and we deeply appreciate it.

All right, without further ado, here is my wonderful conversation with Professor Adnan Hussein on Persia, the Ottoman Empire, modern Iranian state, Islam, the Sunni-Shiah divide, and so much more. I'm Adnan Hussein, a professor of medieval Mediterranean and Islamicate world history at Queens University. And I'm also a host of a show on YouTube. My channel is at Adnan Hussein show. And I'm also co-host of Gorilla History podcast. Oh, yeah.

And people will be familiar with guerrilla history. I was a longtime co-host of that show as well. You guys are still doing great work. Highly recommend people check that out and subscribe to your channel. channel. Adnan is obviously a fan favorite. You've been here a million times. We had a whole show for several years together. So I'm positive. Rev. Left listeners will be familiar with you. And I just wanted to first, like, kind of lay out why I wanted to have you on and what kind of discussion I wanted to have. So obviously, we're over two weeks in to the brutal war of aggression launched by Israel and the U.S. against Iran. Iran is fighting back valiantly. In some ways, I think Iran was underestimated. by the U.S. and Israel and Iran is not backing down. They know that a ceasefire or a new round of negotiations is just another fig leaf for Israel and the U.S. to recuperate and kind of, you know, build back up to launch another attack.

Negotiations have been used several times as cover for, you know, belligerents and attacks. So Iran has learned that lesson in particular. But what I wanted to do differently here is I wanted to flesh out some of the history. when I hear people talk about Iran, regular people, you know, the Americans now trying to make sense of what's going on at work or wherever I find myself, people have a monolithic, often very bigoted view of Islam that comes out of the war on terror and the propaganda pushed upon Americans since the war on terror. And before, let's be honest, you talk about the crusading society, we'll get into it. It's embedded in a lot of ways in Western culture. we've talked about Edward Said's Orientalism and all these things are very much at play here. I've always said that Israel, in lieu of you supporting Israel outright, they will settle for you hating Muslims because that still serves their interests.

And we see that full-on propaganda swing online in particular. So what I wanted to do is let's flesh out some of this history. Let's talk about Islam, the Sunni, Shia split, stuff like that so people can have better grounding in that history to make more sense of the president. And I also wanted to bring in Turkey into this conversation, not least because they're a major regional power. You've spent lots of time in Istanbul in particular and throughout the country, so you have really on the ground experience with regards to Turkey. And there was a comment by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recently that I thought really is something we should focus on. It kind of got washed out of the news cycle. But the quote was, Turkey is the next Iran.

And coming from an Israeli head of state, we all know what that means. that they seek to destroy Iran and the next they will turn their genocidal expansionist glare over towards Turkey as the actual last perhaps remaining regional threat to the greater Israel project and more or less Israeli hegemony. So that's why I thought it'd be important to bring in the history and present state of Turkey into this discussion, which is often not discussed in the current situation. So before I get into the first question, I just want to toss it back over to you for any opening thoughts or your thoughts on any of that?

Well, firstly, Brett, I want to thank you so much for inviting me to come on again. I always love our conversations and all the episodes we've done together either when we were co-hosting or when I've been privileged to be a guest on Rev Left Radio. And I really also have to commend you for your conception of the episode because I think you put your finger on a few key components that are often lacking. even in, you know, really wonderful colleagues and comrades doing great anti-imperialist discussions on, you know, alternative left media. But that there are some issues that don't get as much attention. I think you put your finger on several, including the historical background,

also the Islamophobia and allied kind of dimensions of racism, orientalism, that frankly contributed to exactly what you were summarizing in the very beginning. which is the underestimating, maybe we should say misunderstanding and underestimating. So to use the glorious phrase of George W. Bush, misunderestimating of Iran, right? And that is kind of a feature of what we've been witnessing is that it is shocking to the Western colonialist, imperialist imagination that Iran could, A, survive the, assassination, martyrdom of its supreme leader and many from among the governing political and military class without then falling apart because they wouldn't know what to do and without their

kind of oriental despot leader would be helpless and paralyzed in this shock and awe demonstration of U.S. Israeli, Zio-American air power. That's one kind of component that they just couldn't really anticipate that and are having a difficult time processing that that mis-underestimation has now led them into a very dramatic and serious situation of a long-term conflict. So I think absolutely some of the things that need to be focused and also the history. We have heard Iranian officials from, you know, the president, Mahmoud, Pezeshkian to the charismatic foreign minister who's getting a lot of aura vibes. People are really digging what he's doing on media. Arachchi. And I believe Ali Larijani, head of the sort of top official

of the National Security Council and others, have all emphasized a very interesting thing to say, when facing war from contemporary United States is to say, we have a 6,000-year history. It seems to matter to them. There have been very few people who have really bothered to explore what does that mean. What is the consequence of being such a long-lasting culture, civilization, and polity for much of it being its own political entity when it comes now to attacking it and imagine. that you could have regime change, as if a regime is just a kind of epiphenomenon sitting on top of the society, but isn't deeply rooted and embedded in that society, in that culture, and in a longer history that has its own consequences if you attempt to attack, subordinate, subjugated, right?

So I think these are two really important kind of components, appreciating Iran's history and recognizing the Islamophobia, racism and Orientalism that has guided a lot of the propaganda, but more than just the propaganda and the portrait of Iranis and other Muslims and peoples of the region, but also the, you know, I don't want to put it as mistakes, so we don't want them to be good at this, but the ways in which their own racism has prevented them from really understanding the situation and actually being able to have an effective plan and are confronted with all of these surprising

realities, that they occluded reality, you know, as a result of that racism. Absolutely. Totally well said. And yeah, the Iranian culture, Persian culture goes back, as you said, millennia. It's really one of the crown jewel civilizations in human history.

And these little settler colonial upstarts, right? America 250 years old. Israel, not even 80 years old yet. you know the arrogance the belligerence the violence the bigotry to blow up and destroy and try to suffocate in blood this this longstanding again crown jewel of human civilization this deep culture of art and architecture and philosophy and science which none of these people know anything about certainly not in the u.s administration i mean these are some of the most incurious ignorant pig freaks on the planet

it and and sometimes just talking to regular people because of the Islamophobia that is just embedded in our culture they have this vision of Iran as if it was like this desert you know underdeveloped kind of in Trumpian term shithole country and I'm like do you have any idea how developed this this civilization is right it is a fully developed fully modern tech techno civilization and and and I think that that plays into the underestimation of of them and not only their strength, but their contributions to human civilization. So before we get into the first question, I also just want to ask you one more question regarding your travels and expertise.

So can you just remind people of why you in particular are a good guest for this sort of conversation? Well, I mean, I can think a lot of colleagues who also could do it, and I'm not a modern Iran specialist. I'm a medieval historian, the medieval Mediterranean and Islamicate worlds, as I said, what does that mean? It means I'm interested in interactions between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the pre-modern period and Islamicate history that is the diverse histories of pre-modern Muslim lands, and that include, of course, Persia and, you know, what is today modern Iran and connected regions, you know, stretching from Central Asia to, you know,

central Islamic lands of what we think of as the Middle East or West Asia in Iran, Iraq, and the Levant and so forth. So I've, you know, had a chance to spend some time in the region, mostly in Turkey, as you've mentioned, fairly recently, did a lot of studies of Arabic in Arab countries, Syria, Tunisia, have visited Egypt, Jordan, quite a number of Morocco, quite a number of the Arab countries.

But in fact, point of fact, despite having studied Persian and Persian Sufi mysticism for my dissertation and in graduate school, because of the Islamic Revolution, the sanctions and the, you know, very difficult, you know, diplomatic relations between Iran and United States, all on the side, really, of the United States, kind of making it difficult, banning people from going. If you, you know, travel to Iran, it used to be, you know, something that, you know, could conceivably

violate sanctions or violate U.S. kind of rules about your use of your passport, so on. So it was difficult. And other places where they spoke Persian, like Afghanistan, have been subject to war for so many years, both the global war on terror and before that. civil war and before that, of course, the jihadi kind of insurgency against the Soviets in Afghanistan. So you couldn't really go to Afghanistan, Tajikistan in the post-Soviet period, which is when I would have been interested where they also speak a kind of Persian language and had been a Soviet socialist republic in the past, but in its post-Soviet phase was having civil war. and so it was like very difficult to go somewhere in this broader persianate world that wasn't under

you know kind of conflict and devastation or sanction so last uh december actually was the first time i actually visited iran and it was really a fascinating opportunity to go with a friend and colleague from graduate school who is a modern iran historian Iranian historian who was going And he said, well, you know, you're going to be in Turkey, Istanbul. Why don't it's easy flight. Why don't you come and join me for a week? And so I said, when am I going to get a chance? And also, I don't know, you know, what the situation is going to be with this crazy U.S. Empire, you know.

And in fact, even then it was considered quite dangerous to be going then after the June war in June, July, 2025. But I took the chance, and I'm so glad I did, to be able to connect. connect, you know, what I've read, what I've studied, make it less of an abstract place of historical interest and contemporary political interest, but a living place in my experience. And so I did have that opportunity recently, and I can talk a little bit about what it was like right before the protests started just five days after I departed. Wow. You know. You really hit an interesting window there because things before and after really,

escalated. Yes. Yeah, like, you know, Tehran, these are cities that are the top of my list for like dream vacations and explorations. What cities did you visit before we get into the questions? I'm just curious. Unfortunately, because it was a short visit and I was kind of going with a friend who, you know, had things to do in Tehran, we stayed in Tehran and we kind of did sort of the anti-imperialist tours of Tehran going to visit the former U.S. embassy, which is now a museum. dedicated to U.S. espionage. It's called the Jasus Khan, the Den of Spies. And so you can see, like, you know, the back rooms where the CIA cryptography and like where the satellite and surveillance information came in and all that. And we went to other places like the war museum, which really is

beyond just the Iranian-Iraq War, but really tells the modern history of Iran, but it's an incredibly good museum, like with very intense, immersive kind of exhibitions and things. It was so well done. I was extremely impressed with it as a museum. And so we did things like that and explored the city. I definitely must. And if I get a chance and God willing, there won't be terrible damage to these incredible historic UNESCO World Heritage sites in Isfahan.

but that's the city I most want to visit in Iran next. Well, that's wonderful. So we have a background in the deep history, the medieval history of these countries and also on the ground experience, limited in Iran, but still meaningful and recent, and then much more time in Turkey itself. So that's why I wanted to have you on for this conversation. I think you're the perfect guest, and we always have wonderful conversation. So let's go ahead and move into the direction of the outline itself, which kind of starts with

the deep history. We don't need to be super, you know, detailed here. We don't need specific dates as much as the broad thrust of Persian history, and then we'll get into Turkish history as well. And maybe even before we get into that, it might be worth saying something about the difference between Persia and Iran, because Iran is a modern nation state with many nationalities and ethnicities. Persia is a sort of a different thing in particular, so maybe you can clarify that? But then my first question would be, can you kind of walk us through the broad historical arc from ancient Persia to the Islamic era? how the Persian world was transformed after the, you know, engagement or the, you know, the Arab Muslim

conquest, et cetera. Yeah. And I think really it's related, this kind of broader question of Persia versus the modern nation state in its current territorial boundaries of Iran is kind of related to that earlier and deeper history of pre-Islamic Persian Empire. So there are the Persian people, Persian-speaking peoples, mostly situated in five. province and Hora San, these parts of what is today Iran, but on the basis of the long-settled agricultural civilization in the Iranian highlands and particularly in this province of Hora-san, a strong integrated polity was formed that managed then to integrate a lot by conquest and other things, a lot of other peoples into these Persian empires, the most famous and very long-lasting,

one of which the Achaemenid Empire in the Bronze Age of History that people will remember, you know, was a great, well, it's framed from the Western perspective as a great rival of the Greek cities, but in fact, actually, these are vast, you know, domains. And, you know, these Greek cities, states on the peninsula were, you know, a kind of border limit, you might say, of where the Persian Empire stretched. But it included at different times almost all of what we think of as the contemporary West Asian, Middle East, including at some points, you know, in, you know, territory of what today would be Egypt, all the Levant, southern, you know, all of Antarctica.

and parts of many parts of the Balkans all the way stretching, of course, Iraq, Iran, today these modern nation states, and further into Central Asia in, you know, the steplands, close to the steplands, and the former, what are now known as the former Soviet socialist republics of places like Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan that I mentioned earlier, and Uzbekistan, that these were all part of different Persian empires expanse. And so there were Persian peoples who were settled in these areas, and they spoke Persian for some kind of variant and dialect of old Iranian, old Persian, before later developments and transformations and changes in the language.

So they were kind of affiliated in the ancient world with the Akimid Empire and other empires in the more recent kind of antique past as a rival to the Romans, you have, for example, the Parthian Empire, which is just a different dynastic group, but containing many of the similar kind of lands. And after Parthian Empire's passing, you have the Sasanian Empire, which is the immediately pre-Islamic ruling kind of superpower. empire that actually was a serious rival to Rome, to the Eastern Roman Empire, sometimes called the Byzantine Empire, maybe more commonly centered in its capital in Constantinople. After it was sort of divided and severed from the western part of the Mediterranean, it situated itself in Anatolia, what is modern-day Turkey, and ruled much of the Levant through what is today's Palestine, Syria, Jordan, you know, northern part of the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt and,

you know, parts of North Africa, right? That's the Byzantine Empire in its heyday, and its great rival was the Sasanian Empire, which had its capital in very close to what is today, Baghdad in modern day Iraq and further east. And so we had basically two competing empires that were fundamentally situated one around the Anatolian kind of highlands and the other, the Iranian plateau. And the sort of regions between them in what we think of as the Middle East today were kind of a contested zone, you know, where they had lots of wars, they competed for influence. But my point here would be about Iran and about Persian, these Persian empires, is, that this is one, a long history of organized political formations. These were polities, whether

empires or other kinds of states that have existed, you know, for a very long period of time, a couple, you know, thousand years, you could say, perhaps to the, you know, period of the common era, you know, like, you know, the birth of Christ era, right? Is you've got, you know, at least, you know, a thousand, you know, years, a very recognized and probably longer, you know, of polities that were ruling, major empires that organized life. What's interesting about Cyrus the Great, you know, this Ekemenid Empire, he's one of the most famous kind of figures, Hosro in Persian, but Cyrus the Great, is that he created a kind of concept of universal empire, politically speaking, that accommodated and had a place for all these diverse peoples with their diverse practice of worship

and different gods and deities and pantheons and languages and cultures. Nonetheless, they were all part of the Achaemenid empire. And the great emperor or ruler, you know, it redounded to, you know, his glory that he had all these peoples as part of his empire. He didn't try and eradicate the difference. he didn't try and change their religion. As long as they were loyal subjects to this empire, you could have a multi-religious, multicultural, multilingual kind of empire.

And that's something quite interesting, which we see is not so common in modern nation state or, I would say, in forms of empire, colonial empires that are built upon exclusivist political kind of identity. You have to be a, you know, Britain, you know, you have to be an Englishman to be, you know, in the ruling kind of strata of the British Empire, right? That kind of thing. This was a very different model, is this big land-based empire that encompassed many of these different peoples.

And that kind of continues to go forward through the Parthians and so on. There's a little bit of a change with the Sasanians. But I want to make one other kind of, you know, key point here. is that also they had forms of governance and administration as a result of this. And so this will be valuable when we think of the contemporary situation when Iranian diplomats and political officials and leaders are saying, you know, we have this long history in a way they're also referring to a long history and tradition of statecraft.

They were rulers for many years. And then, you know, after fortunes, political fortunes changed, they still, and this is something I want to say about coming into the Islamic era, they still, and we'll transition to that in a moment, they still, even if they weren't the military class rulers or the ruling dynasts, you know, the sultans or the caliphs, they very often were the heart of the bureaucracy, the people who actually governed the state, organized it, figured out how you keep records, taxes, who were in the chancery. So when it came to the written documents for correspondence with other rulers or with subordinates and governors, the people who wrote these kind of important missives and statements and

declarations and administrative type documents were a Persian bureaucratic class. And they are, therefore among the people who would give wise advice to Arab or Turkic, we'll come to that era in the medieval period where these rulers were, you know, ethnically different, you know, Turks or Arabs earlier, the ones who gave them wise advice about the traditions of rule and governance, how to be wise and just rulers, how to, you know, correspond in diplomacy and conducted diplomacy. And even advice about things like, you know, how do you get information from the rest of your society?

You know, they didn't have a surveillance state like we have today where basically we're all providing information about everything we're doing and the government can collect it and figure out everything they want to know about us to better rule and govern and also figure out where are the challenges to their rule, where's the sources of rebellion, who might be a dissident, et cetera. And they can crack down on you, right? Well, that was difficult when you didn't have these modern technologies, but nonetheless, they had state capacities and they thought about this question and problem. So they would give advice for things like, well, use the Sufis. They wander around, the dervishes. Use merchants and make sure, you know, that you have a good relationship with those people because they go out in society.

And if you need to know what's happening in XYZ province and you don't believe that your governor is really telling you the full story or is trying to hide things, you need other sources of information. So when it came to statecraft, when it came to diplomacy, when it came to how you organize your affairs and are a wise ruler, even if they weren't the ruler, they have a tradition of governance and being part of sovereign states, right? So for all this time period, I guess I should say something about, you know, what happens when these ancient Sasanian, Parthian Akimid, you know, these ancient empires in the late antique period in the six, seventh, and eight centuries where there are the rise of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula,

and there is a spreading of Muslim political power through conquests and border conflicts with both the Sasanian Empire and the Roman Byzantine Empire that leads then to a new polity being founded, the question is, okay, what changes? Very often, it's portrayed and characterized that this was some radical departure because now there are Arabs, Arabic speaking people with a new religion, and a religion that is particularly the almost exclusive religion of this ruling, governing, political and military class, that this must be some kind of radical, and departure from everything that happened before. And a lot of times people mistake political dynasties with, you know, being descriptors of what's

happening in society, in culture, and so on, when they are just a small ruling strata, right, at the top, a lot of things just simply don't change, which is one reason why, in fact, many of the Eastern Christians who were not part of the Greek official Greek Orthodox Church welcomed, or at least weren't going to put up resistance when the Arab Muslims came as new rulers because they were being oppressed by the Byzantine Orthodox Church. And so they welcomed the opportunity to just continue doing what they wanted to do in terms of organizing their forms of worship and their communities under their, you know, religious authorities. And so there was an awful lot of continuity between the pre-Islamic and,

you know, Islamic eras in the ancient Near East. And let's try and understand exactly why that might be the case. Well, Islam emerged from the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula who were really outside of the settled regions that had developed cities and these larger scale political structures. So when they came, they, you know, and managed to conquer these areas, they didn't want to disrupt the agricultural wealth and the society that was producing, you know, surplus. You know, they didn't, you know, replace populations, you know, get rid of them. And they also, in fact, didn't even, at least initially, seemed to be all that interested in converting them. It was more like this is our specific unique kind of military class religion

for the Arab peoples who have, you know, come and are now this ruling kind of strata. They left everything more or less in place. And in fact, they used the bureaucracies that already existed in the provinces for administering Eastern Roman lands in the Levant, Syria, Egypt, etc. And likewise, the Persian bureaucratic administrative secretarial class for the lands of the Sasanian Empire in Iraq and what is modern day Iran and into Central Asia. So in many ways, it's an over emphasis to say that because there's a new political dynasty and they had a new religion, that all of this was a big disruption and change and that Islam, which is often imagined in this way, was imposed by these Arab conquests. That's why I was careful to say, Muslim, Arab Muslim political rules spread, but that didn't

necessarily mean in the initial stages that the community, a number of people who actually identified with and practiced Islam was that big. It was a small group of people who were now ruling over a much larger, settled population that had a great deal of continuity. Rulers come, rulers go. It just so happens in this case. There was a pattern of rule that managed to last. And over time, several centuries, people did begin to convert. And that had changes as a result on the nature of Islam that became much more, you know,

kind of multi-ethnic, you know, in its sort of character. And so the last thing that I would say about this is an interesting and key feature. I already alluded to some political, well, religious persecution of religious minorities, like Eastern Christians who were outside of, say, the Nicene Christianity, the Council of Nicaea being, you know, very important in establishing certain kinds of Trinitarian doctrines, the nature of Jesus, right? It was something that Christian sects debated a lot. well, in this, you know, counsel, people who didn't accept the Nicene Creed, as it became to be known, were outside, they were still, you know, regarded as Christian, but maybe Christians in error.

And it's also during the era of Constantine and subsequent developments among Eastern Roman emperors who adopted Christianity, then for themselves, converted to Christianity. then made by the end of the fourth century, what we think of as Orthodox, Nicene Christian, you know, Christian doctrine, the religion, official religion, sponsored by and supported by the state. And what that meant in an area where you have diverse religious communities

and diverse kind of traditions and orientations and sects or denominations within even the dominant religion, that those become heresies or suppressed religious others, not just because there is, you know, they're not in the position of dominance, but because there is an official, you know, one, and being in these other kind of communities puts you at a disadvantage.

And so that's also kind of an important pattern to recognize and realize that likewise, in the era of the Muslim empires that develop out of these early conquests is that Islam becomes the official religion of the state, but that it also accommodates, though in a kind of subordinate position when it comes to rulership and governance, of the other communities, whether they're Jews, Christians of all varieties, or Zoroastrians, which was the dominant and becomes the kind of official confessional religion of the Sasanian Empire in the pre-Islamic period. So you have great religious diversity. Iran starts to

become Muslim, but there's still a lot for several centuries of Zoroastrians and varieties within the kind of Zoroastrian stream of religion that develops out of ancient Iranian sources. So those are what I would say about the transition, except that very often modern nationalists, so here's how it comes to the contemporary situation is that modern Iranian nationalists, particularly under the secularizing, modernizing, so-called modernizing, westernizing of the Shah, the Pahlavi Shah, whose son now wants to return, it seems to being installed as a U.S. v. vassal as ruler of Iran, that under him, there was a real valorization of the pre-Islamic Iranian. history, right, to try and connect it to some other. And, you know, you see this with many forms of

nationalism that they project back deep into time some kind of continuity and identity of the people that we have this ancient past and we are those people who used to be in this land. And, you know, whether it's kind of very continuous or not, they then have to portray the Islamic era as somehow an Arab importation that is like not indigenous and is somehow, you know, in conflict culturally and religiously and incompatible with Iranianness from these previous sources. And so they posit and portray the arrival of Islam as a form of colonialism, a form of suppression of the Iranian nation that now in the modern period under secularization, and modernization can restore itself to this kind of ancient connection and ancient glory.

So you see a lot of latent Islamophobia in the kind of ways of thinking that in order to be Iranian in this new secular nationalist kind of framework, we have to abandon Islam to get back to what it really means to be. Whereas if you think about what is Islam and what does Islam really develop into is that, and this is something that many Muslims would, you know, have a real problem themselves with really recognizing and understanding, which is that Islam didn't come sort of fully formed into the social and legal and theological and intellectual, you know, and political system that ends up becoming Islamicate or Islamic civilization, you know, after a few centuries of development.

it is, you know, some of the sources, key sources like the Quran, traditions that are associated with the Prophet Muhammad, but that all of the scholarship that kind of develops it into systems of law and systems of theology and, you know, are the intellectual fruits of the development of the Muslim religious sciences that make up really what the religion becomes. were developed in these subsequent centuries, and that many, many of the most important, famous scholars, even people who standardized the grammatical rules and understanding of the Arabic language were themselves Persians,

who spoke both Persian as their native tongue, native language, but then learned Arabic for scholarship and for religious, but also just general scholarship for doing scientific study and so on, Arabic becomes the key kind of intellectual language in the same way that, you know, people in, you know, the Dutch lowlands, you know, what become like, you know, the Netherlands spoke a kind of Flemish and Dutch kind of variant of German and people in southern France spoke Langdoc. That was the Langdok. They had a Provenzaal language and people in France or in, you know, London spoke, you know, either, you know, English, Anglo-Saxon, early Anglo-Saxon, or, you know, old French or version of French. But if they wanted to become educated, they learned Latin, and they wrote in Latin, and they conducted their scholarship as well as their religious sort of studies and writings in this kind of universal language of scholarship and of religion in the church. Well, Arabic was similarly a lingua franca

that becomes important in all of these Islamic lands and many of the top scholars who really are formative when it comes to Quran interpretation, study of Arabic language, theology and doctrine and a systematic understanding of it, they were from Iranian Persian lands. So to claim, you know, whatever Islam becomes out of this historical process,

to claim that it is somehow some importation that is incompatible, Well, it's the Persians who made much of it themselves, just as, you know, in North Africa, you know, many, you know, Amaziz peoples, you know, become scholars, learn Arabic, contribute to, you know, establishing the school of law, the Maliki School of Law, in the Western lands of North Africa, the Mhrib, Morocco's name comes from that. And they have their own local characteristics that makes it indigenous. They indigenous. They are the ones who actually, the form of Islam as it develops, is not something that is itself imported. There's many features that are imported from, you know, the kind of culture of the Arabs, the language, and so on, but that it is an expression of this synthesis that has many continuities with what came before. And some scholars argue that, of course,

there are many new developments and doctrines of Islamic belief. They don't agree on the Trinity or the divine sonship and so on. But what has happened is that many of the intellectual trends or horizons, the theological kind of modes of thinking, like dialectics and how you take a proposition and interpret a scripture to all of these things. Like Arab tribes people of the Arabian desert who first, converted to Islam when it emerged in the, you know, seventh century, didn't have all of that scholarship. That's something that happened because they went into the ancient near east or late antique

near east, engaged with those cultures, governed with the help of the systems and structures that were already there, and likewise, you know, came to elaborate and develop Islam as a kind of global world, sophisticated, religious system through this kind of interaction. Absolutely. Absolutely elite recapitulation of that fascinating and millennia long history. And you're emphasizing the continuity of a polity of political systems as such. And you're emphasizing the dialectical interpenetration of religions as they travel and evolve. Same thing with Christianity.

Starts off in the Levant, moves up through Europe as it engages with European preexisting pagan, culture, it is altered and it alters Europe. Same with Buddhism coming out of the Indian subcontinent, traveling through China, confronting Taoism in that instance, turning into Zen Buddhism that travels then to Japan. That is actually how religions unfold. And in every engagement with the new culture, there is this interpenetration. It's not just this domination of this new religion into the pre-existing culture. It is a dialectical engagement from both sides that the whole thing that comes out transformed by that by that meeting and so that's important because as you said um you know in the case of the shaw for example trying to present Islam as alien it would be like you know germ and some

nietzschean right wing nationalist in europe do this where they treat Christianity as this alien thing and actually we're pagans and we should go back to that um but that's a reactionary of course trend that we see that we see emerge in that instance before i move on i just want to ask the the obvious question if that was the posture towards Islam from the Shah, what is the Islamic, and so far as you know, the Islamic Republic's posture towards the history of Persia? Like, how do they, because, you know, you think ideologically they'd have to combat this view that Islam is as wholly alien force, and in so doing, they would have to wrestle with that Persian history. Do you have any insight

as to how they do that? Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know as much as I was, like about how modern, say, education in the Islamic Republic of Iran handles and discusses, like any nation has to have its textbook history, right? And obviously, there's a new textbook history that comes into play as a result of curriculum changes and so on with the Islamic, with the revolution, the revolution in 1978, 79, and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. But you can even see that they are still very proud of this long heritage. And you don't see, for example, suppressing or wiping out antiquities from the pre-Islamic period. There are a lot of public architecture and sculpture that picks up on themes of ancient Iranian mythology.

And for example, the Shah Nameh is a Persian text in modern. Persian, Persian undergoes a kind of development where around the, over the course of a couple, three centuries, the old Sasanian, you know, Middle Persian undergoes some kind of a transformation with all the social change and with incorporating a lot of like new vocabulary from Arabic. And so it becomes a kind of new literary language, but it is a very powerful literary language And some of these great Persian epics that, you know, either were written or were, you know, passed down orally get reformulated within and preserved in a serious way, the ancient kind of book of kings is what the Shah Nama is. And it's about, you know, these kind of mythos of ancient Iranian, you know, just like the, you know, the Greek myths are something about a kind of like, how did we come to be who we. were, you know, and especially as a political force because they were, these large and important

and powerful empires that were established that had long-lasting consequences and duration themselves. They continued for a long period of time. So that all that material is still there. It's still used. It's referred to. People know those stories. They retell these stories. They refer to them, and they're part of the fabric of the culture. It's just that they understand at a certain point, they adopted Islam as their belief. And I think in some ways, and we'll probably come to talk about this a little bit more,

the Sunni Shia's sort of division, what's that all about, what does it mean? But one thing I would say in terms of the modern identity of Iran, the fact that it adopted Shiism at a certain point, in its history, you could say perhaps gave it a distinctive religious culture in some ways, even within Islam, even in the broad tradition of Islam, that preserved in some sense some identity of Iranian nationalism. Now, of course, there are many Shia who are Arab and different parts of the Middle East, but, you know, the majority of Shia, I think, are, you know, in Iran

and our 12 or Imami Shiism, we'll come to talk a little bit about those differences. What are the strands of Shiism? But in terms of this Iranian national identity, the fact that it's rather distinctive and different in some ways from surrounding Sunni or Arab lands and other Sunni kind of non-Arab countries like, you know, the subcontinent and so forth, gives it perhaps a... an easier way to make these continuities to say, well, we've always been this kind of special, you know, community and just at a certain point we adopted Islam. And they sometimes don't emphasize the fact that for most of its history in the Islamic era, they were Sunnis living

in Iran. At a certain point, they adopted Shiism. But it's perhaps something that helps give it a distinctive way of framing its connection with, you know, a pre-Islam. past as well, that we have been this distinctive religious community in some way or another, or culturally in some way or another. So while, you know, some of the stories of gods and, you know, metaphysical forces might not completely align with maybe an Orthodox, you know, she theological, you know, understanding, you know, in a popular kind of level and sense, you see actual pride in this long history and the time. culture that they've inherited and you know they still for example uh annually celebrate no ruz the new

year in march is actually coming up a time of recording it's like in a week or so in 10 days uh maybe eight nine days from the time we're recording in late late in march march like 23rd 24th something like that is like no rus and that is a pre-islamic kind of calendar and system based on this agricultural cycle and the culture and civilization. And Iran is not distinctive in that a lot of areas, you know, where Islam comes either in the 7th, 8th centuries, like in the case of Iran, or in the 12th, 13th, 13th, 14th centuries, like in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and takes on, you know, greater significance in the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries. or in Africa, you know, from starting in the like eighth, ninth centuries and, you know, into West Africa in like the 12th, you know, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries. But it always integrates with existing structures of society, culture, you know, and community and even calendar systems and so on.

So it's not like this is just a kind of Persian resistance survival that they're still trying to hang on to some of their Persian identity. That's the case wherever you see Islam is that it has adapted and melded. And you pointed out that that's also not something, you know, kind of unique to Islam. But what's interesting is how often and frequently Islam is exceptionalized when it comes to history, the story of religions, you know, you name it, like for some reason, this is exceptional and operates totally differently from our social scientific understanding, our history, et cetera. And if we just restored it to being a normal religion of human society, you know, I think we get beyond quite a lot of the problems that we have in understanding and interpreting our contemporary world. Absolutely. I mean, again, expertly said,

and there's genuine beauty in how these religions, spread across the world and engage with unique cultures and give unique expressions to the religion itself. And one of the worst things that you see, especially in the West, especially in the U.S., is treating the whole region as monolithic and treating the religion itself as monolithic. And not only do you just lose analysis and your brain gets scrambled, but you lose the beauty of actually trying to engage with curiosity the fascinating unique histories of all these different regions and all these different countries and all these different people's engaging with and in the process changing and evolving and elevating, you know, in this case, Islam, but across the

world, these different religious traditions, it's gorgeous, it's beautiful, it's fascinating, and we should have that posture. But you did mention the Sunni-Shiah divide, and it's something that gets talked about. I think when you hear the ignorant statement that I hear all the time of all these people have been at war forever, it's just what it is over there. I mean, oh my God. is so much to be said about that alone. But I think part of it comes with a dim understanding that this is part of that conflict, perhaps, even though many people couldn't even articulate the Sunni-Shiya divide,

to be honest in the West. But can you kind of talk about the Sunni-Shiah divide, how it's portrayed, kind of its ancient roots, how it evolved historically, and kind of how it informs regional politics today? That's a big question, take it any direction you want. Well, I mean, I do think it unfortunately does inform regional politics today. And in the recent last couple of decades, it was worsened very much by the U.S. global war on terror, and particularly the invasion in Iraq that confessionalized political and civic identity in a way that hadn't happened for all of the terrible faults of an oppression and corruption of the, you know, Arab nationalist Ba'athist regime under Saddam Hussein and even some of his forebears,

though it really was much worse under him, that they had not emphasized very much. The Sunni-Shi-Shiya division maybe existed, maybe you didn't have, you had some intermarriage, but maybe, you know, less because people married confessionally. But there wasn't a very kind of public and political confessionalization. but when, you know, the Iraq war happened as they're reconstituting politics, the U.S. really stoked the sectarian divisions, and also it was used in a way to also mobilize against Iran and the dangers

of Iran, which had already happened because of the Iranian revolution and concern among the conservative Arab monarchies and corrupt dictatorships of the region, most of whom were vassal states of the U.S. or soon would become vassal states of the U.S. if they had been part of the, say, Soviet orbit, you know, much more like, you know, Syria and Iraq had been and were that, you know, the revolution posed a real threat to imperialist and colonial control in the region. And they mobilized, you know, sectarianism to help, you know, martial resistance to that to encourage Iraq to invade very early in the 1980s, you know, eight years of war against Iran, supported by all of the Gulf monarchies, you know, with, you know, massive amounts of funding and support. And of course,

the West providing various weapons, including chemical weapons, which were used on several occasions against people in Iran. So that kind of the threat and the danger, essentially, of decolonizing the Middle East, the overthrow of the Shah and the possible spread of that revolutionary message was countered in some ways by Sunni sectarian fears of the kind of Wahhabist, Salafist, Gulf monarchies, that's the form of Islam that they supported, and also stoked and increased, also also by U.S. and Western support at the same time that they were funding and operating a very sectarian-oriented radical form of Islam to participate in the Jihad, Holy War in Afghanistan against and recruiting all over, you know, the, you know, the Arab world, South Asia, etc.

So that was going on. That kind of has made sectarian policy. very important in dividing countries and impeding them in alliances against Iran and even in this idea of a Shia crescent that had to be opposed, that is Iran support for Shias in southern Iraq, a dominant population, and she's in southern Lebanon, that they had a lot of connection with as shared in their form of Shiism. and also even in Yemen where a different version of Shiism kind of loosely could affiliate itself within the orbit of Iran's aid and sponsorship against U.S. Empire and Israeli Zionist kind of dominance in the region. So really quick, just to clarify something, would you say that the axis of resistance kind of maps not cleanly, not perfectly, but generally onto this more or less sectarian? divide? Well, it, you know, obviously the Palestinians are the exception here. You know, the Palestinian resistance in, well, firstly, of course, in its secular form, doesn't map on, but then secondly, in the form of the Islamic resistance, whether it's Hamas or Islamic jihad and other resistance

factions and groups, you know, are from Sunni Arab communities, whereas all the others that I mentioned, are one kind of Shiism or another. So it's not perfect. But then there are lots of Shiis that are not revolutionary. So look at Azerbaijan, which is a majority, you know, a neighboring country to Iran and is a majority is a Turkic language speaking people. Azeri is a Turkic language. But they are 12 or she. And they are, you know, in this alignment with, you know, very close allies with Israel, for example.

and pose a real threat to, you know, with animosity towards Iran and geopolitically. So it doesn't map on perfectly that 12 or shees or forms of shees are part of the resistance faction and not all members of the resistance faction are shees, but you would say that there is an overlap that is noteworthy. What I would say is that it is the consequences and effects of the, revolutionary Shiism that gets developed as a result of events in Iran as part of the revolution, that there is a kind of new Shi'i consciousness that is resistant and revolutionary, that adopts political engagement, anti-imperialist politics, and affiliations and collaborations across the region

with those who will take up resistance. And so that's a particular form of revolutionary 12-versheism that emerges because of Iran's revolution in 1979, because of people like Ali Shariati, a great kind of Muslim sociologist and thinker who really is sometimes characterized, maybe it's too simplistic to put it this way, but sometimes characterized as, you know,

kind of Marxist inspired, but still kind of seeing Islamism. He's one of the kind of ideological exponents and developers of a kind of Islamism. That is the idea that Islam, if understood properly, can be a tool for social development, revolutionary and egalitarian politics, and achieving solutions to, you know, this worldly kind of political sphere and not just for internal spiritual development, right? And that's something that Shiism was identified with for much of its history as being largely apolitical, quietist, and nothing like the Sunnis that had this whole history of, you know, governance and rulership. And so when it came time for modernist and reformist types of Islam and like then 18th, 19th and 20th,

century, they were dedicated to confronting colonialism and imperialism because they had that kind of history of governance. And so being subordinated, you know, under colonial rule was somehow, you know, going to elicit this response within Sunni Islam. But for Shi'is, it was thought of as something very different, which is why it was so surprising for many people when the revolution happened. Now, in order to explain that, what we do need to now maybe talk about, little bit about Shiism and how it developed and this sectarian division at its roots and its subsequent history. So these sectarian divisions emerge out of historical conflict that takes place in the early Muslim community, principally you could say over the question of succession to

Muhammad, prophet Muhammad after his death. So already during Muhammad's lifetime, there was a polity formed. I don't know if we could call it a state. It's maybe not quite that organized. And it's also a charismatic kind of authority of the prophet is present there, both bringing revelation and religious guidance, but also organizing social and what we would call political life, you know, in the absence of a state. That's, you know, tribes don't have states. They are, you know, kind of a form of political social organization without like extraneous state structures, right? But there is something else going on, an early polity, if not a state, at least some kind of organizing of relations of the tribes together in this new concept of a Muslim Ummah or community or polity, you could say.

And that once he passes away, there is a kind of problem of what is the fate of the community going forward? How is it to be organized? Could somebody inherit his prophetic role, or was that unique to him? In which case, what was the form of leadership that would be, you know, acceptable or divinely, you know, a legitimate, you know, in this new religion and there were differences that emerged over that question. There seemed to be kind of consensus that there should be a leader. There were some people who pull some tribes that pulled out of the kind of polity in the sense that they said, well, we don't have to pay, you know, this religious tax. That was for recognizing Muhammad as the prophet. We're still Muslim, but we don't want to pay that

tax. We don't want to be part, in other words, of this political community. as integrated. We want to go a different direction. There were conflicts that resulted out of that, but the vast majority, the main grouping, decided, yes, this polity should continue, but that there should be a leader. And it was kind of a question, well, what is the sort of status of that leader? Are they continuing to have religious authority of some kind or not? Could they, you know, how would that be understood and what was the mechanism for succession when they disappear? So what ends up happening is that four companions of Muhammad end up succeeding him as caliphs, the fourth of whom is Ali, his nephew and son-in-law, was married to the Prophet's daughter.

And he was a very important person in the early Muslim community. And there were many people who felt he should have been the first succeeder. and that Muhammad had indicated that he had designated him for some kind of role after him, and others disputed and didn't accept that. And so we started to have a conflict over succession where the partisans of Ali's role as imam is how they characterized it, that is both religious and political guide and authority figure, that, you know, his imamate, him being imamese, became a principle for them of the right religion and of the right kind of decision that should

have been made politically for the benefit of the community. And so the partisans of Ali are known as the Shia. And that's what the Arabic word means is basically the supporters or partisans. So this word Shiaism, that's probably not actually how she, that's not really how she's think of themselves by this term. They think of themselves as good Muslims who are loyal to the faith. family of the prophet and the decisions that he made and they venerate members of the family of the prophet and think that they have an important spiritual religious status. But they are known as

she is because in this early period they were the faction that supported his claims to being the rightful and most legitimate religious and political authority. In essence, it was also really who is going to be the political authority. There were a war, fought, you know, war was fought over, you know, his succession. For various reasons, there was a kind of conflicts that happened. The winners of this actually formed a dynasty, kind of an Arab kingdom, dynastic kingdom, and established their capital for all of these areas that had been conquered in Damascus. And they're known as the House of Umayya, that is their kind of tribal. They were part of the same family, sort of tribal grouping of Muhammad from, from, from

Mecca and they established this dynasty, but there were some people who in the early Muslim community who never accepted this as legitimate. And they continued to support the imam of their time even after Ali was assassinated. They turned to his eldest son, Hassan, and then after his death to Hussein, the grandson of the prophet, right? The second grandson of the prophet, Hassan and Hussein. And Hussein has a very important and significant role in history because the partisans of the House of the Prophet and this other idea of what was legitimate proper Muslim governance

and religious authority encouraged him to rise up in rebellion and call people to recognize him as the rightful kind of leader. And as a consequence, the Umayyad, sent a force to capture and kill him and eliminate him. And he and many members of his entourage, his family, and supporters were massacred at a place called Karbalah, which is in today's Iraq, not so far away from the city of Kufa where they were trying to go because the people of Kufa had invited them to come and lead them. And so they were supposed to support him.

and he was on his way there to establish a kind of independent polity from which his leadership could be recognized. But the martyrdom of Hussein then becomes an incredibly important moment in the devotional history and culture of Shiism that they remember him being sacrificed as a kind of key. key moment, right, in recognizing the persecution of the imams and the family of the prophet. This kind of continues. They chose another leader, and the different kind of forms of Shiism

develop in part from disputes over who was the next successor from some of these. And during this time, there were social changes that were taking place where there had been a lot more conversion now. And there were people who were known as non-Arab Muslims who were attached. The way it worked is that you had to be kind of sponsored to be part of this kind of ruling military, you know, political class. And so they were known as Mawali, that is clients who had to have a patron, a patron and a client relationship and essentially be sponsored, you know, to be part of the Muslim community. And that created a, two-tier kind of world, a social division between subordinates and kind of Arab elite.

And as the numbers of Mawali grew as new cities were established, this social tension ended up resolving itself in a more egalitarian, revolutionary, and inclusive form of Islam to replace the Arab dynasty of the Umayyads who had been ruling in Damascus. And I just mentioned had been responsible for the massacre and martyrdom of, you know, Hussein and his family, that there was a revolution that was a revolution that was advertised as being under the banner of justice for the family of the prophet, right? All the people who their grievances, social and religious, were kind of put together in this. This would be improved if the rightful people who should be in charge were restored to that. And so we seek justice for the family of the Prophet. What ended up

happening is that a different wing of the Prophet's family that was outside of this tradition of the partisans of Ali and subsequent groups that had formed to support various successors after Hassan and Hussein, you know, joined this revolution, expecting that the Imam Jafar al-Sadik would be the one who would then now be put in place as ruler and spiritual guide of the Muslim Empire. However, that didn't happen. And as a result, Jafar himself ended up saying, okay, from this time forward, this continuous attempt to contest the leadership politically, that phase is over. What we need now to do really is develop the religious dimensions and preserve the spiritual

and religious knowledge that is being transmitted from the fact. family of the prophet and guard and protect this true Islam, right, that we recognize, that we have access to and that has been abandoned by, you know, all these others who are supporting this, you know, corrupted, you know, dynasty and empire. And so that's when you might say it really took a sectarian turn and became, started to have its own particular identity as a religious division within the Muslim world. But that happened also at the same time as it kind of took a quietest turn. Not everybody agreed with that. And so you have different she communities and groups that go in their own development that maintained this kind of continuous struggle

against the corrupt empire and established the Fatimid dynasty in North Africa, centered for a period of a couple of centuries in Egypt, which was a variant one that said, need to have a proper caliph and imam, and they ended up doing so and establishing, you know, part of that territory under their rule. But the main line of she's that is the dominant majority today are known as the 12 er shees or imami shees, who had a continuous line of 12 imams who succeeded until in the 10th century, the last imam, after many times, many of these imams were assassinated by and persecuted by the governing authorities. And at a certain point, the 12th Imam that they recognized had to go in hiding,

couldn't be out in public being the leader of the community. And this is when he was a young boy. So he was sheltered and went into hiding. And there were a few people who were designated to be go-betweens, to continue to provide leadership on behalf of the Imam in the Shi'i community. but after a certain point, when that 12th Imam didn't return to public kind of duties, too much time also had passed, there developed this doctrine within 12 or Shiism of the occultation or the going into kind of more ontological hiding of the imam who would return at the end of time

as a rightly guided figure, that's what the word Mahdi is, to restore justice at the end of time. but for this period, we would have to make do with the teachings we had inherited from the previous imams, develop kind of our knowledge and understanding of the right way of practice from all of those, and be in waiting and expectation, and not be contesting political power or raising rebellions or, you know, saying here is the rightful ruler because there now was no imam available to be kind of the candidate for legitimate rulership over, you know, the Muslim. according to the Shi'is. And so that has since that time, you know, been the expectation of the Mahdi. And that's why Shi'ism was often characterized among many people for subsequent centuries.

Their history looked like they were quietistic. They were, you know, waiting for the end times in a way. And there were other variants of Shiism that continued, as I said, to contest political power. own kind of traditions and identity and the ismaelis are one that continued to have an imam and also the zadis after the fourth caliph there was dispute after uh hussein among some people and they chose an imam that wasn't the same as the you know what becomes the 12er tradition of lineage there and they ended up establishing themselves in yemen And so they are a form of Shiism, but a somewhat different one that has like a different law and different structure and different ideas about the nature of the Imam and their authorities and so on, then others, you know, developed. So that's kind of the snapshot of the Shiism in this kind of early formative period.

And it's in contradistinction to them that crystallizes later, really, you could say an idea. of Sunnis as the people who just accept the majoritarian, you know, kind of tradition and compromise in a way and say it's not so important that we find who is the rightful ruler as long as it's somebody who will, you know, rule under the guidance of Islam. And, you know, we can accept as long as they're, you know, acceptable on these grounds. They don't have to be a member of the family of the prophet. And so they become known as Sunnis and they end up being the dominant majority, but there persists from this time, these two wings, broad wings of Muslim religious practice that also have a different take on the history and also a different narrative and a different theory

about, you know, rightful and legitimate governance of Muslim lands. But, you know, what I think, think that's the sort of deeper history of it. And I characterized it as somewhat kind of apolitical, you know, for much of its history. But something happens in the 16th, in the late 15th and 16th centuries, which is that after the Mongol conquest, there was this period of political fragmentation, you might say, where there were a lot of local, you know, challengers to power, but they were also kind of competing with one another for legitimacy and authority and made appeals to religious vocabulary and universalist kinds of concepts. And so you see a lot of very interesting kind of experiments in, like,

religio-political movements and formations emerging, in this kind of ferment and, you know, of the post-Mongol kind of order collapsing. And out of that kind of century and a half, two centuries of various contestations where Sufi brotherhoods, their Sufi sheikh becomes somebody who wields a lot of social power and can provide some sense of community in a kind of large regional way that connects people, they start making kind of claims potentially to being people who could rule in Central Asia. Some Nakhshbandi Sufi sheikhs become basically the rulers of Samarkand and Bukhara. And likewise, the Turkic tribal rulers who are really the ones who rule the dynastic rulers of much of the central Islamic lands for several many centuries are competing with one.

another for power and authority, they start also characterizing themselves within a kind of religious vocabulary, which had not been so common to do. And some of them absorb Shi'i kinds of ideas, possibly that they are the Mahdi and the, you know, the Imam about to return. They are also Sufi, spiritually guided, perfect, you know, in Sufi theology, there's this concept of the Insan al-Kamil from Ibn Arab be the perfected or complete human, you know, this kind of achieved full spiritual self-realization. And so, you know, they're making kind of claims that combine political power and legitimacy with religious kind of status. And, you know, one group out of this really is very successful, this figure Shah Ismail, who's head of the Safavid Sufi Order, and at the same time,

is the head of a Turkic tribal confederation. And he kind of promotes this idea, this kind of ecstatic, charismatic idea that he is the Alexander of his age. He is the shadow of God on earth. He is the true Imam, come back. He is also the perfect man. He kind of coordinates a whole range of spiritual and political kind of claims to legitimacy and authority and manages to actually galvanize a really charismatic movement

among the Turkic tribal members of this Sufi order who are known as the Qizelbash, the redheads, and are like his kind of shock troops that really just, you know, almost essentially deify him. He ends up starting to expand his power. and, you know, in like the early 16th century and is really reshaping the central Islamic lands from Anatolia, eastern Anatolia, through Iraq and Persia and into Central Asia in this vast sort of territory.

But he is defeated in 1516 by the Ottomans at the Battle of Chalderon, Selim the Grim, Defeats him, you know, in this moment. And this millinarian and mehisc, kind of movement has to deal with this massive defeat and the fact that they can't expand to a universalist kind of Muslim power, but really have to base themselves in kind of more or less what is today modern kind of Iran, a little bit more than what is today modern Iran, but essentially that. And so as a result, he decides that instead of this kind of charismatic kind of religion,

he needs now a kind of stable basis in society that also still does. distinguishes it from, you know, kind of the Ottomans and other powers. And he decides to choose 12 or Shiism as the official religion and doctrine of the Safavid dynastic state that he is now kind of ruling in Iran. And he decides that we must impose Shiism as this official religion and forcibly convert Sunni Muslims in these territories. And also the other Sufi groups, because there were other rival Sufi orders, some of whom were Shi, some of whom were Sunni, they flee from these lands. And over a period of time, I'm not sure exactly how long it takes, but over the course of a generation or two, Iran becomes principally 12 or she,

as it is and remains today. That's comparatively recent in its history, but it had this distinctive kind of revolutionary transformation that shows that sometimes sheism could be activated as part of a state program, a political program, and wasn't just a kind of quietest, you know, waiting for the end, you know, times sort of passive community. And very often people have forgotten, I think,

some of the earlier histories of Shiism when they've promoted this idea or ended up being so surprised when later in the 20th century, Ayatollah Khomeini, you know, managed to be a leader in a clerical, if not completely led clerical revolution, but one where the religious community and authority provided a large, you know, kind of organizing structure and authority that came from their religious reinterpretation. of Shiism that transformed it from this kind of let's wait and expect the imam to come and someday to a demand for justice against oppression and for right rulership and anti-imperialism today. That's what happened in the Iranian Revolution.

Man, magisterial, so much there, so much fascinating stuff. We will not be able to get into it today, but I highly encourage people who are interested in filling out their understanding of this history in particular to look into deeply the Iraq. in Iranian war because I think that sets the tone for so much that came after. And of course, learn more about the 1979 revolution, what came before and what came after. It's a complicated picture for those of us on the socialist and Marxist left, for sure, because they were a huge part of the Iranian revolution. They eventually had sectarian divides within it. The religious component won out. That's a conversation for another day. I did want to mention, you mentioned

Sufism, you and I have done work on that before. I'll link to that in the show notes. But but you said something interesting. You said that there are Sunni and Shia versions of Sufism. And I'm wondering like it, you know, because I've sort of maybe wrongly conceptualized as three branches, Sunni being dominant, Shia being, you know, the minority, but still, you know, the second biggest. And then Sufism being a sort of third branch separate from the other two, but is that not a correct way to think about it? Well, I would certainly agree with you that it has very distinctive orientation.

But really, I would characterize it less of being a sect of Islam than being a devotional current and devotional stream that prioritizes spiritual knowledge of God, right? And, you know, all the things that we talked about in that episode about what Sufism is as a devotional and spiritual, mystical current that informs. you know, practice of Islam and is certainly distinctive from other emphases like legal scholarship or theology, but doesn't necessarily map perfectly onto the sectarian divide, though it was developed principally early on in communities that would be more identified with Sunni law and Sunni theology. Partly, but it's very interesting because there is a lot of overlap in various ways, because most of the Sufi brotherhoods and later Sufi traditions that crystallize into these communities in the medieval period, the Sufi Todok, the brotherhoods, actually in their chains of mystical ascription,

like the lineage chain that they ascribe for how this connects them through various previous spiritual masters and sheikhs, all the way back to the prophet, Muhammad, which is what they want to do. They want to align this as a spiritual knowledge that was transmitted since the time of Muhammad. They almost all go through Ali, the first Imam and the fourth caliph and nephew and son-in-law of Muhammad. So you could say in a way that this is, you know, something that looks very much like Shi'isim's love for the family of the prophet and valorization of the spiritual significance and religious importance of Ali that, you know, similar in some ways to claims that the Shia, you know,

partisans of Ali and Shiz make for why he should have been the first caliph. Now, Sunni Sufis don't really make that kind of claim or concern, but they obviously reflect some sense of his importance as a guide and as a important figure who carries forward, the religious meanings and spiritual interpretations of Islam inherited from Muhammad. So there are some interesting overlaps. In the medieval period, some Sufi brotherhoods and orders do explicitly adopt a Shi'i kind of law and theology in this kind of sense of denominations or sects of Islam.

But it shows that there is some ability for this to be a, current within different legal theological orientations because it's the spiritual devotional orientation. And sheism also does develop its own mystical kind of thought and thinking. Even in the absence of, say, organized Sufi brotherhoods, they have a notion of Erfan, nosis that is similar to, we might say, mystical theosophy of Sufism. So that's how I would think of it as the sectarian division as Sunni Shi, but that also has meant very different things at different times. Like, you know, there was a lot of crossover and interconnection, and Sunnis always did develop this idea that they also love the family of the prophet. They revere Hassan and Hussein.

They would also, sometimes in the medieval period, we have evidence that Sunnis were, you know, interested in the martyrdom of Hussein kind of commemorating. that take place known as Tazia. That is where they reenact the events that happened and identify with them. And, you know, take this on as like a kind of spiritual performance of the memory of that tragic history, which is part of the devotional culture of public Shi'i devotion. And Sunnis were attracted and interested sometimes to this. You know, so the divisions could mean different things at different times,

and there was a lot of overlap and interpenetration at different moments in history. And it's really, I would say, the Ottoman kind of adoption of a kind of Orthodox sunnism as a sectarian difference to the division that Shah Ismail sort of created by establishing 12-vershiism as the new political and social and religious identity of the lands. he was going to rule as the Safavid, you know, dynastic leader and empire in Iran, that that is what created for a period of time, a sharpening of sectarian division that previously maybe in the centuries before, a few centuries before, there had been a lot more overlap and integration. But these lines become much more polarized as part of the geopolitical contestations and competitions between two rival empires contesting rule of kind of central Islamic lands, one from based in the Anatolian highland.

Does sound familiar a little bit between the Roman Eastern Byzantine and the, you know, the Sasanians is that, again, these are geographical loci where political states can be built around, you know, these as very important territories that are productive, agricultural, and have a long tradition in history of being the basis for states' formations or polities and so on. And so, again, we had this pattern where the, you know, kind of Ottomans essentially inherit the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, and in fact, actually Mehmet the conqueror, who conquers in, you know, the middle of the 15th century, conquers Constantinople, as an Ottoman nonetheless kind of styled himself as like, well, I'm the emperor of the Romans now, you know, and so we can see that that kind of pattern was there in the

early period, but that subsequent development, once the Ottomans conquered lands in central Islamic lands, in the Arab Middle East and so on, they had to reformulate themselves not to being a frontier gazi power that inherits the Byzantine authority, but actually to being Muslim, legitimate rulers and the way they expressed. That was support of Sunni orthodoxy as their kind of state practice, right? So that's kind of what we have is the confessionalization of their political identities that affected sectarian division and sharpened it during that period of competition. And subsequently with the waning of the Ottomans or the transformation of the Safavids

into a different kind of dynasty with less expansive territories and less rivalry with Ottomans and others, you know, really more during the period where, you know, Russia and, you know, British Empire starts to encroach and establish, you know, power and authority in regions and exercise influence over Iran is like that sectarian division is really then less important and significant. It becomes, again, important later in like the U.S. global war on terror, where they, you know, incite this kind of confessionalization of politics in after the invasion of Iraq and fears of, you know, Iranian influence against, you know, in Cold War, you know, dominated United States control of the region. So that's what ends up being, you know, at stake. These aren't static kind of identities, of course they're meaningful, you know, but they aren't political. and sectarianized all the time in the same way, I guess, is what I would say.

So is it fair to say then, after a lot of that, that there's this Sunni-Shiya divide, as you say, is always oscillating, always changing, there's nuances within both, but that you mentioned the Safavid Empire of Persia, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire in Turkey, that's when it's fair to say, perhaps, that this divide becomes institutionalized politically? Is that right? I mean, it's one of the big moments where the modern Middle Eastern, in a modern inheritance of it, you could say this confessionalization,

sectarianization that's attached to these really takes on, as you're saying, institutional and geopolitical identity in a pretty strong way. Okay, so what I'd like to do, for the rest of the conversation, shift over to the Ottoman Empire bit. You don't have to go as in depth if you don't want to, but we can. Then bring it up to the modern relationship

between Turkey and Iran. And then I kind of want to touch also on your thesis about the crusading society, and then we can zoom in on maybe just a quick contemporary discussion of the current situation. Is that sound okay to you? Sure, yeah, yeah. I want to be respectful of your time, as always. Well, I also, you know,

probably need to be briefer also in like some of it. But, you know, you get me going on the history. It's so, like, you know, interesting and fascinating. And so, so little of it tends to be part of like public knowledge and inform any current thinking. I'm not saying absolutely everything about this history is vital to know, but the larger processes, and in order to understand those processes, we have to go into some analysis of the details and so on, because this isn't familiar history to most people. Absolutely. And even Muslims get their history a lot through the sectarianization that we're

talking about or modern nation state and nationalist histories or westernized, you know, the Garbzadeghi oxidantosis, where they have to kind of reframe Islam as this kind of retarding force that's preventing them from really entering, you know, history. So you end up getting lots of distortions even in peoples of their own region, how they frame it. And I'm not saying like nationalist histories, Arab nationalist, et cetera, are, you know, totally invalid. but, you know, it's just they do give a certain kind of frame. And my frame is, as somebody who's studying it from an earlier period coming forward, it looks different to me when I'm looking back from the vantage of looking forward in an earlier period,

you know, that I'm not taking, you know, trying to rationalize the contemporary nation states. You know, they're just constructs of a lot of these, you know, colonial processes and so forth. So I'm looking at this kind of longer Islamicate history, you could say. And so sometimes, you know, things will look differently to me. And I think it's worth having that other perspective as well. So what I would say here really about the Ottoman Empire, I mean, what's to say other than that it is, you know, a very important multi-ethnic, multi-religious and empire, you know, as I say, it sort of inherited in some ways that position of the East Roman Empire in its control of the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkan lands, right?

So for much of its early history, it was principally a European power in the sense that most of the territory of the Ottomans in its early period from, you know, the 14th to the 15th century, its early period, it was on this frontier and it made its territorial gains really in the Balkans, you know, on the other side of technically the division between Asia and Europe, right? Istanbul is divided the Bosphorus, you know, channel. One side is the Asian side, one side, the western side is the European side. Most of the territories that the Ottomans governed and ruled in the early formation of the state and polity were in Balkan lands in the western, you know, western side of that, of the Bosphorus.

But then, as I said, it did become a Middle Eastern power, in addition to being a Mediterranean power, a Middle Eastern power by, you know, in, you know, Salim the first conquests, I think, 1506, I think, in 1503 or six in like the Levant, Syria, Greater Syria, what includes today, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, occupied Palestine, Lebanon, and so forth, all in one kind of kind of fell swoop, and then Egypt, conquered Egypt. So now it was like a major Middle Eastern power, and so it had to kind of manage a very large territory. As I said, it developed a bureaucracy that was capable. I'll say, you know, just getting back to our Iranian story, that the early period, there were a lot of, after the Mongol invasions in the 13th century, a lot of Persian-speaking scholars from Central Asia and Iran,

those lands and territories escaped, you know, the sacking of cities like Marv, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, uh, and, and, uh, and, and, and, uh, and in, in, in Chorazam and so forth, they fled west and they helped the little Turkic statelets in Anatolia with their kind of knowledge about administration and governance and tax collection and, you know, this kind of stuff and served these emirs and later sultans, the first the Seljuk Sultans, who were, you know, a branch of a Turkic tribal group that governed in Anatolia since 1087, more or less. But the Ottomans are one of these groupings and some of the early viziers and people who are important in state administration and helping build this state of conquest in the Balkans were Persian administrators, Persian-speaking administrators and scholars.

So they grow into this multi, you know, very, you know, it always was very multi-religious in the sense that those Balkan lands were mostly Christian, right? But then it, you know, kind of creates the system of accommodating religious difference and producing a kind of educated bureaucratic class that, you know, could do this in Turkish and, you know, through bringing in people from outside and the devship, Mesa, many of the rulers of the Ottoman lands, like the governors, the viziers, the administrators, were actually from places like Albania and Bosnia and, you know, Croatia and so forth. Like, you know, they were absorbed and became Ottoman. So when we think of today, Turkey as inheriting the Ottoman and the Ottoman Turk, Yes, the dynasty was originally Turkic warlords, you know, fighters and Ghazis that established the dynasty. You know, they were a Turkic tribal group of West Turks, the West Turks, the Ouz Turks.

But over time, you know, who's really governing is like, and also the Ottoman dynasts are intermarried with, you know, Byzantine, princesses and Circassians and so on. And so it's like ethnically, what did it really mean to be a Turk is really kind of political category when you're talking about an Ottoman as an Ottoman Turk, is that, you know, they had a certain kind of Turkish, Islamic culture in the Ottoman kind of language, but it's actually a diverse ethnic kind of category, really. It comes from diverse ethnic sources, and they're ruling over a very multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. So by the time that it comes to be breaking up in the late 19th and early 20th century and into other states with the rise of other nationalist movements, Arab nationalism,

as well as a kind of Turkish nationalism that refounds the state under Mustafa Kamal, you know, Ataturk in the so-called Young Turk movement, you know, they have to create a nation state out of a diverse, you know, land empire, which is the story of what's happening actually the Austro-Hungarian Empire, similar in some respects. Also, the Russian Empire is undergoing these kinds of, you know, sorts of changes and then figuring out what's it going to do with the non-Russian kind of populations that are part of the Russian Empire. And, you know, the after effects of this, of course, in the era of nation states, you know, leads to all kinds of issues, tensions, and problems.

But that also, you know, was a kind of major issue for the Middle Eastern states that never got to kind of form their nations except under the divisions of colonial rule with the breakup of the Ottomans after World War I. the establishment with the League of Nations mandate, and it's basically a colonial situation that was just authorized internationally for managing the lands of the Ottoman, former lands of the Ottoman Empire that were not defended enough, you know, successfully enough to stay in this new Turkish Republic. So Balkans, obviously Greece had already had an independence movement. Some of the other Balkan states end up having their independence movements.

And of course, World War I just sort of shatters the rest of, you know, what remains of the Ottoman kind of system. And the Middle East territories, the Arab territories, particularly, are managed by these two colonial powers, the British and the French, especially the British. and the modern map that comes out of the Sykes-Picot agreement and subsequently the Treaty of San Remo after the war, you know, basically establish the current boundaries that at the very moment we are recording are under extreme stress, right? There is a greater Israel project that is looking to rewrite the map. I regard it as an extension of the Crusader project, right? You know, is to continue the expansion. The Crusader states when they were formed were also meant to be kind of expansive and continue.

You know, they write back to the Pope saying, you know, we intend to extend. Now that we've captured the center of the world, Jerusalem, Jerusalem being thought of as the kind of geographical and spiritual center of, you know, of the world. of the world, that from there they would then expand from sea to sea, right? You know, like this kind of globalist sort of vision. And similarly, of course, Israel never has declared its borders and has always had and maintained the possibility of expanding into various forms of what they imagine the biblical kingdoms. Now we have a kind of, you know, vision of greater Israel as possible.

possibly including, you know, Nile to the Euphrates. And so what is happening is on the other side, of course, also is that some of these colonial petty monarchies of the Gulf that were established basically by the British as a technique for helping them control access and waterways, access through the waterways to India and the resources there and also the oil that once it's discovered, they certainly don't want it to.

to be shared out among the peoples of the region for their economic and social development as a whole. So they created these small, very weak and dependent, you know, little statelets by appointing, you know, an emir and establishing a dynasty or a king and so forth to divide the region, divide the region, you know, into these small little states in the oil rich areas,

and divide the region from these little oil states so that they could be, you know, controlled and, you know, under the dependency as vassal states of the West. And what we're seeing, I think at this moment, in some ways, it's phase two of Iranian revolution as an anti-imperialist decolonizing revolution. And that seems to be one of the goals and objectives is the removal of U.S. bases and power that have been established there and that enforce this dependency that supposedly were there for the protection of these, you know, oligarchic, you know, statelets. But in fact, actually have proved to be what endangers them, you know, in this circumstance.

So that whole security pact and bargain, you know, is being up to question. And there was, in fact, an Iraqi commentator recently on a program who apparently, you know, said, well, what we might see end up happening is that, you know, the 17th province, I think it is of Iraq will be rejoined, meaning Kuwait, right? And something Saddam Hussein had said, is that this belongs to Iraq and it was divided by the British, you know, and it was, you know, part of the governorate of Basra, which became absorbed into the modern nation state of Iraq. That is the Ottoman governorate of Basra. But the British, you know, pulled out this Kuwait part. So he said, that could happen. Bahrain could go to Iran, okay, because it has a, you know, majority Shia population, but is ruled by, you know, I think a wing, I think a kind of distant wing maybe of the Saudi family, or tribe and clan, but is a Sunni emir or prince or king, you know, that has been established by the British over this.

population of mostly she's and that Qatar you know which if you look on a map is just an appendage out of Saudi you know back to you know into Saudi and UAE if you look at that and the kind of curve of the Gulf is basically the desert of Oman and that that could go back there so what is being contemplated is that there are different kind of political possibilities you know that reverse some of the consequences of colonialism into more regional, regionally sovereign entities. That's what it really is all about. That is why Iran is subject to this imperialist war is because they are a sovereign country. They had a revolution. They got rid of their vassal, you know, a dictatorial ruler, the Shah.

And since that time, they have existed outside of the U.S. imperial system. and continue to be a challenge and a threat to the settler colony that is so important in, you know, dominating and controlling this region in Israel, right? So that is how I see this kind of larger history is that Iran has always been a regional power. It has always been a basis for a large, powerful state in the region. And the war on Iran is to reduce it, to continue. the process of trying to prevent it from exercising a decolonizing kind of character in the wider, wider region, and to challenge and perhaps even eliminate, you know, the Zionist state on behalf of liberating, you know, Palestine. Yeah, there's so much there.

One is you're right, the attacks on the Gulf Coast countries, particularly the American bases there as well as some of the oil production there, is Iran dismantling the facade that the U.S. is actually going to be a source of protection of these countries. It's obliterating that mythology and making those countries think twice and three times about, you know, what this relationship with the U.S. actually gives them. And they're, you know, they're taking some of their resources out from those countries. countries putting it towards the protection of Israel, which really shows favoritism involved here. Israel is being hit harder than it ever has in its entire history. I think we should just pause on that right now. Iran is hitting Israel harder than it's ever been hit. It's starting to really have a toll on the impact of the settler colony as a whole and the settlers themselves.

Some with passports flee. The rest are now living this bunker life at night where they have to, you know, kind of retreat to the bunkers underneath Tel Aviv or these other, these other cities to protect themselves from the barrage and that really is shattering a lot of the mythology that I think Israelis even believe about their superiority to other other countries in the region militarily economically, etc. The Sykes-Pico agreement, this colonial carve-up of the region, is now being invoked on behalf of the Greater Israel Project that there needs to be a new round. So we see that coming out. I think the Trump administration, it's befuddled, it's confused. It has no real vision. Maybe Trump thinks he could, or maybe he thought at the beginning that

he could do a Venezuela type situation, you know, do a decapitation strike, bring somebody else that will be more willing, perhaps, to negotiate on some level. But that's not Israel's interest. Israel's interest is to turn Iran into the next Syria or Libya. It is to destroy it as a regional power at all, you know, and the axis of resistance so that it can pursue the greater Israel project. We've seen images coming out of IUDF soldiers with greater Israel patches showing that this is a very clear sort of vision that they have during this war going forward, that they want to continue to colonize and take over this entire region. There are two countries that stand in the way, big countries. Of course, Iran is one. And as we alluded to earlier, Naftali Bennett, saying Turkey is the next Iran, is gesturing towards the fact that even if they're successful in Iran, which,

It's not guaranteed, and I think the statistical odds right now are against that idea. But even if they are, that the next regional power that they have to displace and overthrow and destroy would be Turkey. So with that in mind, I'm interested in what the relationship between Turkey and Iran is today. We understand what Israel's relationship to everybody is, kill them all, destroy everything, take over everything. But Turkey and Iran have this historically sort of contentious relationship. Erdogan, in particular, is really really. really ambiguous in a lot of ways and tries to walk these balancing lines between these power divisions in the in the region and i'm wondering if you could just help clarify what that relationship

is today and what it might look like going forward yeah that's an interesting um issue um and also kind of a complicated one because the politics of turkey's position in the region are pretty contrary um pretty contradictory you know in a lot of ways You know, it's a NATO power since, what, 1953, 52, early 50s, it, you know, joined NATO. That has to be seen as a concession of Cold War geostrategie because of its location, you know, kind of controlling Black Sea access into the Mediterranean world, you know, warm waters of the Mediterranean, right? So this is it. And, you know, we remember during the so-called Cuban missile crisis that it was precipitated by the United States placing, you know, missiles that could strike targets in the Soviet Union, particularly nuclear missiles that could be, you know, that could be fitted with nuclear warheads in Turkey. because it was a NATO power and an ally of the West, you know, under the kind of military,

sort of, I don't know if I would say military dictatorship, but certainly kind of authoritarian rule with the military as the kind of key institution, you know, behind the state and state policy. In the post-Ut Turk era, they carried on the kind of Republican tradition, but not a democratic kind of, well, there wasn't a Democrat. I mean, Attiric was also kind of an author, was an authoritarian ruler, but this Republican ideal that is the secular westernized state. And so they were affiliated and allied with, you know, the U.S. very strongly in the Cold War. Huge number of troops from Turkey participated, for example, in the Korean, you know, peninsula on the side of the U.S., and so on. So there's that kind of history of it.

being very much a very important part. In fact, it has the largest, I think, standing army after the U.S. in NATO. And so it's kind of an important bulwark, you might say, of like European, Western influence or kind of due strategic interest. And its position, however, has, of course, changed a little bit after the end of the Cold War. And Turkey has undergone, you know, under Erdogan's Ak Party, a long period now, where that secularist tradition, where Islam was not at all part of like public culture, you know, I mean, it's part of the society, of course, but, you know, there's a very French-type laicite idea of secularism, right? You know, that that has also changed and made open up the possibilities for Middle Eastern politics

and set of relations based on being a important Muslim power, a big country, you know, that has economic potential, you know, agriculture. It has a real manufacturing base and makes a lot of, you know, appliances and, and, and, does industry. So, you know, it's kind of a middle power. It's not like a very strong economic power. It doesn't have, you know, oil and so on, the way Iran does, but probably similar kind of population. And, you know, it has been trying to kind of realign in some ways and have influence in the Middle East. for example in like Libya it had like you know it was on one side of it had clients you know it's supported in the the Libyan situation the post-Kaddafi era it obviously has intervened for years in the Syrian civil war and was a conduit for U.S. for you know dissident and militant groups that were

part of that conflict so you know it's kind of has had as a result now this ambiguous sort of situation. Technically, you know, you would think that it would have some potential for cooperation with Iran in the region as two kind of major powers that, you know, could have a lot of trade and so on. I guess, Interestingly, they are, you know, as part of a kind of, so there was like the Western kind of orientation and NATO, but Turkey was prevented from ever joining the EU. You know, it wanted to go through European accession. It was prevented basically for Islamophobia. I mean, the head of like the EU or like titular head.

At one point, some French diplomat Destang, I think was his name. He said, we can't, we just can't have a nation of 70 million Turks. like 70 million Muslims in, you know, Europe. Like that just doesn't work. Like, you know. So there's that kind of potential sphere, but there was blockage. Then there was this kind of Muslim kind of Muslim brotherhoody politics. They were involved, of course, in helping and try and support Mursi's Egyptian administration that was overturned, you know, by military coup with U.S. support and connivance after the

you know, kind of Arab Spring-type revolution that happened there. Then the other kind of orientation is pan-turanism or Turkic community, you know, so of Turkic-speaking countries, one of which is Azerbaijan, that has a kind of conflicted relationship with Iran. So that's a very close ally of Turkey. In fact, Turkey has supported the Aliev, you know, Aliyev's against in their conflicts with Armenia or in the Nagorno-Karabakh region where several kind of small wars, well, not so small for the peoples involved, a lot of casualties,

but wars, they were kind of regional, local to that kind of situation, whereas Iran has developed pretty close and good relations with Armenia and increasingly good relations with Russia that Turkey has a kind of natural and historic problem with as well, just geostrategically that they kind of control access for Russia into the Mediterranean. So that location is of concern. So there's a lot of kind of complex things that could pull them together, but also things that tend to also put them on opposite sides. And I would say the decisive factor recently has really been regional commercial alliances, you know, with Azerbaijan, with Israel, for gas and continuing to provide during this whole period of time, natural gas and oil, the fossil fuel

energy, and its position as a NATO ally that has a huge base, injured like air base. My mother actually worked at this base when she was in high school. It's close to the town where she grew up. And that's kind of not clear what its status, how involved it is with the, you know, surveillance, radar, and monitoring that's so important in the U.S. Israeli kind of war effort, especially since the closer radar stations and all of that that were in the Gulf and all of those U.S. bases. It seems that many, if not most of those, have been destroyed. So that base may be very important. It's hard to know. There have been also reports of, you know, missiles heading in that direction. We don't know if those are false flags in order to foment a kind of greater animosity and bring Turkey more directly in with its own troops. Since it does have like the biggest army, it does have a lot, has been investing a lot in military weapons. And like all these NATO powers, has to be up to a certain standard of interoperability and so on with U.S. and other NATO forces. So in some sense, it would be very much to the advantage of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and to recruit Turkey as a direct part of this. But what you started this off with was a very interesting suggestion that saying this kind of thing out loud, and actually

it's been several months since the overturning of the Assad government in Syria and Turkey's heavy involvement in that sponsorship and support for the kind of former ISIS and Al-Qaeda groups that now have transformed themselves into HDS, sort of kind of protecting them and sponsoring and providing support for them, as well as Turkey occupying parts of northern Syria near the border, that it seemed then that, you know, with Israel's corresponding expansion during that period of chaotic anarchy, you know, as this change in regime from one, you know,

government to this like new kind of network taking over, that Israel kind of, you know, took more territory from the Golan, around Mount Hermon in southern Syria, bombed all over to destroy military capabilities of the former Assad government. And likewise, Turkey has extended a lot of its authority and power in Syria. That puts them in a kind of almost sharing a border, which they have not had in their history.

And that kind of was a harbinger, and people in Turkey were talking, already about that this might put them into kind of conflict with Israel, that Israel may not want a strong power like Turkey with a large military, with a lot of capabilities extending its power and influence in the region in a way that could curtail further expansion by Israel. I mean, the fact is, though, that there's been a lot of commercial cooperation, but that doesn't matter.

We realize and recognize there were also all the April. Abraham Accords, and we're seeing that, you know, Israel's sort of like busy trying to get Saudi and UAE and so on to be shot, you know, their ground troops for them and get them involved in this, in this war. And, you know, it doesn't really matter so much to them if they're bombarded and and so forth. What's of concern to them is only the radar kind of systems that are part of the protection and early alert and warning for, you know, Israel. The last thing I would say on this is also that there's a conflict because of Cyprus. Perhaps you've picked up on, and listeners may have heard some interesting reports. Even in this recent, there's a big British air base because it was

under British control earlier in the 20th century. And when it was finally given its independence, part of the agreement for Cypriot independence was that the British could maintain two major air base, major bases, military bases that are technically like under UK sovereignty, you know, like that's British territory. And there were some attacks and a lot of the U.S. equipment and personnel and war planes that had to be evacuated from the Gulf because they were so vulnerable to Iranian missile and drone attacks and were moved to places like Cyprus. But also there's a lot of Israelis who have been involved with, you know, in temporary, you know, getting second homes or getting, you know, EU rights and citizenship in Cyprus. It's like a short boat ride or short flight away. And, you know, they have also given military support and established a kind of alliance with the Greek part of the island, whereas the northern part is under Turkish occupation from a war that they had in the early 70s because it used to be under Ottoman. So there was a Turkic-speaking population.

And when, you know, went through all of these transformations with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and so on, there were, you know, communal tensions you could say about the status of the island and Turkey fearing for the Turkish-language-speaking minority intervened and kind of took over the northern part and occupies the northern part. And so there is, that is a kind of line of battle. And you could say also that that is

being pulled into possible tensions between Israel and Turkey because it is supporting Cyprus and Greece, you know, there. So it's kind of like a real, like open. It's like there's no clear like ideological. This is the problem, really. It's so hard to organize what's happening because these are all based on geopolitical, military, economic, various interests. And they're not organized around there being like a clear other than, you know, what Netanyahu tried to announce as some kind of coalition was this hexagon of alliances that he announced like a few weeks, two, three weeks ago. And, you know, among them he was including basically Greece and Greek Cyprus, you know, of course, India, Modi was recently there. And then he said two Arab states. And we don't know

which one, obviously, UAE, but I don't know what the other one, you know, is. But he's trying to kind of frame that this is a kind of alliance that is capable of, you know, formulating basically the new shape of the Middle East and being a bulwark against what he sees as potential Sunni. He's still using this kind of language. The Sunni axis, which basically is like Turkey and Syria. and Saudi. And on the other hand, the axis of resistance, Iran,

and its kind of allies in the region. So that might describe something, but like most things that Netanyahu says, it's a lot of projection, and it's a lot of propagandistic, you know, prospective, what he's trying to do rather than what, like, really, you know, exists.

So I don't know if that was at all helpful or coherent because there isn't actually a clear position that you could say of whether there is animosity, rivalry, or amity in potential friendship and commercial and political and military collaboration that could happen between Iran and Turkey. They're both kind of, you know, I mean, Iran is much more ideologically clear and committed. It's for, you know, decolonizing the Middle East. It's for popular sovereignty.

And, you know, and that kind of development. It's part of a kind of geopolitical. political alliance of interest with Russia and China. So that's kind of clear, but everybody wants to be part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. All these countries have been attracted by the potential and possibility of bricks. Turkey, you know, Turkey, you know, went forward trying to, you know, be a BRICS kind of, I guess, that intermediate, like affiliate kind of power. You know, so it's not sort of that easy to figure out which of these kinds of interests and affiliations will be prioritized. My concern is that, unfortunately, as a NATO power, NATO is maybe the least flexible

of any of these formations and alliances, and they may be tied very much to, you know, the interests from a security and military perspective of what the U.S. dictates. Yeah, absolutely. I think The whole region is in a real state of flux right now. I think you outlaid the complicated web of interest in conflicts that exist. There are some areas in which Iran and Turkey have obviously shared interest, many areas in which they don't. Syria is another side of struggle in which they took opposite sides in that conflict. The antagonism of Israel towards everybody is putting interesting pressure on Turkey.

The Turkish population, as far as I understand, is going to be overwhelmingly sympathetic with Palestine. You know, like most of the populations in the region, despite the government's posture. And there's real threat, too, of any real conflict between Israel and Turkey putting, as you said, pressure on this inflexible and already weakened NATO alliance, right? Like, could we imagine any sort of real open conflict between Israel and a NATO country in the U.S. taking the side of Israel against the NATO ally. It would just be another nail in the coffin of NATO. Under Trump, it might happen since he's, you know, ready to take Greenland against a, Denmark's interest, another NATO power, right?

Yeah, another point of tension on that, on that decaying relationship as the world is really reorganizing itself in ways that we can't fully see yet. I'm wondering if you have any insight, and this, you just might not, but you have any insight on how the people of Turkey are thinking about Israel right now broadly and even how they might interpret or meet such a statement? like Turkey is the next Iran. There's a lot of pride, you know, in Turkey, and they're not, they're not one to be bullied like Iran, right? They're not one to just take bullying lightly. So do you have any sense of how that stuff is received?

Well, I mean, I haven't been following, like, the last few weeks, the Turkish press closely to know, like, any specific reactions to the statement by enough Tali Bennett. But as I said, there already had been anticipation and expectations that with the change, circumstance over the course of the Gaza genocide and the, you know, fall of Syria. I mean, they don't see it as a fall. They see it as like, okay, we get, you know, important influence. Some people accuse them of neo-Ottoman kind of pretensions and ambitions in the region because it reminds them of Salim the first who I talked about kind of, you know, in the early 16th century, you know, starting to conquer and absorb these territories of the Levant, the Arab Middle East,

in Egypt. So some, you know, you know, Turkey, they see it as kind of a natural, we're an important regional power and, you know, Syria is close and related to us and very connected. We have all this history and trade routes came through and so on. So they don't see it in the same way that Arab nationalists, you know, look at this as a very alarming, you know, situation. But about Israel, they already had been for like about a year talking about the potential danger that Turkey poses. I feel some of these nationalists during the course of the early part of the genocide, of course all those Turkish people, as you rightly pointed out, very much solidarity. You go to Istanbul, you go to any city in town, you will see that there are banners and there had been big marches and protests,

but, you know, the people are extremely sympathetic and concerned about the suffering of the people in Palestine. They are, of course, also they revere Jerusalem and the Al-Axa as a very important religious site as well. You know, so they have all of those reasons to be very concerned, you know, about it. Some of, I think, the nationalist kind of, you know, looked at like the lack of response by Arab neighboring. states who, let's be honest, their leaderships are corrupted, you know, Western vassals. Like, you know, basically the dividing line is that Iran and a few other places, Yemen, Yemen fought for its freedom from, you know, they had these political, you know, problems and civil war and so on. And I encourage people, if you want to know more about the anti-imperialist sort of history of

Yemen, go back and listen to a two-part series I did on my program with, you know, Issa Blumie, a historian of Yemen, that out of that crystallized a resistance movement that, you know, was anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, managed to survive years of war and devastation by the GCC countries, really led by Saudi and the UAE. So they are sovereign. And Iran is sovereign. These are like almost the only sovereign kind of spaces in the Middle East. And as a result, they reflect the people's will, that we be in solidarity with Palestine, that we free this region from external control that tries to subordinate us and, you know, exploit us and all of that. All these other countries, the people feel similarly, but they are ruled by authoritarian, military

dictatorships, surveillance society, all of that has ratcheted up, and all of those kind of ruling elites, whether the corrupt monarchies of the Gulf, or states like Jordan and Egypt that are neighboring to Palestine and Israel, they have an interest in controlling their populations using the high-tech surveillance that, you know, Israel is so part of a web of development and testing for that, like, you know, they want to keep track of their people through apps and all that. And the Israelis, you know, have the tech and the know-how for, you know, controlling populations. That's what they've been trying to do.

So as long as that kind of continues and you don't have revolutionary popular sovereignty in these other countries, they're going to be passive, you know, and controlled and have their interests aligned in a certain way with, you know, Israel's interests. And so the Turks have looked at the Arabs saying, oh, well, that's their problem. They're the neighboring countries. They're right there. Why don't they do something about it? Now, I think it could be interesting if they feel themselves targeted directly by Israeli expansionism, you know, that could galvanize the population, you know, to really be more demanding of intervention,

confrontation, and solidarity with Palestine. But that is yet to emerge. You know, that's really in Kuwait. that has not, you know, happened. But they have talked a lot about how they might be, you know, kind of next. And I think the biggest problem for them is that there are so many other relationships that have been established as a result of this kind of Abraham Accord nexus of a certain kind of development and commercial ties and relations, that there are some people whose interests

are in continuing and perpetuating this kind of a status quo or even, collaborative relationship with Israel, that it divides and has contradictions for the state and society. And without those being resolved, you know, and maybe they will be resolved by just like unrestrained Zionist aggression and then like, well, they will have no choice. But if they, if that is the choice that they end up having to face that, you know, Israel targets them and tries to, you know, undermine their interests and degrade their capabilities and put them, under, you know, military stress and all of that, what we've seen, you know, happen. If they wait to do so from my perspective, rather than affiliate and align with the anti-colonial

project of the Middle East, then you face, you know, you, you will be facing it alone, you know, that's the, that's the thing. It's like, you know, if Iran falls, you know, And you kind of collaborated in like Syria, falling because you thought you could get something out of it for your own kind of immediate benefits and expansion of your power. But that puts you in the crosshairs of the Zio-American Empire. And now there's nobody else in the region equipped and capable or even interested and willing to try and make common cause with you to defend yourself. This just seems like very foolhardish. hardy thinking, but the problem is, is if you're tied into NATO, how are you going to, you know, have sovereignty for you over your military policy? How are you going to actually chart a different,

you know, pathway? I mean, sometimes Erdogan has seemed like he wants to do that. But, you know, as soon as the U.S. wanted, like, that pastor back, right, you know, there was this pastor who was held for being maybe complicit or involved with the coup attempt that happened several years ago, you know, and they had him, you know, jailed, et cetera. At a certain point, Trump was like, you guys have to set him free. And, you know, Turkey didn't want to do it. And then he, you know, kind of did some treasury, you know, kind of currency manipulation, just like they've been doing basically with Iran that destabilized Iran and led to the initial protests

that were then kind of infiltrated by, you know, kind of various external forces, making common cause with, you know, disenchanted youth and stuff and starting to, you know, create the violent kind of riotous character of those protests on January 8th and 9th. Similar to that kind of destabilization of the currency, you know, under the first Trump administration, they, you know, within 24, 48 hours, they had put in mechanisms that completely undermined the Turkish lira

and sent it spiraling in its value. And so, you know, Erdogan immediately said, okay, you can have him, have the guy back, right? So the question is like, what are the options, you know, do you just have to sit and wait for your turn to come? Because you, you know, any attempts to like get involved, you're now going to be directly in the line of fire. Or do you have to take the opportunity that at least there are other powers in a kind of collective decolonial project and that eventually one way or the other, you know, if you are not, you know, part of this And this is what the Gulf states learned,

is that they are not able to buy their way past the racism, past the Islamophobia, to being truly on the in crowd. When push came to shove, you know, those anti-missile, you know, batteries, they got to go somewhere else because they got to protect Israel. They're not for you.

They were there to attack Iran. They were not there to protect you. They were there to protect the U.S. bases that are there to attack. hack Iran. And so, you know, like this is the sort of situation that, you know, that you see. They thought that they could buy their way into, you know, this kind of Epstein Empire, you know. And some of them are part of this Epstein class, but they're not real members of the Epstein Empire. And, you know, that's also going to be the case for Turkey. Like nobody is thinking, nobody makes a difference.

Look, Trump just recently was explaining, I think he called up on some radio program or whatever, or maybe it was a Fox program by phone. And, you know, he's being asked about this war on Iran. And he was like, wow, they're all ISIS. They're genetically, you know, different from like you and me. And basically it's just rank racism. No distinction. If you knew anything, you would know that it is Iran that fought ISIS more than the U.S. in various theaters around the Middle East,

and they have nothing to do with that kind of extremism, but the Islamophobia that's present operates so fully that there's no meaningful distinction to be made. And what little people know about Shi'i kind of theology and devotion and orientation, they simply seize upon something that's very much projection of the evangelical Christian apocalyptic imagination, which is, oh, they're going to do anything because they want to bring the Mahdi back, right? You know, so they're using the kind of

Shi'e expectation of the Imam who's supposed to come and bring justice and end oppression, you know, which is basically part of their anti-colonial, anti-imperialist ideology. It isn't about imposing their vision on others. It is about freeing from the oppression that they have been under for 47 years sanctions, subversion, you know, color revolution attempts, you know, sponsoring these riots, currency manipulation, you name it, right? And actual open attack. That there's this projection that they are religious fanatics, you know, you can't give a nuclear weapon in the hands of the mullahs because they would be so irrational with this expectation. They would just use this bomb to try and bring back the Mhdi and kill us all.

excuse me, the radical theocracy in the equation is the United States and Israel. They are both more irrational and aggressive and apocalyptic in their approach to, you know, international relations. You know, Iran is the adult in the room here with like sober kind of demands and claims, able to kind of negotiate on the technical conditions of, you know, enrichment and all of that and make decisions. and compromises and, you know, they're acting in a very rational sort of way, but it is this Islamophobia and this orientalism that is driving in some ways, this why I call it a sort of crusader sort of spirit, is you've got a Hegsa, you know, who's got all these Jerusalem tattoos and Deis LeVolt

and sees this as Christian militarism and warrior ethos and basically identifies as a crusader. So much of the American military officer corps have been, you know, recruited, it seems, from, you know, evangelical Christians who share the Huckabee, you know, ambassador to Israel worldview that, you know, the rapture is nigh, we need Armageddon. The Armageddon will take place with conflict with Iran. That's how they interpret the Bible. And that this is a step in precipitating the second coming and, you know, all of the events of. the end times. This is part of the officer crew. We're told, we're telling people, you know, enlisted, you know, folks that like we're having this war as part of a divine plan. And there were a lot of complaints about this registered with the, you know, military, you know, religious

freedom foundation, Mikey Weinstein former, I think major, maybe a colonel, I think major in the, in the U.S. Army established this foundation to say, you know, this should be over. open to all faith and shouldn't be, you know, confessionalized, but that, in fact, actually, since the Bush era, you know, it really, you know, has been. So that's why I think of it as a kind of crusader sort of aggression. Also, Pahlavi even said that, you know, when in this prank call, I don't know if you saw this one, Brett, where these two, I don't know if it was German, I think German or Russian kind of comedians did this prank call to Reza Pahlavi. you know, saying that they were kind of German security officials and that the German state was

considering, you know, under the Meritz government, you know, joining, you know, in this war and wanted to have a call to kind of talk about this. And he was really pleased with this, you know, idea. And he even said, you know, it would be great to have more members as part of this crusade. Okay. So, you know, it's just like, I mean, I don't have to. use my historical analysis. They are Hexeth, Pahlavi, Lindsay Graham said this is

a religious war. I mean, my God, this is the religious theocracy of imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, capitalist, Christian millinarianism. I mean, what could be more dangerous than that in this moment?

It is absolutely insane. It's crazy making the projection to watch it play out, to see these incurious brutes who have the the lack of sophistication that some bigot at the end of a bar and a pub and middle America would have about Islam, like, you know, the Trump administration Hegset, the way they view Islam, the way they view the whole region, I wouldn't be surprised if they've never heard the words Persia or Ottoman,

I mean, except in some vague reference to something they learned in middle school or something, if even that. And that these people with these insane religious ideas, evangelical Christianity, Zionist Judaism, using their interruption, interpretations of the Bible as, you know, in the 21st century, as, as, you know, the intentional force behind what they're doing, trying to bring about the end of the world. It's, it's psychotic doesn't even begin to, to get at it. So I don't want to take up more of your time. I have one more question. The crusading society, I think you made that point. And I'll link to other episodes you've done on that work, because I think it is a crucial sort of heuristic device to understand Western society's approach. to that region. I'll link to your two-part episode on Yemen as well. But there's one more thing we haven't talked about that I think ties in, which is Al-Aqsa Mosque. And, you know, we talk about the possibility of nuclear war. We talk about the possibility of the Samson option, you know, a rudely

destabilizing escalation. And I think Al-Akska holds out a similar possibility for escalation. So can you, you know, quickly kind of just explain to us what it is, you know, the construction of the third temple in Zionism and these ideas fit in here quite well, what it is and why it is like a red line throughout the Islamic world if Israel were to make any sort of attack directly on it? Well, the Al-Aksa Mosque and the gold dome of the rock, Kobeta-Sachra. People have seen pictures of that as well. They're both located on this kind of plateau in the old city of Jerusalem. And it is a holy site for Muslims because of the mention in the verse of the Quran about the farthest mosque. That's what Al-Aqsa means, is the farthest mosque. So it was, of course,

some distance from Mecca and Medina where the, you know, early Muslim community was, you know, receiving Quranic revelations, the verses of the Quran. to the Prophet Muhammad. So this was mentioned as part of his night journey, a kind of mystical or in physical journey where he went to Jerusalem, visited it, prayed with the spirits and souls of all the previous prophets in that Al-Aksa Mosque. And then when, and then from there, you know, had something very much like Dante's otherworldly journey. In fact, some people feel that Dante's divine comedy is actually perhaps based on, you know, this night journey of Muhammad, where he then visited, you know, the seven heavens and the seven levels of hell and, you know,

has this kind of brings back this eschatological kind of, you know, information for Muslims about the afterlife and so on that is part of Muslim devotional culture. And this night of the Isra, night journey and mirage, the ascension, you know, into the heavens, is celebrated, you know, annually and remembered. But because it has a Jerusalem kind of context, it makes Jerusalem the third most important. And those sanctuaries, they are the third most important or holy sites after Mecca and Medina.

And so as a result, there is universal Muslim devotion towards Jerusalem as a holy place. And during the long history of the Islamic, you know, Islamicate rulers and dynasties and polities. These were open and accessible to Muslim believers and the other kind of holy sites associated, for example, with Christianity, the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Resurrection, Bethlehem and other sites related to, you know, gospel accounts of Jesus. you know, were also in the land and you had access to them.

And, of course, also Jews were allowed to live in the city, which they hadn't been when the Muslims came in 632 and, you know, took control of Jerusalem in an agreement with the patriarch of Jerusalem Sophronius. Part of the agreement was that, you know, Sophronius was interested in putting in the agreement, according to historical sources and documents, that Jews be continued to be prevented

from taking up residence and spending time in the city because it was a Christian city, and that meant for them that it was exclusively a Christian, that the temple had been destroyed. That was a very important thing in announcing that the Messiah had come and that it wasn't the earthly Messiah that Jews expected. It was Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven,

was at hand, and so it was very important that the holy city be preserved from being, you know, under, you know, the sort of tainting presence of Jews. This was now a Christian city. But when the Muslims, you know, Arab Muslims conquered it, it then became open to Jewish settlement again. And for the next, you know, 13, 14, 100 years through to the Ottomans, the holy places were managed with access for all the different religious communities, for their own. you know, sites and so on. But what has happened in the Zionist era, not the early Zionists, because the early Zionists were not particularly religiously interested. They just wanted this land because it was attached and associated and, you know, compatible with Western kind of ideas of the

appropriate place for the Jews because of the shared heritage of the biblical, you know, kind of text of valorizing, you know, the biblical text. So it was, of course, very important, really, Christian Zionism, you know, really preceded Jewish Zionism. And that was a religious sort of form of Zionism. And Jewish Zionism early on wasn't particularly a religious orientation. It was a secular, colonial, nationalist. And, you know, you could say in the kind of, you know, dimension of colonial racism, also a supremacist kind of ideology.

and in fact actually a way of making Jews like Europeans, like white imperialists superior. As long as they were trapped in Europe, they were considered subordinate. They were subjected to anti-Semitism. But this colonization project, a settler colonials, is what they thought would, by giving themselves a national identity and a territory and a colonizing kind of mandate would then make them kind of modern, Europeans, part of superior European culture and civilization. It's in that era that after further settlement, you know, has taken place to Jewish immigration, there's been deep interest in having, you know, restoration of the third temple in the era of the Messiah, because in many ways you could say that the establishment of the state was meant to be the messianic, you know,

know, in the like end times, the Messiah comes back. And that's when you have the in-gathering and the, you know, reestablishment of a Jewish polity, right? Of a political state. The Zionist sort of orientation kind of flipped that order and said, well, let's just create a state for all these other secular reasons. We don't need to worry about this kind of Messiah sort of tradition. but subsequently there have been forms of religious Zionism that have developed a kind of ultra like older traditional Orthodox Jewish communities would wait were waiting for the Messiah to return and they thought this Zionist kind of project was actually you know wrong and to be you know stopped if possible. They certainly didn't want to be a part of it. They disagreed with this

sort of approach. They regarded it as irreligious. But now there are variants and forms of religious Zionism and Jewish orientations that are looking to reconstitute what happens in the Messianic Age, which is the third temple. Now, there are all these prophecies and people have probably heard about the red heifer and the certain kind of, you know, conditions are required to have sacrifices at a reconstituted, you know, temple. But so that's what they're trying to advance is, in fact, actually have that messianic age by destroying Al-Axa, which they, you know, believe that that is the location where the Salamonic temple, you know, was and the new temple should be. And as a result, there needs to be a removal of the Muslim kind of holy sites in order to prepare for the building of the third temple.

And there's been some concern that there have been important, powerful groups in Israeli society and the government that have these ideological and kind of millenarian sort of views that you could say are sort of parallel in their own way to the evangelicals or the Mahdism. but really very close to the evangelical kind of Christian messianic, millinarianist, apocalyptic kind of ideas. And there have been concerns that they've been trying to work towards this, and that this war with Iran might be the conditions under which they could use ballistic missiles coming and so on and claim that that's what destroyed, like by bombing it themselves, that's what destroyed, blame it Iran and use that to prepare for taking over the religious Muslim religious sites, which they have in the last decade or so increasingly prevented access by Muslims to them. And especially during Ramadan,

this like last 10 days is usually a period where people would want to spend who can want to spend the last 10 days in a kind of like, you know, solitude. What is it when you, yeah, I'm forgetting blanking on the word when you go into a retreat, you know, for spiritual kind of training. And in Arabic, it's this practice for this last 10 days is called er ticav. But I'm forgetting how we might translate that into seclusion or, yeah, like seclusion for solitude and spiritual training for the last 10 days. And people would do that in the mosque and like go to the mosque, spend 10 days. there praying and meditating and contemplating, not really speaking, you know, this kind of discipline. And that has, you know, been very difficult to do because access has been limited.

Last Ramadan, I recall, and the previous couple of Ramadan's, worshippers in the mosque during the last 10 days were assaulted and attacked. Settlers or these kind of extreme apocalyptic Zionists were allowed to go on. to this sacred sort of precinct march and abuse others and start to perform some of the rituals that had been banned even by the Israeli authorities as too dangerous in precipitating possible conflict between the religious communities and inflaming Muslims not only locally but worldwide. But can you imagine if there was destruction or serious damage to the dome of the rock or the Al-Aqsa mosque, how devastating and how inflaming that would be.

We saw what happened with the decapitation strike, so-called, the assassination and martyrdom of Ayatollah Ali Qamenei, the supreme leader, how that has transformed into a revolutionary spirit of defiance in Iran, bringing people together and also in other kind of parts of the Shia Muslim world. Can you imagine if that is something that is universally kind of revered by all Muslims, how potentially dangerous that could be, at least among the peoples? Again, we don't know whether the governments would do anything, but it would really, really, you know, be extraordinary and devastating, you know, for people and would be certainly one way of really activating a lot.

of deep concern not only because of the Gaza genocide and the solidarity that is universally felt but now in a kind of absolutely alarmed and you know you know horribly horribly devastated sort of sort of way of anger and and so forth yeah so that's what it seems like is important to know about the you know a laxa situation and the last little footnote on that is that the last time there was some kind of, you know, very serious damage. Well, there has been with like these incursions and assaults and tear gas and various things in it. But like damage, damage was when the Mimbar or the pulpit in Al-Aksa Mosque

that actually had been commissioned by Nuruddin Zanghi in the 12th century and then Salahedin after he conquered the city of Jerusalem in, you know, 1187. from the Crusaders, he brought this Mimbar, this pulpit that had been prepared and was sitting in the mosque of Aleppo. He brought it and put it where it had been built for, you know, had been built during the Crusader era that when it is liberated, we want this, you know, this pulpit to be placed in Al-Aksa mosque. That had been there since then. It's incredibly ornate, carved with inlay and all of that. but it was burned by a Christian fundamentalist from Australia, I think in either the late 60s or very early 70s,

and sometime in the 70s, I think, should check on the date. But that actually so outraged Muslims around the world, and at that time, their governments, that the organization of Islamic states, the OIC, actually, the organization, the organization of Islamic conference or I'm forgetting the exact acronym, but it's the Muslim states kind of like international organization was actually founded in response to that. And I wonder if today what the kind of reaction or response, you know, would be.

But it just shows how important at that time, at least, you know, the sanctity and protecting Al-Axa, it galvanized, like creation of a new international body to have cooperation between Muslim states that had as one of its goals that we really need to get organized around trying to liberate Palestine and at least get the, you know, the 242, the UN Resolution 242 dimensions established with an independent state of Palestine in the West Bank in Gaza and its capital in East Jerusalem, right? You know, so that was something worth remembering is that it did at the time really galvanize

the not only the Muslim peoples, you know, but also Muslim states. Absolutely. And I think the thing to remember is all that importance. There's an actual intention and a reason why the millinarian, apocalyptic Zionist, cults, Christian and Jewish, would target Al-Axa. And there's obviously, if that word

to happen going to be an attempt to lay it at the feet of Iran who has no interest or intention or any reason whatsoever to attack Al-Axa and the idea that, well, it was a misfire. They tried to hit something else and hit that total nonsense. We can say before it happens, that if that does happen, we know exactly who the fuck did it and it wasn't Iran. And I think the people in the region are going to know that as well. And so far as we're political educators, we should try to reach our audiences and make that claim up front because we know who has the reasoning to do it, why they would want to do it,

and why they'd want to displace blame for who did it. We can see that before it even happened. So that's important to know. All right, my friend, Adnan, amazing, as always, over two and a half hours. But this is the sort of history that anybody who wants to really understand the region and the players in this particular conflict, well, you have to go through this history. You have to understand this rich, deep, millennial. along evolution of these societies and of these religions and really cultivate a curiosity and

an understanding that can only benefit any contemporary analysis that attempts to apprehend what's going on in the region and the unique character of all the individual countries and peoples involved. So absolutely expert analysis and beautiful going through of millennia of history by you Adnan. It's an honor and a pleasure to have you on as always my friend. I let you go. Can you just let listeners know where they can find you and your work online? Sure. And just thank you so much, Brett, for having me on for your patience as I go on through all of this, you know, long answers of lots of history. And I hope that your listeners find it useful if they have the patience to get, you know, all the way to the end. Apologies for, you know,

making it so long. But I'm passionate about it too. And I just love to be able to impart some of this knowledge and analysis and your questions are always so good and open up like really serious, real things that, you know, hopefully people find it useful and productive. So I thank you for that and the work that you're doing. If people want to, like, you know, kind of keep up with what I'm doing, they can follow me on Twitter. I still do Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, so X.com slash Adnan-A-D-N-H-A-I-N. And my YouTube channel, but you can also listen to it as an audio podcast. It's on all the usual platforms. Just Adnan Hussein Show. I didn't have the creativity for a real name. But that's also on

YouTube.com slash at Adnan Hussein Show. And, you know, hopefully there's a lot of good resources there. I've been having a lot of discussions about the Iran situation, other things related to history, both Middle East history and others. And, you know, I know some of your list, are interested in the spiritual, they're, you know, interested in the material and liberation, but they also connect that to their own interest in spiritual development as well. And so I do have a series that I like, and a new episode will be coming out today when I publish it in the 99 names series on my channel that is about the Muslim mystical spiritual Sufi tradition of the 99 names of God. and this week's or this next episode is arrahim the compassionate and i think right now in this world

there's nothing we need more than empathy compassion understanding of the other rather than this you know cruel barbaric and sadistic sort of power and politics that we have so if you find something like that appealing, please do check it out. Yeah, I'll link to all that. I'll link to guerrilla history, really advocate people go and listen to your conversations you've been having on your YouTube channel. You have really unique guests. You know, you introduced me to a lot of thinkers and a lot of guests, and the conversations are always incredibly deep and well-informed and anybody could benefit from engaging with it. So I'll link to all that in the show notes, as well as some of our previous episodes together on St. Francis, on Sufism, etc.

If anybody wants to follow those particular rabbit holes and learn more about those things. The St. Francis episode got assigned in a course recently, not mine. Somebody, a colleague, assigned it. So, you know, people really, really loved that conversation. So do check it out if you haven't heard it. I did not know that. Absolutely beautiful. Yeah, if you have not listened to it, go check it out.

All right, my friend, this is one and many more conversations. You and I will have keep up the amazing work, and I'll talk to you soon.