It is written by Kristof Szitar (Ph.D Université de Lausanne), an early career researcher specializing in Persianate and South Asian studies. He currently serves as co-editor of the Ghaznavid Poetry Anthology and researches on Persian and Urdu literary cultures. 

***

Years ago, I hiked through Switzerland’s Francophone countryside. When I passed through Chesalles-sur-Moudon, the village coat of arms caught my eye. At first, it looked like just another flourish in Europe’s heraldic landscape. But then I noticed the symbol at its center: a golden lion brandishing a scimitar beneath a blazing sun. This unmistakably Persianate cameo conjured the tiled palaces of Safavid Isfahan, the squares of Samarqand, and the imperial courts of Mughal Delhi. The lion’s share of the story behind it, I would learn, belonged to a globe-trotting local of these pastoral slopes.

Chesalles harbors an improbable link to the Persianate world: in 1927 the commune adopted a new blazon, the lion and sun, to honor an eighteenth-century native whose journey carried him from these verdant slopes to the Mughal court. His life—and the emblem that later memorialized it—offers a vivid window onto early modern mobility and the travels of symbols across continents.

Farr Far Away

In Chesalles, the lion and sun, or Shir-o Khorshid, survives as a civic symbol—its former imperial clout spanning Iran, Central Asia, and South Asia now only a memory. Over centuries, the symbol accumulated layered meanings. The lion signified courage and worldly authority, while the sun radiated farr, the “glory” (ultimately from the Avestan “xᵛarənah”, lit. “good fortune”) believed to legitimize kingship.

From the era of the Turco-Persian Seljuqs onward, this dyad absorbed Islamic political theologies—including the association of the lion with ʿAli, known as Asadallah (lit. “the Lion of God”)—while preserving older Iranian conceptions of cosmic order. Standardized under the Qajars, it became one of the most recognizable emblems of Persianate kingship, legible from the Iranian plateau to the irrigated valleys of Transoxiana and the Gangetic plains.

To understand how the Shir-o Khorshid found a second life in Switzerland, we must turn to one remarkable micro-history of audacity and cross-cultural encounters: the story of Daniel Moginié. Born on 31 August 1710 in Chézals (as Chesalles was then spelled), he died on 22 May 1749 in Agra, during the turbulent reign of Ahmad Shah Bahadur (r. 1748-1754).

His brother François—a London-based innkeeper—later edited and published his swashbuckling brother’s biography, issuing it from 1754 onward under the title L’Illustre Païsan ou Mémoires et aventures de Daniel Moginié (The Illustrious Peasant: The Memoirs and Adventures of Daniel Moginié). The book found an avid readership, feeding the eighteenth-century appetite for travelogues, courtly intrigue, and stories from the exoticized “Orient”.

Following the publication of Moginié’s memoirs, later writers tried to impose a coherent “origin story” on a life that would carry him from rural Switzerland to Holland, the ports of Southeast Asia, and ultimately to Iran and Mughal India.

One of the most widely read versions of this story appeared a century later, in the Sydney Morning Herald of 23 June 1865, which presented a romanticized account of how his journey supposedly began. It claimed that, at about eighteen, a night of wine and family stories in the half-ruined ancestral home awakened his obsession with the Moginié family’s lost nobility.

A joking remark about some forgotten proof of that grandeur hidden “in a corner of the house” supposedly led him to break open a wall and discover a mysterious parchment. Taking this as a sign of destiny, Daniel enlisted in a Swiss regiment bound for Holland so that he could consult a professor in Leiden, then a rising center of philology.

From the Malay-Indonesian World to Persia and South Asia

In Batavia, Moginié was caught up in colonial rivalries and intrigues that ended with his expulsion to Malacca, where a retired French officer urged him to abandon Southeast Asia and seek his fortune in Persia instead. Acting on that advice, he persuaded a ship’s captain in 1729 to put him ashore at Gamron, the port now known as Bandar Abbas, on the southern coast of Iran.

In Persia, Moginié entered the service of Nader Shah, the formidable Afsharid ruler, whose campaigns between 1736 and 1747 reshaped the political geography of Iran, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Moginié reportedly served as a scout, an artillery officer, and a participant in the siege of Shiraz, where he was wounded. But the turbulence of Nader Shah’s later years—marked by palace intrigue and purges—eventually pushed Moginié to flee eastward toward Mughal India.

Delhi remained a symbolic center of Persianate sovereignty. Moginié’s Persian experience, coupled with the symbols he carried—including the lion and sun—seems to have impressed court officials. The Sydney Morning Herald claimed that in India Moginié rose to the rank of “Omrah” (i.e. ʿUmaraʾ, placing him among the empire’s high nobility) and held high offices, including the governorship of the Punjab and the supervision of the imperial household.

While the details are difficult to verify, his memoir and later accounts portray a broader arc that is consistent: Moginié was said to have lived in considerable splendor until his death in 1749.

A Swiss Odyssey and the Lion’s Share of a Legend

Drawing on his published travelogue, an 1865 article in the Sydney Morning Herald, titled “The Romance of a Swiss Boy,” embellished Moginié’s career, describing him as chamberlain and generalissimo to the Mughal emperor and as the husband of a wealthy princess who died childless, leaving him a vast fortune.

What began as a personal device encountered in Persia and India thus entered the visual language of a Swiss village, but it did so within a global order shaped by European expansion overseas. Switzerland had no formal colonies, yet Swiss soldiers, engineers, financiers, and merchants were deeply embedded in the imperial systems of others, from the Dutch East Indies to Mughal and post-Mughal India. Moginié’s career—part mercenary, part cultural cross-dresser, part self-mythologizer—belonged to this wider imperial world, even if it unfolded before the age of high empire.

Seen in this light, the Shir-o Khorshid on the coat of arms of Chesalles is more than a relic of distant courts. A Swiss adventurer claimed to have risen to power within Asian empires by mastering their political languages and symbols, and it was this version of him that the village chose to commemorate in 1927, at the height of European global dominance. The Persianate lion and sun thus records not only a remarkable journey, but a strategy of European authority abroad, in which foreign emblems were appropriated to legitimize rule.

Long before the British “White Mughals” of the nineteenth century, Moginié’s legend anticipated this imperial logic. The Shir-o Khorshid that crowns Chesalles records how a small Swiss village located itself inside a colonial world by adopting the symbols of Persianate power.

The post How the Lion and Sun Became a Royal Symbol in Switzerland appeared first on Ajam Media Collective.

It is written by Larkin Cleland, a Hungarian-American journalist and geographer. In 2025, he completed a Fulbright scholarship at the Hungarian Geographical Institute. He currently uses his fluency in Persian and Arabic as a researcher for Global Energy Monitor. 

***

The winter chill hangs over Košice, the capital of Slovakia’s easternmost district. The city feels tired and grey. I see the sign for a small restaurant above a hair salon and make my way upstairs in search of warmth and food. The waitress speaks only Slovak, but when I ask, “Magyar?” to see if anyone speaks Hungarian, she gestures for me to wait. Soon she returns with the cook, who describes the special of the day: tarhonya with chicken. It’s a classic Hungarian home dish, couscous-like balls of dried flour and egg dough fried in butter, then boiled.

“There is no Hungarian food more Hungarian than tarhonya,” is how one lifestyle magazine describes the dish. This was exactly the type of authentic cultural experience I had set out to have as I learned the language and explored my ancestry in this historically Hungarian part of Slovakia. But when I finished my meal, I googled tarhonya, and found a result more complicated than I expected. The roots of the dish and the origin of its name are Persian, related to the tarkhineh (ترخینه) eaten in Iran today.

The cook behind the tarhonya was likely not thinking about the dish’s origins as she told me she had lived her whole life in now mostly Slovak-speaking Košice. Her ability to speak Hungarian, like her recipe, came from a grandmother who lived here before the Kingdom of Hungary lost these lands in the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. She told me she was proud to be Hungarian and proud also to see me, a descendant of a Hungarian great-grandfather who went to America, learning the language.

In 2010, newly-elected Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and his conservative coalition passed a law granting fast-track (European Union) citizenship to anyone who can prove ancestry in “Greater Hungary” and who speaks the language. This represents a significant material and symbolic benefit for “Hungarians beyond the borders,” as Orbán calls us. Hundreds of thousands, the vast majority in Slovakia, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine, have taken advantage of the opportunity. In the 2022 election, 94% voted for Orbán.

This strain of Hungarian nationalism draws a firm line between insiders and outsiders. Orbán’s right-wing party mainstreamed anti-Muslim xenophobia. The prime minister stood proudly as the only “openly anti-immigration” leader in the European Union, warning Hungary might otherwise become a “mixed race society” and conflating migrants with Islamic terrorists. He juxtaposed these “invaders” with the timeless cross-border Hungarian nation he claims to represent.

Orbán’s use of enduring symbols and myths of Hungarian identity, alongside his claim to represent the transnational community, were key to his brand of illiberal nationalism and his construction of a political dynasty. That nationalism is characterized by its ability to incorporate not just a single origin story and shared blood, but also ideas of a unique Hungarian mindset and affinity for the complex language, letting it include people with tenuous genealogical ties to the nation like myself.

While Orbán was defeated this April, the Hungarian nationalism he shaped seems likely to live on. The new prime minister, Péter Magyar, is a former member of Orbán’s party. He too has taken a hardline stance on immigration. And, one of the key stunts of his campaign was a walk from Budapest to Nagyvárad (Oradea), a major city for “Hungarians beyond the borders” in Romania—an appeal to transnational Hungarian nationalism highly reminiscent of Orbán.

In the mythologized story of the Hungarian people that nationalists promote, the Magyars came from Central Asia across the Ural mountains and settled in the Carpathian Basin in the 800s C.E. A millennium later, explorers and linguists set out towards the Central Asian steppe to find the tribal groups who still speak Finno-Ugric languages distantly related to modern Hungarian. Even as the ruling party kept up its rhetoric against immigrants from the East, it recently spent 80 million euros to build a gleaming new Museum of Ethnography in Budapest, which prominently displays the Central Asian artifacts those explorers brought back.

The Persian roots of tarhonya, the quintessential Hungarian dish I tried in Slovakia, highlight the contradiction inherent to this version of nationalism. The dish did not cross the Ural mountains into Europe with the early Hungarian tribes. Rather, it arrived in the 16th century with the Ottoman invasion. From the Persian تر (meaning “wet”) and خوان (meaning “dish” or “food”), versions of tarhonya are now found across the region. 

Iranian recipes for tarkhineh use bulgur and kashk while Anatolian versions use a fermented wheat dough with yogurt, but all, including the typical Hungarian preparation, involve a dried dough rehydrated as a soup or stew corresponding to the original Persian name. Folk etymologies even link this rehydration process to the demands of the nomadic lifestyle Hungarians lived in Central Asia, though the word arrived long after they settled down.

Tarhonya reveals a Hungarian language and culture full of influences from the East, including many of the most prominent symbols of Hungarian identity. The iconic Hungarian paprika did not exist before the Ottomans brought spicy peppers recently introduced to the Mediterranean from the New World, nor did the classic Hungarian stuffed cabbage. Tourists and locals alike still flock to thermal baths, both those constructed by the Ottomans, like Rudas Thermal Bath, and newer alternatives built after the tradition was assimilated into Hungarian life. One of the most striking examples of cultural mixing is traditional embroidery, also displayed at the Museum of Ethnography as a timeless Hungarian art, though many of its designs descend directly from Persian carpetmaking.

From a linguistic standpoint, there are at least several dozen New Persian loanwords by way of Ottoman Turkish, words like padlizsán (“eggplant,” cognate with Persian بادنجان), papucs (“slipper,” from Persian پاپوش), and csárda (“tavern,” from چارطاق or چهارطاق meaning “four pillars”). But there are also many more with origins in Middle or Old Persian that were borrowed directly into predecessors of Hungarian. Examples include tej (“milk” in Hungarian and cognate with Persian دایه meaning “wet nurse”), hús (“meat,” cognate with گوشت), and hét (“seven,” cognate with هفت).

Persian speakers are familiar with myths of a “pure” language and condemnation of contamination by foreign words. Movements to remove Arabic influences from Persian have been used to promote visions of Iranian nationalism that erase layers of identity and the unique beauty and history of Persian and its interaction with other languages and cultures. Like Hungarian interest in preserving language communities abroad, these movements have found particular footing in diaspora communities. But while educated Persian speakers usually recognize Arabic words, and educated Hungarians are often aware of the Germanic, Slavic, Latin, and even Indic (by way of the Roma languages) influences in their language, Iranic and Turkic words are less recognizable.

Still, the presence of these words evidences not just incidental contact between Hungarian and the Persianate world, but centuries of cultural and ethnic mixing, on the steppes of Central Asia in the 7th century as in the Carpathian Basin under Ottoman rule from 1526 to 1699. Hungarian nationalists mostly agree on the strict divide between welcome “Hungarians beyond the borders” and unwelcome “migrants” today, and they also agree on the ancient origin of Hungarians in Central Asia. But if we consider the 16th century, when invaders also brought so much of what it today means to be Hungarian, that line blurs.

Nearly all Hungarian schoolchildren read Eclipse of the Crescent Moon, by Géza Gárdonyi, a late 19th-century novel about the fight against the Ottomans and an ode to love of Hungary. It centers around the 1552 siege of Eger, where a group of brave but outnumbered Hungarians defend the fortress against the padesah (پادشاه) and his Eastern hordes. Many fall as martyrs, but with cleverness and heroism, the protagonist finally drives back the faceless, nameless army of turbaned invaders at the point of a sword engraved with the word hazáért—“for the homeland.”

In 2016, Viktor Orbán repudiated a decision of the European Parliament by refusing to allow migrant resettlement in Hungary, saying, “it’s better if everyone stays under their own fig tree.” He invoked the story of Eclipse of the Crescent Moon, stating also that this was “not a migrant crisis we need to solve, but a historical task for us Hungarians, Europeans, Christians.” But there is a certain irony in that invocation. The idea of preserving the Hungarian nation by pushing back the Muslim invaders might, in his mind, parallel the battles of the 16th century. And yet, neither Orbán, nor Magyar, nor Eclipse of the Crescent Moon could describe the swords wielded by the Hungarian warriors to accomplish that task without the Persian word by which they are referred to in Hungarian: kard (کارد).

The post Tarhonya, Tarkhineh: The Persian Roots of Hungary’s Most Hungarian Food appeared first on Ajam Media Collective.

***

In March 2026, Iraq’s soccer team beat Bolivia 2-1 to qualify for the World Cup for the first time since 1986. I watched the game on a phone screen at an airport far from the pitch, but I savored the rare sense of collective joy among Iraqis I saw onscreen. As the Iraqi players celebrated, they raised not only the official Iraqi standard but also a blue-white-and-red flag that I know well: the Assyrian flag.

Held aloft by the team’s five members of Assyrian heritage, the flag’s appearance was an unexpected moment of visibility for Assyrians that sparked pride among the global diaspora and curiosity among many non-Assyrians.

My first memory of the Assyrian flag was in Nuhadra (Dohuk) a small city in northern Iraq encircled by mountains. I was a child walking alongside my activist parents at a parade celebrating the Assyrian New Year, known as Kha B’Nissan or Akitu in Assyrian. Seeing the flag  and being surrounded by members of my community dressed in traditional clothes and shouting “Khaya Atour” (Long Live Assyria) filled me with an overwhelming sense of unity. 

I was too young then to ponder how a flag came into existence. Yet my little fists formed part of a continuous history.

In Assyrian neighborhoods and villages in Iraq today, it is common to see the Assyrian flag at celebrations. But Assyrians only started to openly celebrate their new year after the establishment of a safe haven in northern Iraq in the early 1990s. Public celebrations were the result of the efforts of generations of Assyrian activists who paved the way for greater recognition of the community’s rights on their native lands.

Fewer than 300,000 Assyrians live today in Iraq, down from 1.5 million before the US invasion. Hundreds of thousands more live spread across Iran, Syria, Turkiye, Lebanon, and Palestine, and around 3 million Assyrians live in diaspora. They are united by a shared language, history, and culture.

In 1992, I moved with my parents from Baghdad to the northern region, reuniting with one side of the family while losing sight of the other. My mother’s native village, Bakhetme, was destroyed in 1987 during a campaign of collective punishment by Saddam Hussein’s government against Assyrian and Kurdish communities across the north. As a result, we lived in Mesurike, an encampment town built to host the displaced people of my mother’s village.

I developed a deep pride in my Assyrian identity while living in Mesurike. I learned that the Assyrian flag hanging around the village represented our people as a whole, rather than a single political ideology or party. The flag was an embodiment of community resilience in the face of oppression, and a beacon of unity for Assyrians across their indigenous lands and in the diaspora.

In 2004, a year after the US invasion, my father was injured in an attack as violence engulfed Iraq. I emigrated with my family to Chicago, joining an estimated 80,000 Assyrians there. 

About three years ago, I was ordering flag banners for the Assyrian Club at the school where I work as a counselor. I quickly realized that the Assyrian flag was not an accessible product online. I also found at least five different versions of what is supposed to be the same flag. Once I started looking closely, I even found different versions of the flag within my own house. The symbols were printed in different colors, ranging from red, black, brown, and gold. In some cases, they were completely absent.

I realized that, as a people, we are losing track of the correct version, or even where the flag had come from. I began to wonder: what is the history of the Assyrian flag? Why are there so many different versions? And which is the official one?

As a people without a state, it was hard to find answers to these questions. There were no national archives I could visit, or official history textbooks to consult. Assyrians live spread across many countries. Our history, too, is scattered around the globe. 

I began searching for answers. Members of the Assyrian Universal Alliance (AUA), the organization that had originally called for a unifying flag in the sixties, heard about my research into the flag’s various designs. They started supporting my efforts to trace this history and create a site dedicated to the evolution of the Assyrian flag. 

In this article, I present the history of the Assyrian flag and how it became a unifying symbol in Assyrian communities worldwide.

The First Assyrian Flag 

The first Assyrian flag was created by the Syriac Orthodox community of Tur Abdin in Turkiye before World War I. It had three horizontal stripes and three stars. The three stars represented the three main denominations of the Assyrian community at the time: Syriac Orthodox, Church of the East, and the Chaldean Catholic Church. 

In my research, I found several versions of the WWI-era flag, varying in design, colors and elements. It has three stripes and three stars, another has an added seal featuring an archer shooting an arrow on top of a bull. Sometimes the colors are purple, white, and red; others describe them as salmon, white, and red. 

In 1916, the version of the flag containing a seal was created by Reverend Joel E. Werda, President of the Assyrian National Association of America, and Executive Secretary Charles S. Dartley.

Assyrian military leaders Agha Petrus and Malek Kambar’s flags are among other standards that came out during WWI to represent different Assyrian movements.

Agha Petrus led Assyrian volunteer forces and later took part in efforts with the British to advocate for Assyrian autonomy. Malek Kambar was associated with French-backed discussions of possible Assyrian autonomy in the Jazira region, though no lasting political entity was established. 

But after World War I, the Assyrian homeland was divided between different countries and the earlier Assyrian flags became less widely used. Until 1968.

On April 13th, 1968, Assyrian Universal Alliance (AUA) was founded as a worldwide political organization aiming to secure the human rights of the Assyrian people in their homeland and attain an autonomous state in the Assyrian ancestral homeland. With chapters on all major continents, AUA has been a member of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) since 1991. It has been a driving force of Assyrian activism worldwide since its founding.

Soon after AUA’s inception, the organization addressed the need for the Assyrian nation to have its own official national flag. They appealed to Assyrian artists and experts worldwide to collect ideas in a design competition. Eventually a decision was reached in favor of a design described by the late Homer Ashurian, AUA’s former History & Cultural Director, as the one that best captured the Assyrian essence.

Ancient Symbols for a Modern Nation

This design belonged to George Bet Atanous, an Assyrian living in Iran. Bet Atanous was an Assyrian history and art enthusiast, described by some as a self-taught Assyriologist. His family moved to Russia before WWI, where Bet Atanous was born in 1919. But he returned with his family in 1927 to Urmia, the region they were from in northwestern Iran. 

Urmia was historically home to a large community of Assyrians, with hundreds of villages dotting the hills and river valleys west and north of the vast Lake Urmia. Ottoman forces invaded Iran and killed many Assyrians in World War I, reducing their population from tens of thousands to several thousands and sending many more fleeing. But in the 1920s, Iran invited Assyrians to return and rebuild their communities. The region is considered a cradle of Assyrian culture, and Bet Atanous grew up in its heart. Urmia became a center of the modern Assyrian cultural renaissance.

While the flag was new, the inspirations that Bet Atanous drew on were anything but. The symbols are ancient Assyrian imagery dating back to the Early Dynastic Period of Sumerian art, including the ancient sun god, Shamash, the national god of Assyria, Ashur, to the Assyrian Imperial Standard.

These ancient symbols reappeared within the Assyrian community as early as the 1950s, when Assyrian intellectuals began to use the Shamash icon as a symbol of identity. 

The golden circle at the center represents the sun, which, by its exploding and leaping flames, generates heat and light to sustain the earth and all its living things. The four-pointed star surrounding the sun symbolizes the land, its sky blue color symbolizing tranquility. The blue wavy stripes extending from the center to the four corners of the flag represent the Euphrates river. Euphrates is colored blue to symbolize plentitude. Euphrates in Akkadian is Prat, which means plentitude. This river was surrounded by agricultural fields that it irrigated and sustained the people.

The red wavy stripes extending from the center to the four corners of the flag, whose blood-red hue stands for courage, glory, and pride, represent the Tigris. Tigris is colored red to symbolize pride. The Akkadian name of Tigris is Diglat or Tigla meaning date palm. Palm trees grew along the banks of this river in thick rows, which probably inspired the name of the river.

The white lines in between the two great rivers symbolize the Great Zab river; its white color stands for tranquility and peace.

Bet Atanous’s flag design was approved by the 6th Congress of the AUA in Yonkers, New York in 1973. The flag has since become a common feature in Assyrian communities worldwide, both in the homeland and diaspora. 

Assyrians have survived genocide, dictatorships, forced assimilation, internal conflicts, and displacement. But the Assyrian flag serves as a living symbol of resistance, standing against attempts at erasure and supporting the continuity of our people.

But because Assyrians are a stateless community, they lack the institutions to promote their symbols. This is why so many versions of the flag proliferated, using different symbols and images. But this is also why I believe it is so important to preserve the original Assyrian flag and to remember how it came to be.

Remembering the memory of the Assyrian activists and artists who made the flag possible is part of keeping our community alive.

As I researched this history, I was joined by Assyrians from Russia to California who offered expertise ranging from graphic design to archival collection to create a vessel of information accessible to our people and the world. It is now available at www.assyrianflag.org. 

A flag is more than just a design. It is a symbol of unity and resilience that carries the memory of our ancestors. 

I am proud of the Assyrian flag that hangs today in my office in Chicago. And I am happy to know that the same Assyrian flag decorates the streets of Assyrian villages across Iraq. I imagine girls just like myself waving our flag as they march in the Assyrian New Year parade, full of joy and surrounded by our community in their ancestral homeland. 

My journey to understand the history of the Assyrian flag began with a question and ended with a collective effort that brought together Assyrians from across borders and generations. Time and lack of governing bodies may blur the information, but it cannot stand in the way of our determination to remember our history. 

The post The Birth of the Assyrian Flag: Modern Pride for an Ancient Nation appeared first on Ajam Media Collective.

***

On the morning of April 7, 2026, I woke up to a phone call from Tehran. It was a friend of mine, a member of the Association of Jewish Iranian Graduates. Her voice was marked by shock and disbelief: Rafi-Nia Synagogue had been destroyed by an Israeli missile strike. I was stunned. How could a small, modest, almost invisible building tucked away in a dead-end alley in central Tehran be hit by an Israeli bomb?

I thought back to my first experience at this neighborhood synagogue during Yom Kippur a few years ago: the quiet entrance of men wearing kippot, women offering brief, hushed greetings, and the beginning of rhythmic prayers on this day of collective mourning. Voices rose in unison as they recited the Shema and the Kaddish, holy Jewish chants, and then gently subsided. Children moved along the temple’s margins. The synagogue was a home for families as much as a space for rituals. 

My friend’s voice brought me back to the present: “It was around three in the morning. There was an explosion. Neighbors called and said the synagogue had been hit.”

Just the night before the attack, Rafi-Nia had hosted a Passover celebration. The morning after, the community had gathered again, my friend told me, this time to survey the synagogue’s rubble.

In such moments, news moves in fragmented narratives before it stabilizes.

But the experience of loss begins even before official confirmation. One thing was evident: the Rafi-Nia Synagogue was no longer what it once had been. Israel had destroyed a religious and social space for Iran’s Jewish community.

Tehran’s Jewish Geography

The Rafi-Nia Synagogue formed part of the wider landscape of Iran’s Jewish community, which today numbers between 10-15,000 people, according to the Iranian Jewish community association.

Over many years of fieldwork, interviews, and visits across Tehran and other cities, I have met numerous members of the community, from male factory owners, businesspeople, and lawyers to women who served as nurses during the Iran–Iraq war or pursued careers in law, sports, and commerce. I have witnessed a community navigating change while maintaining continuity, and have always received a warm welcome throughout my research.

Tehran has 26 synagogues, of which 13 are active today. Many synagogues are in older Jewish neighborhoods such as Oudlajan, the “mehelle” which was the center of Tehran’s Jewish life in the 19th century. In recent years, there has been a movement to restore older synagogues and open them up to non-Jewish visitors.

This includes the national heritage site of the Ezra Yaghoub Synagogue in Oudlajan. Funding comes from Jewish community members both inside Iran and abroad. In this same neighborhood is the Dr. Sapir Hospital, a Jewish community hospital, which continues to serve central and southern Tehran’s population even as the Jewish community has mostly moved uptown.

These shifts reflect broader social and urban transformations. Over the years, as Tehran expanded northward, many families gradually moved from Jewish Oudlajan toward major streets with mixed populations, including Si-Tir, Sheikh-Hadi, and Gorgan, and beyond. Some community members describe this as a “migration from the neighborhood to the street.” Jewish institutions were previously concentrated in a single neighborhood, but they spread across Tehran from west to east and north during the Pahlavi period.

But the community held onto their old spaces even as they moved elsewhere. Today, no Jewish families reside permanently in Oudlajan, yet three synagogues remain active.

Once, while visiting Hadash Synagogue with a friend, I observed a small group of about ten men gathered for Shabbat prayers. They attended weekly simply to keep the synagogue’s lights on by ensuring a minyan. After prayers, we shared a simple Shabbat meal of eggs, potatoes, and wine.

These intimate moments reveal the continuity of tradition, even when the broader community has largely dispersed across the city and the world.

These spaces retain shared characteristics: inward orientation, small scale, and integration into the urban fabric. Unlike many religious buildings that function as urban landmarks in Iran, such as major mosques and churches, synagogues are often embedded within residential neighborhoods. They are less seen than “recognized,” existing within networks of social relations and familiarity. 

This “invisibility” is a defining feature of many synagogues in Iran. Yet it did not protect Rafi-Nia from Israeli missiles.

Fragments of a Shared History

The Rafi-Nia synagogue was located in a narrow cul-de-sac in a busy neighborhood of central Tehran, not far from the University of Tehran. The alley was so tight that two cars could barely pass each other. From the outside, nothing distinguished the building from its surroundings: a south-facing structure without any overt religious markers. It was fully absorbed into the fabric of a residential neighborhood home to many Jews.

The synagogue likely dates back to the mid-20th century, the early Pahlavi period. Its sloped roof and wooden beams preserved traces of older construction techniques. Its religious function began in 1958, when the late Abdul Rahman Rafi-Nia made it available to the Jewish community. Rafi-Nia was from Mashhad, and it became known among locals as the “Khorasani synagogue.” In the decades that followed, the synagogue became a stable center for Tehran’s wider Jewish community. Tehran’s Jewish community, like Tehranis more generally, traces from across the country, especially Isfahan, Shiraz, Kashan, Yazd, and Mashhad.

In recent years, Rafi-Nia expanded beyond its role as a synagogue. It became a gathering place for the Association of Jewish Iranian Graduates, hosting meetings on psychology, sociology, and individual creativity for aspiring professionals from the community. On the ground floor, a small kosher and vegetarian restaurant operated, serving local favorites like pizza, falafel, and sandwiches. Rafi-Nia was not merely a religious site; it was a layered environment where worship, sociality, and everyday life were intertwined.

Rafi-Nia’s interior was simple yet deeply meaningful. Rows of chairs faced the Ark of the Covenant (Aron Ha Kodesh), where Torah scrolls were kept behind a curtain. It was portions of these scrolls that were found in the rubble.

The walls were adorned with Hebrew texts, framed prayers, and ritual symbols. Light entered softly through small windows, creating a calm, low-intensity atmosphere. This was not a monumental or representational structure, but a lived space, one whose identity was shaped less by architecture than by use.

Even the simplest objects carried memory. The chairs, for instance, were donated before the Iranian Revolution by Habib Elghanian, a businessman and patron who was executed in 1979 amid accusations of spying for Israel. They were part of a living assemblage of objects, each bearing fragments of a shared and ever-evolving history. 

One of the defining features of this synagogue was the link between ritual and collective participation. In ceremonies such as Yom Kippur, ritual roles were assigned through a form of communal auction that included opening the curtain of the Torah and participating in specific parts of the service.

Even objects within the synagogue were symbolically included in this participatory process. This mechanism was not merely economic; it functioned as a collective investment in maintaining and sustaining the space. Amounts were often determined in multiples of 13, a number with symbolic significance in Jewish tradition.

Synagogues are not simply places of worship; they are networks of relationships, repetitions, memories, and human presence. Damage to them signifies the disruption of a way of life, a way of being in the city.

‘The Bricks of My Soul’

April 7 was the last day before a ceasefire went into effect after 40 days of joint Israeli-US bombing that claimed more than 3,000 lives across Iran. It was also the morning that Rafi-Nia was destroyed.

Today, rubble litters the spot where the synagogue once stood. Pieces of the Torah, ripped and burnt in the attack, were found among remains of concrete walls and wooden chairs. 

Israel and the United States have caused widespread damage to infrastructure and historical sites across Iran, including the Falak-ol-Aflak Castle in Khorramabad, Chehel Sotoun in Isfahan, and Golestan Palace in Tehran. 

The targeting of a Jewish synagogue by Israel is not just a military strike; it reveals a profound historical and human paradox. The war between Israel, the United States and Iran is not merely a geopolitical event for Iranian Jews; it is a deeply personal, emotional, and familial experience. 

Many Iranian Jews have family members and friends in Israel. In times of war, these connections are disrupted: communications are cut, contact becomes limited, and family reunions are postponed. And, in the case of the Rafi-Nia Synagogue, their holy site was destroyed by a state that claims to be their defender. In the process, it has become a testament to the history of Iran and its Jewish community. 

But that history is still being written. In conversations with two members of the community, I learned that there are plans to rebuild it after the war. In a telephone interview, one of them invoked a verse by the poet Simin Behbahani: 

دوباره می‌سازمت وطن

اگر چه با خشت جان خویش

I will rebuild you, my homeland

Even if with the bricks of my own soul.

References

Sohrabi, N. M. (2023). Tehran synagogues: the socio-cultural topographies and architectural typologies. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 22(1), 29–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2021.1971934

Sohrabi, N. M. (2024). The politics of in/visibility: The Jews of urban Tehran. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 53(1), 74–92.

Sohrabi, N. M. (2026). Critical Jewish heritage and memory in Tehran: funerary spaces, aesthetics, and preservation. Middle Eastern Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2026.2629505

Sternfeld, L. B. (2019). Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-century Iran. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Digital / Online Sources

Sassooni, T. (2023, December 10). Saffron and Shabbat: Stories of Iranian Jewish Cooking in Diaspora. https://ajammc.com/2023/12/10/iranian-jewish-cookbook-diaspora/

The post Bricks of My Soul: Remembering a Tehran Synagogue Destroyed by Israeli Bombs appeared first on Ajam Media Collective.

“The shadow of God is over the King.”

I often heard this phrase at picnics in the Afghan diaspora community in New York City where I grew up. Over black tea with cardamom, I’d listen as uncles and aunties shared stories of ale Hazrat, “his majesty,” and the sayeh-ye khoda that guided him. Afghan monarchists were usually elites from Kabul who’d  benefited from government posts and fellowship or diversity-driven academic programs. Most immigrated to New York, New Jersey, Virginia, or California. It was His Majesty’s benevolence that helped many secure passage out in the early years of the Soviet-Afghan war. 

This was Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, who reigned from 1933 to 1973. His photograph once hung in Afghan classrooms and government offices. In the diaspora, his calm visage decorated family living rooms.

In his portrait, I saw a clean-shaven man with a neatly trimmed mustache, hairline receding into a high forehead, and a calm, upward tilted expression meant to project aristocratic aloofness or stability. He was shown dressed in a dark green military suit with red epaulettes edged with gold trim. 

Recently, another king has flooded my newsfeed, shared by my Iranian-American friends and held up high by diaspora protestors. At sixty, Iran’s exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi’s face evokes his father, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who was overthrown in the 1979 Revolution. The ornate military uniforms of his father are gone, replaced by Western suits. But pronounced dark eyebrows, bold nose, and swept back gray hair echo his father’s features, as does the Sun and Lion symbol on the flag behind him.

I am reminded of my father’s framed collection of Pahlavi-era Iranian banknotes and coins, collected during trips to Mashhad and Tehran, which covered a wall of our home alongside Afghan bills bearing Zahir Shah. These were portals leading back to collapsed worlds, turning monarchy into nostalgic myth. 

The nostalgia for Zahir Shah in my home was a longing for a time of forty years of what in retrospect felt like uninterrupted peace and progress. During a vacation in Rome, Zahir Shah was ousted by his cousin, Daoud Khan, in the “Bloodless Coup” of 1973. His short-lived Republic of Afghanistan was toppled by the Communist Coup of 1978. Then the Soviets invaded in 1979. Afghanistan descended into decades of armed conflict from which it has yet to recover. 

Today, when I hear members of the Iranian diaspora wax nostalgic about the Pahlavis, I sense a familiar ache. But I feel a deep discomfort because I know that royal nostalgia does not come in times of peace, but in moments of crisis. 

Back in 2001, at the brink of America’s war with Afghanistan, Afghans in the diaspora were caught in a similar fantasy. Theirs was a dream of toppling the Taliban and restoring a king who symbolized a gentle and ordered past. This was a dream delivered by US missiles. 

As I watch the surge of support for Reza Pahlavi in the Iranian diaspora, the political script is eerily similar. Zahir Shah, long exiled in Rome, was revived in the same way: funded by American interests and eagerly promoted by a diaspora longing for order and dignity in their homeland. The war against the Taliban received a progressive Afghan face, a symbolic bridge to a peaceful past. 

Reza Pahlavi represents nostalgia for restoration, especially for those living far from the battlefield. In the aftermath of the Women, Life, Freedom movement and the violent suppression of young Iranians’ hopes for democratic change in repeated uprisings, the visuals of the Pahlavis offer a mirage.

Nostalgic images offer a numbness, a way of ignoring the casualties of a US and Israeli war on Iran that has killed thousands. But when political hopes are divorced from organized movements and instead pinned on fragile fantasies, they risk collapsing at their first encounter with reality. The Afghan diaspora learned this lesson the hard way.

The Dream of Return

In 2000, I was a youth delegate at the State of the World Forum in New York City, which convened global leaders near the United Nations Headquarters. Afghanistan was high on the agenda after highly-publicized laws restricting women were implemented by the Taliban the year before. The optimism of the late twentieth century was at the meeting’s core: the belief that the world could be reshaped through dialogue. 

I met a blonde American businessman from Texas who told me he had a plan to get Zahir Shah back in power. This man, whom I’ll call Hank, told me that his father had worked as an oil engineer in Afghanistan in the 1960s. “Those were the glory days, when there was progress!” I was comfortable in this conversation. Hank’s words recalled my father’s stories of the years of progress and prosperity in Afghanistan. 

Hank saw that I was Uzbek, a minority group excluded under the Taliban; his sales pitch for a future “progressive” Afghanistan was meant for me especially. The return of the king would mean equality for all Afghans, he said. 

Hank told me he was helping finance a loya jirga, a Pashtu term meaning a traditional meeting of elders and representatives, that would bring back the king and his circle of progressive intellectuals. Hank promised that the diaspora could bring back the golden era of Afghanistan – and he would help pay for it.

The dream of a returning king and the invocation of native forms of governance like the loya jirga provided a counter-current to the Taliban even before the US invasion. Hank passed on a VHS tape of an earlier meeting with Zahir Shah from a loya jirga in Rome. Young Afghans were courted to launch this restoration initiative; another gathering took place in August 2001. 

When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, the idea of the exiled King’s restoration gained traction. The presence of 87-year-old Zahir Shah would redirect the optics from Americans toppling a government to the US supporting Western-aligned Afghan technocrats confronting the Taliban. With the frail but potently symbolic face of Zahir Shah, this political transition would appear Afghan-led, dignified, and restorative.

At the Bonn Agreement which instituted the Afghan interim government in December 2001, the royalist project that circulated in exile seemed within reach. Afghan factions and diaspora figures embraced Zahir Shah as a unifying figure. But the American and NATO forces favored a republic led by Hamid Karzai. When Zahir Shah returned to Kabul in April 2002, he was given the title “Baba,” or the Father of the Nation, but no political authority. 

Monarchists entered the 2002 Loya Jirga held in Afghanistan as the “Rome Group.” They held multiple seats that included women and ethnic minority representation. But after interim-leader Karzai was appointed, they were absorbed as members of parliament. 

The new state would be shaped less by Afghan dreams and more by external design. The monarchist project was a mask for American interests in Afghanistan, a performance pitting a “civilized” former monarch against the “savage” Taliban. 

Eventually, this Afghan republic, lasting from 2004 – 2021, was hollowed out by corruption, kleptocracy, and dependence on foreign military powers. The Taliban returned in 2021, more fierce than ever. The many former exiles who staffed the government fled as suddenly as they’d returned. 

The Perils of Royal Nostalgia

The US government presented the war in Afghanistan as a necessary intervention to defeat terrorism. During Bush’s “War on Terror,” the verbiage was “state building” and democracy. Afghanistan represented the good fight for women’s rights. This discourse found a welcome home among the generation shaped by the Soviet-Afghan war and its aftermath. The Afghan diaspora lived with “sojourner’s syndrome,” a belief that their exile would be temporary. 

After each rupture – the Soviet-Afghan war, the civil war, the Taliban years – the diaspora held their breath. But after decades away, they barely knew their homeland. And the past they longed for was hardly as good as they remembered it. While urban elites prospered in 1970s Afghanistan, most of the country lacked access to education, healthcare, or basic roads. The Afghanistan the elite dreamed of had barely existed for most Afghans.  

In both the Afghan and Iranian diasporas, images of a rosy, pre-Revolutionary past serve as political shorthand for the restoration of an era imagined as more legitimate. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym identifies this as restorative nostalgia, a mode of remembering that mobilizes idealized images of the past in order to rebuild it without being critical of its shortcomings. In this context, we can call it “royal nostalgia.”

Afghan royal nostalgia emerged in the late 1990s and 2000s during a profound crisis. Taliban rule, international isolation, and the lasting devastation of civil war created a vacuum of legitimacy in which the long-exiled king was seen as a bridge to bring back a lost nation.

A key moment was the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, when the Taliban pulverized Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. This crisis jump-started nostalgia for the monarchy, especially the era from 1960-70s, when Zahir Shah opened Afghanistan to research, archaeology, natural resource development projects, and international visitors. Kabul was remembered as a place of universities, museums, and cultural exchange rather than a site of war. 

Afghan royal nostalgia condensed an entire country into a handful of images from one city and one decade. The rebuilding of Afghanistan was an attempt to restore Kabul as it appeared in some family photographs and inherited memories. Zahir Shah returned as a symbol, while Hamid Karzai, an Afghan once living in America, staged unity through carefully selected ethnic clothing. British Vogue magazine even dubbed Karzai as a “stylish leader.” 

Nostalgia proved easier to mobilize than to govern. The former king-turned-Baba spent his final years in the Arg, Kabul’s Royal Palace, restored after the American invasion. The monarch had returned on the backs of an army of foreign occupation. But he was unable to move more than a few feet without an armed escort. He died in 2007, surrounded by Louis XIV furniture and decoration resurrected from the 1970s. He was buried in a simple white shroud at the royal mausoleum on Maranjan Hill in Kabul. The funeral was held with the pomp and circumstance of a royal burial. His sons did not continue the monarchy. With the death of Zahir Shah, the symbolic restoration ended. 

The Taliban insurgency grew in intensity. The insurgency grew more organized and lethal. IEDs and suicide bombings increased. In response, U.S. and NATO forces escalated. The war expanded endlessly into villages, homes, and farms. 

The monarchy did not return stability to Afghanistan. The struggle to make an entire country in the image of Kabul with the help of a foreign army failed catastrophically. 

After ale Hazrat

Restorative nostalgia may briefly unite a diaspora, but it is not enough to build a nation. Afghanistan offers a stark lesson. The promise of a new golden era was more tangible as a dream rather than a political reality. When that dream collapses, it is the people with nowhere to flee who bear the greatest cost. 

Even now, the remnants of the Afghan monarchy are still exhibited in the homes of exiles, like my father’s collections of stamps and banknotes with the king’s face. But these objects are no longer political claims.

They are reminders of the impossibility, and undesirability, of return. My father himself never returned.

Back in Kabul, Zahir Shah’s mausoleum suffered a worse fate. It was stripped of wires, its light fixtures stolen, graves broken and vandalized. Just the name remains, ale Hazrat, as those who still long for the kingdom remember him as. Everything valuable was carried off.

The author thanks Zarlasht Sarwari, Mejgan Massoumi, Zarena Aslami, and Leila Nadir for their vital input.

The post Chasing God’s Shadow: The Dangers of Royal Nostalgia appeared first on Ajam Media Collective.

***

“What should Indians try in Iran?“

“Ghormeh sabzi,” the Iranian sailor says, smiling without hesitation. He adds:

“Biryani is so spicy,” gesticulating tears in his eyes. “I am crying at the table.” At this, the Iranian sailor and the Indian interviewing him burst into laughter. 

Their exchange was filmed in late February during the International Fleet Review and MILAN 2026, a massive multinational parade and exercise in the Bay of Bengal. It is a light-hearted conversation and yet it evokes some of the oldest promises of naval life: the opportunity to see the wider world, the fraternity of maritime society, the experiences through which young men and women become someone. The sailors take selfies, group photographs, videos of the procession; their sojourn in India is memorialized in pressed uniforms and smiling conversations, the awkward signs of youth inscribed in their manners and gestures. These images would become the last records of their young lives, faces that would never have the chance to grow old.

On March 4, 2026, on their voyage home, the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena was ambushed and torpedoed by an American submarine off the coast of Sri Lanka. Within moments, approximately 180 people on board were thrown into the sea. As the Iranian sailors struggled to stay alive in deep waters, the Dena sent out a distress call pleading for help. In abject disregard of historic maritime custom to assist and rescue survivors of shipwrecks, including wartime enemies, the American vessel ignored their calls and sped away.

Only days prior, these drowning cadets marched in the same parade with their US Navy counterparts. The US would have known the Dena was defenseless because the parade was a peacetime mission and participants were required to be unarmed. The Sri Lankan Navy became the primary search-and-rescue operator, recovering 87 corpses and 32 survivors.

 “Quiet death,” boasted the self-styled ‘Secretary of War’ Pete Hegseth. Exhibiting a video of the attack, he praised it as “an incredible demonstration of America’s global reach.” The Unclassified periscope footage offers a now-familiar thermal gaze: a grainy black-and-white heat signature recording from the vantage of a targeting system.

A burst of mist and the iron vessel flops with surreal softness like a cake; we have to remind ourselves that under the white oceanic bloom, this is a state-sanctioned snuff film. This evidentiary optic once appeared in the scandalous drone footage released by WikiLeaks, but the visual grammar of disclosed war crimes has transformed into an aesthetic of trophy-making. 

The same spectacles were made of the bombardment of Yemeni tribesmen in Hodeidah and Colombian fisherman in the Caribbean Sea, demonstrating what Greg Grandin argues is the migration of a particular doctrine of force: “The Trump White House is bringing the logic of Gaza to the Caribbean—the use of disproportionate, high-tech violence to kill defenseless civilians with impunity, justified by the broadest imaginable definition of self-defense.”

A spasm of studious, technicality-scraping legal arguments were quickly penned by academics from the U.S. Naval War College and Harvard Law School to legitimate this assault—yet, when asked what justified this freakish decision, Trump answered playfully:

“It’s more fun to sink them.” 

***

The joint US and Israeli war on Iran is archipelagic. It stretches across the aerial-maritime anatomy of the United States’ “empire of bases.” It is underwritten by a vision of a West Asia subordinate to the “political economy of the Abraham Accords”: a frictionless geopolitical surface dominated by an alliance of American, Israeli, and Gulf capital—and which has found its most annihilationist expressions in Gaza. The sinking of the Dena is the farthest delimitation of this war’s fronts. With the Strait of Hormuz as its Archimedean point, it alerts us to the maritime centrality of a conflict that leverages the world-ocean in matters of defence, assault, and attrition. 

The ambush of the Dena, returning peacefully from an Indian naval parade, has moreover exposed the limits of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s muscular nationalist claim that the Indian Navy is the “guardian of the Indian Ocean.” Whether New Delhi’s response is evasive, complicit, or merely cautious, the episode reveals an uncomfortable truth: the Indian Ocean is not governed primarily by the states or societies that live along its shores.

Over three billion people inhabit the Indian Ocean rim, one-third of humanity, and yet the decisive power in its waters lay with an external, unaccountable hegemon in Washington. How did the Indian Ocean, this dense, interconnected, millennia-spanning continuum between Africa and Asia, become a geography of unilateral US dominance? 

***

In Sukarno’s address at the Bandung Conference of 1955, the Indonesian president dwelled on anxieties about the sea as he spoke to leaders from across the newly-decolonized states of Asia and Africa. His tenses were unstable, shifting between past, present, and future. The seas do not safeguard us, he argued, but serve as the liquid “life-line” and “main artery of imperialism.” The Portuguese, Dutch, and British were all transoceanic empires whose naval supremacy “pumped the life-blood of colonialism.” His uncertainties hung in the air: what is to prevent another such empire, a neocolonialism after independence? And what to make of oceanic domination in an age of atomic warfare and industrial pollution? “Even if we ourselves escaped [contamination] lightly,” Sukarno added, “the unborn generations of our children would bear on their distorted bodies the marks of our failure to control the forces which have been released to the world.” 

Postcolonial thinkers augured alternative visions of the Indian Ocean. Non-Aligned intellectuals and statesmen, such as K. M. Panikkar in Asia and Western Dominance (1953) or Clovis Maksoud in The Arab Image (1963), located themselves at the conjunctural end of the “Vasco da Gama epoch” of Asian history, referencing the Portuguese conqueror. The politics of the new age sought to reverse the colonial separation of Third World societies and the militarized, competitive, hierarchical logics of empire. The Indian Ocean was rediscovered as a space of worldmaking and redemptive possibility.

To be sure, the ‘Vasco da Gama epoch’ simplifies the history of the Portuguese empire and overstates their overall disruption to the Indian Ocean. But as a moral chronology, it brought into relief an idyllic sense of the precolonial Indian Ocean—and critiqued imperialism as a four-century long interregnum of what Engseng Ho called the “marriage of cannon to trading ship.” The Indian Ocean was remembered as a peaceful, creolized counterpoint to exclusivist European notions of race and nation. 

In this reading, the Indian Ocean was the original cradle of globalization, an efflorescent “world-system” that arched from Arabia to China without a dominant centre. It was not absent of violence and hierarchy. But the imaginative heart of the Indian Ocean retained its status as a pluralistic, exchange-based creation by and for Asians and Africans, a Third Worldism before such an essentialism was needed. The Indian Ocean posited a diasporic, hybridized communal form that stood in opposition to ‘White Australia’ and ‘apartheid South Africa,’ suggested Mauritian historian Auguste Toussaint. The Ocean’s promise was that of a shared Afro-Asian commons, a polycentric space defined by relationality, not domination.

***

Decolonizing visions collided with the geopolitical realities of the Cold War. As the United Kingdom patchily withdrew from its holdings ‘east of Suez,’ the United States moved into the vacuum. The rise of American power in the Indian Ocean was legitimated by paranoia of a Soviet search for a “warm water” port. However, it was also an extension of America’s blue water empire forged after 1898, incorporating Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines. 

Senator Albert J. Beveridge’s “In Support of an American Empire” (1900) urged the widening of America’s frontiers and the creation of a thalassocratic polity. It was Manifest Destiny transposed to the “geography of the world.” At the twilight of “the Indian wars,” the Philippines opened a new frontier. In justification of the US military’s atrocity-filled ‘counterinsurgency’ against Filipino nationalists, courting contemporaneous analogies to Wounded Knee, Beveridge furnished his speech with a potent dose of civilizing mission. Indeed, Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” was penned in admiration of the US colonization of the Philippines.

After the Second World War, the occupation of Japan and the mobilization of the Korean War—wherein, the US dropped over 635,000 tons of bombs on the peninsula—consolidated the Seventh Fleet within the US Navy. This evolved into the hemispheric force that is the present-day Indo-Pacific Command. These naval leviathans were repeatedly deployed by Nixon-Kissinger against the North Vietnamese and to enclose the Bay of Bengal in support of Pakistan’s genocidal war in 1971 . 

In the western Indian Ocean, the US strengthened authoritarian, anti-communist partners while formalizing containment through alliances like the unsteady Baghdad Pact of 1955. After the CIA coup d’état against Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, on account of his attempt to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Iran became a significant node in this security architecture. The US aided the Pahlavi regime in building the most technologically advanced military in the ‘developing world,’ including a carte blanche pathway for nuclearization.

The historian Ervand Abrahamian noted arms dealers joking “that the shah devoured their manuals in much the same way as other men read Playboy.” Massive arms sales from the US—fighter jets, naval destroyers, nuclear submarines—transformed Iran into an outpost capable of projecting force across the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. 

Situated within striking range of the entire Indian Ocean littoral, one finds the most ominous, emblematic microcosm of American empire: the island of Diego Garcia. A coral atoll in the Chagos Archipelago claimed by France and later Britain from the eighteenth century onward, it was populated by plantation slavery and indentured labour.

During the Cold War, Washington eyed Diego Garcia as an ideal base through which the US could manifest—in the words of the architect of the island’s seizure—an “Indian Ocean Monroe Doctrine.” Between 1967 and 1973, after leasing the island from the UK and falsely claiming to the United Nations that the archipelago had “no permanent population,” the British and Americans jointly expelled thousands of Chagossians from their homes with no right of return.

“There are times when one tragedy, one crime, tells us how a whole system works,” narrates John Pilger in his documentary on Chagossian expulsion. The tireless activism of this small community helped push toward a British transfer of sovereignty—albeit, with controversy, to Mauritius and not to the Chagossians themselves. Even so, the archipelago’s strategic concerns continue to override human rights and international law. Trump criticized the UK’s decision this January as “an act of GREAT STUPIDITY” and later in February stated that irrespective of the decision: “[s]hould Iran decide not to make a Deal, it may be necessary for the United States to use Diego Garcia.”

On March 21, 2026, the UK Ministry of Defense reported two failed ballistic missiles fired toward Diego Garcia. Iran has since denied the allegation. Whether truth, propaganda, or the fog of war, the idea alone of Diego Garcia being a target signifies a historic fracture: the first time this looming fortress has been acknowledged, contested, and made to seem even slightly vulnerable. Between allegation and reality, this is a momentous confusion, one that tears into the psychological fabric and spectral menace that is Diego Garcia.

In Diego Garcia, we find a metonym for the entire militarization of the Indian Ocean. It is an emblem of colonial passover from British to American imperialism, the engineering of terra nullius, and the total dehumanization of a people with no home other than the sea. 

Against militarized currents, the UN adopted a resolution in 1971 declaring the Indian Ocean a “Zone of Peace.” Emerging from conversations among the Non-Aligned Movement, the proposal was brought by Sri Lanka. It called for the basin, its airspace, and the ocean floor to be designated as a demilitarized region, urging (a) the de-escalation of current military hostilities and (b) eliminating present bases, installations, logistical supply facilities, and nuclear weapons.

Littoral states were to cooperate in making the ocean a site of postcolonial reconstruction. Countries such as China, India, Indonesia, and even Iran voted in favor of the resolution, while the United States, Israel, and South Africa abstained. It passed in the United Nations General Assembly.

But the US ignored the resolution. Instead, it expanded its military control. The Oil Embargo of 1973 augmented the conviction for greater command over the passage of petroleum. The US cycled through new fronts and idioms: the ‘Arc of Crisis’, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraq Wars, ‘Somali piracy,’ AFRICOM, the Global War on Terror, and to be sure, the present ‘rise of China’ as a global, amorphous spectre. Foreign policy appeals for a post-Middle East “pivot to Asia” is misleading: from an oceanic perspective, the containment of China is not a separate project but a part of a unified, criss-crossed field of hegemony stretching from Bahrain to Okinawa, from Fifth to Seventh Fleet. 

The world-ocean is the heart of our planetary equilibrium. America’s empire of bases acutely devastates maritime ecologies. Massive quantities of sewage, fuel residues, PFAS chemicals, coral dredgings, disruptions to mariculture, and sonar pollution are built into prosaic base operations. More severe are the impact of munitions, herbicides, burn pits, oil spills, and the carbon costs of war mobilization on an industrial scale. The first two weeks of the war on Iran emitted more than five million tonnes of greenhouse gases—or, the annual equivalent of a “medium-size, fossil fuel-intensive economy such as Kuwait.” The apocalyptic sky-blackening ignition of petroleum depots and acid rain over Tehran, Narges Bajoghli suggests, “may be the largest release of petrochemical toxins over a civilian population since the Iran-Iraq War.” This particular moment—and the century-long militarization preceding it—manifests Sukarno’s fears of a poisoned planet left to our ‘unborn generations.’

 This dire state of being is not solely an outcome of US imperialism. Newly independent states did not transcend the constraints of the territorial sovereignties they inherited. Whereas empires thought in “expansively maritime and aerial” terms, observes Enseng Ho, postcolonial ambitions tended to remain “narrowly terrestrial.” Newfound states became gatekeepers of bordered territory rather than stewards of oceanic connections.

Were these failures sewn into the fabric of the Bandung Spirit? A conference that legitimated and empowered not the popular societies of the Third World but the gate-keeper states that oversaw them? Even solidaristic initiatives by Indonesia in 1955 or Sri Lanka in 1971 are contradicted by these governments’ violent coterminous conducts in West Papua and Tamil Eelam. Yet, as the legal historian Samera Esmeir argues: while Bandung “did not transcend the grammar of the sovereign state,” it still “manifested the possibility of another collectivity or being-in-common, bringing back forms of life that were once possible in the Indian Ocean…”

***

The drowning of Iranian mariners was made possible by an asymmetrical US capacity to strike anywhere at any time, without liability or humanitarian sensibility. Is it an exceptional aberration or a predictable consequence of a geography dominated by US militarism?

Nothing in the region approaches the US in material, technological, and militaristic terms—nor in its ideological transplantations of Frontier, Manifest Destiny, and Monroe Doctrine. In its century-long tenure in these seas, it has depopulated societies, facilitated total wars, propped up autocratic regimes, transferred mass quantities of arms, sullied ecologies, and wielded firepower without constraint or accountability. 

To demand the demilitarization of the Indian Ocean is to affirm the primacy of littoral African and Asian societies to determine their own destinies, to meet within their own oceanic commons. “[T]he sea is our pathway to each other,” wrote the great Pacific intellectual Epeli Hau’ofa—and “no people on earth are more suitable to be the custodians of the oceans than those for whom the sea is home.” The time has come to evict US militarism from the Indian Ocean and work toward a genuine Zone of Peace.

The demilitarization of the Indian Ocean may sound utopian. It is, in fact, the only reasonable demand commensurate with the existential stakes at hand. Ecological custodianship or catastrophe. Being-in-collectivity or in domination. The submarine darkness that covers the Dena is a bookend for a century-long history of dispossession and hegemony. Against ‘quiet death,’ an alternative, demilitarized, planet-preserving order in the Indian Ocean must emerge.

The post Demilitarize the Indian Ocean appeared first on Ajam Media Collective.

“Our neighborhood was hit. But we are alive.”

“We are alive.” I woke up to this message from my friend in Iran.

A message like that rearranges the meaning of language. Alive becomes a threshold, a daily confirmation, a fragile accounting.

This is the friend with whom I have walked under falling snow from Velenjak, where our university was, to Shahrak-e Gharb, driven the long arteries of Tehran from Seyyed Khandan to Chizar, where she trained in volleyball, and spent hours in cafés talking about everything and nothing. We browsed second-hand books along Enghelab Avenue, played badminton in parks that are now cratered, and watched volleyball matches at the 12,000-seat Azadi Stadium—men’s matches. Later, women were barred from entering. Now the stadium itself lies bombed, powdered—another force of erasure layered onto the earlier denial of access.

All of those hours now scatter like dust. 

Now Tehran burns.

The city that some members of the diaspora had long called “a ruin already” (خراب‌شده) was never rubble. It was suffocating at times, chaotic, uneven, but stubbornly alive—restless, inventive, full of motion and possibility. War has a way of fulfilling fantasies of destruction that language alone never could. The bombs are doing what rhetoric once claimed. Turning neighborhoods into the ruins others had already imagined.

And when the dust settles, reconstruction will be claimed as someone’s victory—often by those responsible for the destruction.

She sends me texts—short messages arriving between blasts. With each image she sends, another fragment of the city reaches me. I feel the attacks viscerally—the cracking of walls, the shattering of windows, the breaking of bricks under the force of the blast. Distance collapses into sensation.

She tells me she knows what distance does to me. But I don’t feel distant.

Distance is what I feel from the immediate geography around me. Distance from those who speak of war as if it were pollution carried by the wind—an unfortunate externality. Distance from those who refer to people like my friend, their own friends, as collateral damage, as necessary pain—shrugging their shoulders and repeating that tired phrase: we are left with no choice. From those who hide behind the sterile language of “targeted strikes” and “surgical removal,” as if violence could ever be clean.

Every day she writes to lift my spirits. The irony is unbearable. I am the one sitting on my balcony, watching the sun slowly dissolve into the Pacific Ocean—that patient fading of light, the gentle transition from evening into night. She is the one standing on hers, watching a different light: the violent illumination of the sky when a strike tears through the darkness and, for a moment, turns night into day.

And still, she reassures me.

“Do you want me to call your aunt?” she asks.

I have become a burden I cannot even lighten. She is thinking about how she could help me. My aunt. Of course. She had two surgeries on her eyes, only weeks before the war began. I cannot reach her. The internet is shut down. Another kind of lifeline denied. A vein deliberately clogged by the machinery of authoritarian control.

My friend writes that my aunt is fine. “Still in Tehran.”

I try not to micromanage from afar, but the question slips out anyway: “Why are you all still there? During the twelve-day war in June most of you left for surrounding towns”— places spared, for the moment, by the uneven patterns of bombing.

“It’s different now,” she replies.

When you believe something is temporary, you leave. When war becomes a recurring feature of life, you stay. You continue as if everything is normal. You follow routines. It is the continuity of these routines that allows you to live in the middle of war. You want to preserve the semblance of a life untouched by war.

But then you turn and see the crossed tape on your windows, meant to keep the glass from exploding inward. And you know: nothing about this is ordinary. People greet each other with a joke—“Haha, you’re still alive?” 

When survival becomes the joke, ordinary life is already gone.

You stay because the city is still your life—your work, your family, the streets that know your footsteps. Leaving would mean letting the war take that, too.

And I think of what that life looks like for the young—I think of her son. A bright young man now, attending Iran’s top technical university. This is not the life she imagined for him. 

The first year her son entered university, COVID arrived and the campuses closed. Two years later came the Women, Life, Freedom uprising—arrests, killings, the closing of campuses. Just as he was graduating came the twelve-day war—the campuses closed again. Then the January uprisings—arrests, killings, the closing of campuses again.

And now, as he prepares for graduate school: another war.

Tehran is the city that holds this young man’s stories. Where he slowly knitted dreams of a future—only to watch those dreams unravel each time someone dares to shout the simplest demand: life. A decent life. Freedom—freedom simply to live a “normal life”. Dreams unknitted again and again while he watches, stunned, as those who demand life are beaten, arrested, or silenced. Universities close once more. Futures suspended.

What can I do for him? Nothing.

Later, scrolling through my phone, I come across an image someone has posted on Instagram. The screen is split in two. On one side: Tehran burning after the US-Israeli attacks. On the other: rows of corpses wrapped in body bags, waiting to be identified by family members during the January uprisings.

“If you begin to doubt—even for a moment—look at the image on the left,” the caption reads—an appeal to silence anti-war hesitation by invoking the memory of those killed in earlier protests.

Why have we built a world on such binaries? Why must one violence cancel another? Why must we choose between two horrors rather than see both as evidence of the futility of violence itself? These are not separate things, but points along the same continuum. Both shrink the horizon of imagination—and of movement. Each forecloses another possibility.

“We’re doomed either way,” my friend says.

I scroll further down. Someone has shared a short video of a baker whose brother was killed in Israeli strikes from June 2025. A baker with a thick mustache. Sweat beads on his forehead, though it is winter. His hands move with the practiced rhythm of repetition: flattening the dough, stretching it across the wooden paddle, sliding it into the tanour, the deep clay oven where flatbread bakes against its burning walls

He turns his face away from the camera, uneasy with its presence. The whole scene could feel staged—another clip meant to display national resolve for the cameras. The baker says he will not stop baking bread for people. 

“مگه مردم نون نمی خوان؟ مگه مردم گناه کردن؟”

“People still need bread,” he says. “Why should they suffer?”

Maybe the video is staged. But the care in his eyes is not. Perhaps this is how propaganda works: capturing genuine acts of care and packaging them into a narrative of national resolve.

But care has its own trajectory. Care shrinks distance.

I feel closer to that baker—whom I have never met—

than to Alicia, who hands me my coffee at the neighborhood café here in Vancouver.

I keep scrolling. I should stop. But I don’t. Someone has posted a photo on Twitter of yellow jasmines in his cousin’s garden that had turned black.

“Jasmines have turned black,” he wrote. I broke. The poetics of war sometimes arrive quietly, through a single line like this. A flower whose color has been burned out of it.

People are dying under bombs, their bodies shattered, their psyches scorched—and I am sitting here on my balcony facing the vast blue of the Pacific Ocean fixated on jasmines that are no longer yellow but black. How pathetic!

My grandmother kept yellow jasmines in a large terracotta vase on her balcony in Tehran. I loved the contrast: the deep yellow petals against the red velvet Turkmen rug she had spread beneath them.

That rug is now in my office.

The jasmines are gone. And so is my grandmother.

War loosens the past. The dead return in small things: a flower, a rug, a color.

Another image was circulating on Instagram: flames coursing through the joobs—the narrow canals that thread their way through Tehran’s streets. Those joobs are everywhere in our memories. They shape the city’s rhythm. Water runs quietly through them, feeding the plane trees that line Tehran’s long boulevards.

After the oil depot was struck, those canals began carrying something else. Burning oil slid through the channels that once carried water. It was as if the city’s veins had filled with fire. Tehran itself seemed like a body being charred from within.

What are we feeding those trees now?

Soon they will be green no more. Though perhaps they have not been green for a long time—slowly suffocated by pollution, neglect, and decades of failed stewardship.

The fragile colors of ordinary life—the small forms of life that cities depend on.

My friend writes to me again:

“We are alive, Nazanin.

Tehran is dying.”

The post We are Alive, Tehran is Dying appeared first on Ajam Media Collective.

***

In early January 2026, protests spread across Iran. Security forces cracked down and imposed a near-total internet blackout on the country. People inside and outside Iran were left trying to understand events through fragments: expensive, broken roaming calls, delayed messages delivered via VPN and proxies, and the rare leaked clip. Some footage moved via Starlink access unstable under interference and GPS jamming, arriving in bursts, half-seen and hard to verify. 

Video filmed at the Kahrizak forensic centre in Tehran shows families gathered around a monitor, scrolling through low-resolution images of the dead, searching for a face they recognize. Forensic Architecture assembled a short briefing from morgue footage and witness testimony tracing how Kahrizak images travelled during the shutdown.

This is part of a wider pattern of our time: mass death paired with blocked visibility, where the struggle is not only to survive violence but to make it legible at all. Blacking out communications and jamming signals become tools of power worldwide, from Iran to Gaza and beyond. But blackouts do not erase events, they shape what can be proven, mourned, and acted upon. 

I wrote this theory-fiction essay during Iran’s communications blackout to understand what happens when mourning is forced through an interface and death is indexed. 

***

A protocol note from the digital blackout in Iran (8th of January 2026 – and counting)

The first thing you learn when the network goes dark is that darkness is not the absence of images. It is the rationing of images.

Blackout does not mean the screen is empty. It means the screen has moved. It has retreated behind walls, behind checkpoints, behind “authorized access.” It means the image has been reassigned from public circulation to internal administration. You do not stop seeing. You lose the right to see.

Somewhere in Tehran, a monitor stays on.

A video circulates with a caption that reads like a field report, like a warning label, like a plea.

Families gathered at the Kahrizak forensic centre. Searching for bodies. Scores killed. Severe crackdown. Near-total internet blackout. The few videos posted are uploaded through rare satellite access, still affected by GPS jamming.

If that caption is to be believed, the event has already been formatted. Not into a story, but into a logistics chain.

Families. Facility. Bodies. Numbers. Blackout. Satellite. Jamming.

A sequence of nouns arranged like a corridor.

And then the video itself. Not a cinematic image. A screen filmed by another screen. An interface captured in panic, through the wobble of someone trying to keep their hands steady. A list of files. Thumbnails. A face in a rectangle. Metadata.

Date stamp. Resolution. The camera does not show the body directly, it shows the bureaucracy of the body.

This is how power likes to appear when it thinks no one is watching. Not as an officer, not as a speech, not as a slogan. As a user interface.

1. The face as a unit of administration

In ordinary times, a face is a social object. It attaches to a name. It carries a life. It triggers memory and feeling. It is messy and excessive. It refuses to stay still.

In institutional time, the face is not a person. The face is a handle.

A handle is something you grab in order to move something else.

In the forensic interface, the face becomes a handle for routing the dead through procedures. The face is a key for matching. It is an index for retrieval. It is a shortcut that allows the system to avoid the harder work of naming, acknowledging, accounting.

The list of files is a list of handles. Each file is a body without a body, a proof without a public, a portrait that does not want to be a portrait.

A family stands behind the screen and waits for the machine to cooperate.

The machine is not cruel in the way a person is cruel. The machine is cruel in the way a form is cruel. It asks you to compress your grief into yes or no. Match or no match. Proceed or do not proceed.

The grief has to become legible. It has to submit to the interface.

The interface does not just display faces, it produces the conditions under which a face can be recognized at all. It decides what counts as enough clarity. It decides how recognition is confirmed. It decides what happens after recognition. It makes recognition actionable.

And in this actionability, the face becomes political, not as a metaphor, as a mechanism.

2. Visibility as governance

The caption says “near-total internet blackout.” Even if you treat that as a general description rather than a precise measurement, the logic holds: when connectivity collapses, visibility becomes a controlled substance.

People often talk about the internet as a space of expression. Under blackout, it reveals itself as infrastructure, and infrastructure reveals its true function: to decide what flows, where, and for whom.

A blackout is not just silence. It is a redistribution of speech rights.

The state does not need to erase every image. It needs to control which images can form a public. It needs to prevent a shared timeline from consolidating. It needs to keep events local, fragmented, deniable. It needs to turn reality into isolated incidents.

The blackout is a technique for manufacturing uncertainty.

When the network is cut, witnesses cannot synchronize. Videos cannot corroborate one another. Names cannot travel. Patterns cannot be established. The dead cannot easily become countable in public, even as they become countable on internal screens.

This is the split that defines the scene at Kahrizak.

Inside, the system counts. Outside, the world guesses.

Inside, there is a database. Outside, there is rumor.

Inside, the face is a record. Outside, the face is a missing story.

The blackout does not stop documentation. It relocates it. It moves it from the street to the archive. From the public feed to the forensic folder. From social circulation to administrative storage.

It turns the country into a sealed container with an internal camera.

3. The scroll as a ritual of modern mourning

The video shows a particular gesture. Someone scrolls.

This is the same gesture people use to browse photos of friends, to watch jokes, to follow news, to doomscroll. The hand motion is familiar. That familiarity is the horror. The body does not know it has entered a different moral universe. It performs the same movement, but now the stakes are identification of the dead.

Scrolling is how the interface trains you to accept infinity. There is always another item. Another clip. Another face. Another update.

At Kahrizak, scrolling becomes a ritual of forced recognition. It asks families to do the work the state will not do publicly. It asks them to translate disappearance into proof. It asks them to carry the burden of naming inside a system built to avoid naming.

The file list is a mass grave with a cursor.

The thumbnail is a coffin lid that opens and closes at the speed of a fingertip.

The families are made into users, and their grief is made into a query.

You can feel the cruelty of the interface design even in its banality. Not because the designers intended cruelty, but because the interface is optimized for throughput. It is optimized for speed, for consistency, for processing. It treats faces as items and people as operators.

In the logic of the system, the family’s role is not to mourn. It is to confirm.

4. The face as evidence and the collapse of the private

Under blackout, a new kind of portrait circulates. Not the portrait you choose. The portrait that escapes.

The uploaded video is not clean. It is shaky. It is partial. It carries the marks of risk. It is filmed quickly, as if the act of filming itself is a crime.

This is not the aesthetics of self-expression. This is the aesthetics of extraction under threat.

The face appears under fluorescent light, in low resolution, compressed by the limitations of the channel. The face is no longer a self. It is an evidentiary object.

In open networks, people often curate their faces for recognition. They style themselves into legibility. They learn the angles, the lighting, the micro-expressions that read well. They participate in the quiet labour of being interpretable.

Under crackdown, the same interpretability becomes a vulnerability. The same face that can be recognized by friends can be recognized by systems that do not love you.

This is why the blackout matters. It controls not just what is said, but what can be safely seen.

Yet the Kahrizak video shows the counter-truth: even when the network is suppressed, the face remains extractable. If anything, it becomes more extractable, because it is now a piece of evidence that can be weaponized, contested, denied, or used to coerce silence.

The private face becomes public in the most violent way, by being stolen into an archive of death.

And the public network is forced to watch through tiny punctures, through rare satellite links, through leak channels. The public sees only enough to be horrified, not enough to assemble full accountability.

5. Starlink as contraband sky

The caption mentions rare satellite access, and GPS jamming.

Whatever the exact technical details in this specific case, the symbolism is clean. The sky becomes a smuggling route.

When the ground network is choked, the signal tries to go above the state. It tries to exit the territory vertically.

But the state responds by attacking the conditions of navigation itself. GPS jamming does not just interfere with location, it interferes with the possibility of stable orientation. It turns the air into a fog of coordinates. It makes the outside unreliable.

That is the deeper logic of blackout. It is not only about blocking content, it is about destabilizing the concept of an outside.

Even satellites, even sky, even the fantasy of a neutral orbit, becomes contested.

The leak arrives, but it arrives damaged. It arrives stuttering. It arrives as a fragment. It arrives with just enough clarity to confirm horror, and just enough distortion to keep doubt alive.

This is a new genre of testimony: the jammed confession.

A video that says, “This happened,” while the channel itself says, “You might not be able to prove it.”

The state does not need to stop every packet. It needs to corrupt the reliability of packets. It needs to keep the public trapped between certainty and uncertainty, outrage and exhaustion.

6. How a face becomes a number

The interface shows metadata. There is a file name pattern. There is a counter. There is a date.

A face, in this system, is not primarily attached to a name. It is attached to a sequence.

Once you are sequenced, you are governable.

Numbers are clean. Numbers travel well inside institutions. Numbers can be compared, aggregated, audited. Numbers can be cited without mourning. Numbers can become “security incidents.”

This is why regimes love numbers and hate names.

Names create obligations. Names create stories. Names create funerals. Names create anniversaries. Names create martyrs. Names create witnesses.

Numbers create summaries.

A file named IMG_0055.JPG does not demand justice. It demands storage.

The family stands there and tries to reverse the conversion. They try to take the number and return it to a name. They try to pull the face back into the social world where it belongs.

This reversal is not guaranteed. The interface is not built for it.

The interface is built to make the dead manageable.

And this is where the politics of the face becomes unavoidable. The face is the last remaining bridge between a person and a record. It is the surface where the family can still say, “This is not an item. This is ours.”

Recognition becomes a struggle over the meaning of a rectangle.

7. The morgue as platform

It is tempting to think of platforms as online spaces and morgues as physical places. The video collapses that distinction.

A platform is any system that standardizes how humans appear so that they can be processed.

A platform is any architecture that turns life into inputs and outputs.

The Kahrizak interface is a platform. It has formats. It has templates. It has defaults. It has a logic of what counts as a valid entry.

It takes the most intimate thing, a face, and forces it to behave like a file.

What makes this unbearable is not only the presence of death, it is the familiarity of the interface logic. Many of us live inside file lists. We drag and drop. We rename. We sort by date. We delete. We scroll.

Now imagine that same interface logic applied to bodies.

This is the truth the blackout tries to hide. Not only that people were killed, but that their deaths were absorbed into a procedure that looks like everything else. A death becomes one more thing the system can “handle.”

The families are not only mourning, they are confronting the administrative digestion of their loved ones.

They are watching their dead become compatible with folders.

8. The leak as a new kind of funeral

In a functioning public sphere, mourning has rituals. It has gatherings, processions, prayers, speeches, graves, public memory. Even when states attempt to suppress mourning, people invent ways to mourn together.

Under blackout, the leak becomes a substitute ritual.

A leaked video is passed from phone to phone like contraband incense. People watch and cover their mouths. People watch and message each other, “Have you seen this?” People watch and try to verify. People watch and feel the old helplessness: we can see, but can we act?

The leak produces a public, but a fragile public. A public assembled from fragments, always at risk of collapsing into disbelief or despair.

And the leak does something else. It forces the state’s internal interface into the public imagination.

It reveals how the regime sees you when it does not need your consent.

Not as citizens. Not as believers. Not as enemies even.

As entries.

As cases.

As files.

This is why the Kahrizak video hits so hard. It is not only showing grief. It is showing the administrative substrate of grief. It is showing the technical layer of mourning that is usually hidden.

The leak is a funeral for the idea that the state does not know what it is doing.

The interface looks practiced.

9. A closing note, written as a constraint

There is a sentence people repeat in different forms: “the face is political.”

Most of the time it sounds like critique. Here it sounds like a description of a workflow.

At Kahrizak, politics is not a speech. It is a queue.

Politics is a person standing in front of a monitor, trying to identify the unidentifiable, inside a system designed to keep accountability out of reach.

Politics is a blackout that does not erase images, it hoards them.

Politics is a satellite packet that escapes the country like breath escaping a sealed room, and arrives on the other side bruised by interference.

Politics is the cruelty of low resolution, not because low resolution is ugly, but because low resolution is plausible deniability. Low resolution is how violence survives into the realm of “maybe.”

And yet the video exists. The fragment exists. The face exists on the screen, refusing to be only a file.

This is the contradiction that defines the moment.

The apparatus wants faces to be legible enough to process, but not visible enough to mobilize.

The families want faces to be visible enough to mourn, but not so exposed that the dead are reduced to content.

The leak forces the face into a third state.

Not private. Not fully public.

A hostage image.

An image that carries grief and proof at the same time, and is therefore always at risk of being exploited by everyone, including those who claim to care.

A face on a forensic screen is not merely a tragedy. It is a diagram of how contemporary power formats life and death when it can no longer afford open visibility.

In blackout conditions, the regime does not only kill bodies.

It tries to kill the ability to assemble a shared picture of what happened.

And the families, in front of the monitor, refuse that second killing.

They stand there, and they look, and they try to return the face to the world.

Not as infrastructure.

Not as an item.

As a person.

As a name.

As something that cannot be scrolled past.

The post Kahrizak, 720×480 appeared first on Ajam Media Collective.

***

I grew up in Mashhad, a city known for its religious life and long weaving tradition. My aunt, who lived with my grandmother, wove rugs at home professionally for many years. I remember watching her for hours as she tied knots, counted threads, and beat the weft into place. The sound of the loom and the rhythm of her work were part of my childhood. 

A memory that has stayed with me is of a small rug that hung in my grandmother’s house, a brightly colored carpet with the image of Imam Ali. It was displayed on the wall like a sacred presence, quietly watching over the room. That presence left a deep impression and later shaped my interest in the relationship between craft making, faith, and everyday life.

Years later, in the roofed bazaar of Nishapur, I found another rug that recalled that memory. Among the patterned carpets, one caught my attention with its rough, uneven texture. Yet it had the same presence, the image of a holy figure, rendered with bold lines and unexpected colors. That rug became the beginning of my search for similar works: a body of weaving that exists at the margins of Persian carpet traditions yet speaks deeply of creativity and devotion.

Over the past decade, my research has focused on handmade pictorial rugs produced in Khorasan. These works are very different from classical Persian carpets, which are known for their complex designs and technical perfection. They are smaller, more personal, and often show religious figures such as Imam Ali, Imam Reza, Moses, and Jesus.

The figures of Imams, saints, and prophets in these rugs are not portrayed realistically; the weavers prefer to keep the features minimal, reflecting the tradition of not showing holy figures too literally. What might appear as error is instead the freedom of an early gesture, shaped more by faith than by training.

Many of these pictorial rugs were woven by self-taught women at home, taking their first steps in weaving through portraits rather than patterns. As a result, they are often overlooked by collectors. Produced at home rather than in formal workshops, they were motivated more by belief and tradition than by the marketplace, even though some were once sold as religious souvenirs. Their making was rooted in domestic life, not in the structure or precision of commercial carpet production.

In earlier decades, pictorial rugs with holy figures were widely seen in homes, shops, and bazaars. Over time, however, their visibility in public settings declined. This shift may reflect changing tastes, but also the influence of religious authorities who have discouraged the display of shamayel in shrines, ceremonies, and communal spaces.

As public support faded, these rugs withdrew into private life, becoming personal keepsakes rather than public icons. Today, they are understood less as market items and more as devotional objects shaped by domestic spirituality.

The tradition of shamayel, devotional image-making, first appeared in Iran during the Safavid period, when Shi‘ism became the state religion and sacred portraits of Imams and saints appeared in painting and shrine art.

Later, during the Qajar period, photography and lithographic printing transformed visual culture, making images common in books, prayer cards, and household objects. These developments also influenced textile design, including carpets. But the pictorial rugs I’ve studied were not copies of printed images.

Made in domestic spaces, often by women, they drew on imagination and personal faith rather than formal models. In this way, the rugs belong to the longer tradition of Iranian shamayel: devotional images shaped by ordinary hands as an act of belief. Each one brings together faith, memory, and material expression in a single woven form.

In Mashhad’s bazaars, I met traders, collectors, and weavers who continue to handle these rugs. In many shops, small pictorial pieces hang on the walls as symbols of protection or good fortune. When I asked shop owners to sell them, some refused, saying they were family gifts or had hung there for decades. Others agreed, explaining that if the buyer respected the image, the blessing would continue. These encounters showed how strongly these rugs remain tied to personal histories and everyday spiritual practices.

Mashhad has been one of Iran’s major weaving centers since the sixteenth century. During the Qajar period, its markets were filled with small prayer rugs and wall hangings sold to pilgrims visiting the shrine of Imam Reza. Nowadays, pilgrims often choose small printed images of Imam Reza as souvenirs.

Yet even today, buying a rug from Mashhad after a pilgrimage is still considered a blessing. The connection between weaving, faith, and commerce continues to shape the city’s cultural and economic landscape.

A carpet dealer near the shrine told me that the Imam Reza Shrine still receives thousands of donated rugs every year. Some are valuable and carefully preserved, while others are ordinary household pieces. Because the shrine cannot keep them all, it holds periodic auctions where traders and local buyers purchase the surplus.

This ongoing cycle—donation, circulation, and reuse, reveals how faith and economy are intertwined. A single rug can move from a home to a sacred site and back again, carrying meaning at every stage.

These pictorial rugs rarely appear in the mainstream histories of art that museums, archives, and academic institutions shape and preserve. Although absent from that formal narrative, they represent an important visual record of everyday creativity.

They show how image-making thrives outside professional studios and institutional frameworks. Each piece holds a blend of skill, imagination, and belief. 

For me, these rugs are cultural documents, quiet conversations between belief and material. They show how spiritual and cultural values take form in the hands of ordinary makers, becoming visible, touchable, and lasting. Documenting and studying them is a way to understand how visual traditions continue beyond institutions through the creativity of everyday people.

The post Portraits Woven By Faith: Devotional Persian Rugs Collected in Khorasan appeared first on Ajam Media Collective.

I sat cross-legged on a mattress beneath a shaded awning in a village outside Jizzakh in central Uzbekistan, eating slices of watermelon with an elderly couple from the Luli community. The Lulis are a Persian-speaking branch of the Roma people that have lived across Central Asia for generations. The man beside me watched as I awkwardly swallowed the seeds, too shy to spit them into the communal plate like everyone else. 

 “Where’s that accent from?” he asked. “No, not Bukhara or Tajikistan—I have family there. They don’t speak Farsi like that there.” I admitted I was from Afghanistan, and he simply nodded, as if it were the most natural thing. 

With roots in northern Afghanistan’s Perso-Turkic cultural worlds, I have always moved comfortably within Tajik and Uzbek traditions. This linguistic, cultural, and regional fluidity was part of my upbringing and allowed me to navigate Uzbekistan’s multicultural fabric with quiet familiarity. Yet I was often marked as foreign in Uzbekistan—an Afghan—because the post-Soviet frameworks that define identity in the region leave little room for older, more pluralistic affiliations.

Though Tajiks carry Iranic roots and Uzbeks Turkic ones, both are part of a broader Persianate world marked by overlapping traditions of language, literature, and cultural norms that once linked Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, and beyond. Yet in the version of Central Asia mapped by the USSR and now bounded by the borders of post-Soviet republics, Persian-speaking communities are often questioned, sidelined, or erased.

Given this context, this exchange in Jizzakh, rooted in a shared language and unspoken recognition, felt radical. There was no need to explain who I was, or how I spoke their language. Nor did I feel compelled to ask the same of the Luli couple, a community long subjected to discrimination and marginalization across the region.

The Luli, also known as the Jugi or Mugat, are part of the wider Roma and Domari diaspora. They are believed to have descended from itinerant groups who migrated from northern India centuries ago, settling in Central Asia gradually and gradually adopting Tajik Persian and Uzbek as their primary languages. Soviet sedentarization campaigns forced them into cotton farming and scrap metal collection, criminalizing their mobility and pushing them further to the margins.

The Luli largely remained on the margins of society due to entrenched discrimination, a fact reflected in their underreporting in Soviet censuses. In 1920, just 3,710 people in the Uzbek SSR identified as Roma, and by 1989, that number had risen to only 16,397. The real numbers are undoubtedly higher. Outside of the post-Soviet sphere, sizable Luli populations also exist in Afghanistan, where their numbers were estimated to be around 20,000 to 30,000 in 2006. Across both Afghanistan and Central Asia, many Luli remain undocumented, excluded from citizenship and formal recognition. 

Their histories of displacement, marginal labor, and exclusion render them paradoxically both hypervisible and invisible. They are ubiquitous in public spaces yet excluded from national narratives. Scholarship often casts them as unknowable, cloaked in tropes of mystery and distance. One article on the Luli in southern Kyrgyzstan notes that “few scientific studies” exist on their lives, and that their “unknown aspects” merit further research. The World Society for the Study and Preservation of Uzbekistan’s Cultural Legacy puts it even more bluntly: “Little is known about their origin, time of appearance in Central Asia, or their everyday culture.”

Even attempts to document the Luli tend to do so from afar. Uzbek photographer Anzor Bukharsky’s images of Luli life are visually arresting yet lack the rhythms of daily life. The images are captivating, but strangely empty, appearing more detached than intimate. 

As a child in my grandparents’ home in Mazar-e-Sharif, I first encountered the Luli as they  swept through the city each evening to collect plastic bottles and stale bread. The plastic was recycled for money, and the bread fed to cows. Our interactions were brief, shadowed by neighborhood rumors of witchcraft and child abduction yet also marked by a kind of guarded affection. In the early 2000s, as Taliban rule deepened ethnic tensions, a quiet sense of solidarity took root. Unlike Balkh’s Pashtun settlers, who some saw as colonizers, the Luli became preferred outsiders: indisputably marginal, yet regarded as distant kin through a shared language.

When I returned to Uzbekistan in 2021 to conduct ethnographic research on rural water access, I once again found myself crossing paths with the Luli. They appeared in nearly every town, street, and village I visited: sorting recyclables, telling fortunes, and lingering outside bazaars. Their presence was woven into the fabric of the places I studied. Yet when I raised the idea of including them in my research, colleagues discouraged me: the Luli were too marginal, too elusive, too foul to approach.

Seeking guidance, I reached out to a well-known Slavic blogger who had developed a reputation for tackling difficult social and environmental issues in Uzbekistan. I asked how best to engage with the Luli. His response was immediate and dismissive: as a foreigner, I should forget about it. The Luli, he warned, were dangerous and unapproachable. “And by the way—they never farm.” What I found was the opposite. 

In Tashkent, I made my way to a Luli neighbourhood in Eski Shahr, the old city. I greeted a man washing his car outside the gates of his house in Persian and introduced myself as a hamzaban—someone who speaks the same language. Though initially bewildered, he returned the gesture, hand to heart. We spoke about the Persian-speaking families in the area, and he explained that his family referred to themselves as Mugat. A neighbor, overhearing our conversation, offered a different account. According to him, they were native to Tashkent and to that neighborhood in particular.

As more neighbors joined the conversation, some traced their lineage to Multan, a city in modern-day Pakistan. Many preferred the term “Mugat” to “Luli,” which they saw as a Russian imposition. Their oral histories echoed existing scholarship: they had arrived from northern India during a time when Persian was the dominant lingua franca of Central Asia. 

That pluralism fractured in the twentieth century. With the arrival of the Soviet Union, nomadic communities like the Lulis were forcibly settled and the Persianate world they were part of was violently divided. Persian splintered into national variants—Farsi became tied to Iran, Dari to Afghanistan, and Tajik to Tajikistan. Soviet reformers promoted Turkic languages like Uzbek as modern and socialist, while Persian was seen as feudal and suspect. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the monarchy constitutionally established Persian as Dari in 1964, a move interpreted as an attempt to assert cultural independence from Iran. What had once been a shared cultural and linguistic domain became a patchwork of politically defined identities. 

In my exchanges with the Luli, those divisions collapsed. Speaking to them required no translation. We shared cadence, vocabulary, and cultural orientations, reminders of an older Persianate continuity that cut through the geopolitical boundaries of post-Soviet space. 

This continuity, however, is increasingly under assault. Pan-Turkism, an ideology envisioning a unified Turkic world stretching from Anatolia to Central Asia, minimizes the existence of Persian-speaking communities. From the creation of the Organization of Turkic States in 2009, an intergovernmental organization comprising all Turkic-majority Central Asian republics, to Turkey’s decision to refer to Central Asia as “Turkestan,” in its school curriculum, these symbolic gestures and geopolitical alignments flatten entire cultural worlds in service of a singular Turkic narrative. 

Though I encountered institutional barriers to including the Luli in my research, I continued to stop and listen to the Lulis I encountered over the three years I spent in the region. Over time, these brief encounters revealed a more textured picture of Luli life across Uzbekistan.

East of the capital, in the mountain town of Angren, Luli families offered a complex portrait of livelihood—one shaped by mobility, informal labor, and adaptation to Uzbekistan’s economic landscape, all in the absence of formal recognition or integration. Many had relocated from Kashkadarya in the south, citing better weather, more work, and less stigma. They lived in makeshift homes near residential trash bins, sorting recyclables into neat piles: glass, tin, plastic, food scraps.

Though stigmatized, this labor was essential to the area’s informal economy. I had seen similar set-ups across the country, in Soviet-era micro-districts where Luli families lived in informal housing near communal trash bins, sorting recyclables for apartment blocks.

One man, newly arrived from Kashkadarya, paused while sorting cans to gesture towards his home. “There’s more opportunity here,” he said. His words, like many I heard in Angren, were not born of nostalgia or grand narratives but practical assessments of survival.

Farther south, in a small village near Jizzakh, I encountered another reality. A colleague had shared coordinates to a Luli village her father, a retired agronomist, once serviced. It wasn’t on most maps, but his memory was right: Luli families lived there, farmed there, and had done so for decades. One elderly couple welcomed me with watermelon and sent their son to fetch ice cream from the local amusement park.

When I asked if Uzbeks also live in the village, the woman pointed to the children playing together in the courtyard. “Those are my grandkids playing with the neighbors’ kids. They’re Uzbek,” she said. “There’s no issue between Lulis and Uzbeks. We live together.” The couple presented a strikingly different image of Luli life, one rooted not in marginality, but in agriculture and everyday coexistence with Uzbek neighbors.

As I left, two Luli girls began following me. They beckoned me to their house. I declined, but another female relative noticed us and suddenly claimed I had been cursed. She said she knew someone who could lift it—for a price. Curious, I handed her a crumpled bill and followed as she led me inside their house. I was sat beside an elderly woman with white hair and a deeply lined face—the presumed matriarch. Women in floral dresses, their hair tied with handkerchiefs, gathered to observe, their young daughters perched on their laps. The matriarch confirmed that I had been struck by a very serious curse.

Suddenly, she tugged my ears in one swift motion and slapped my back several times. Then, she grabbed my face, brought hers close to mine, and blew sharp bursts of air around my cheeks—“chuff chuff chuff.” Satisfied that the curse had been lifted, the matriarch smiled and instructed me to take photos. “Take a photo of me. Of all of us. I want to see myself in the papers.”

Interactions like these made it impossible to sustain a single stereotype or category.  The Luli lifted curses and told fortunes, yet they also farmed land and became university professors. 

Our exchanges slipped past the rigid categories of language, nation, and identity that have come to dominate Central Asia. In their cadences, gestures, and stories, I heard the afterlives of a Persianate world that has since been fractured, renamed, and politically bounded.

That world survives in fragments: in a phrase of recognition, in the cadence of a conversation, in the solidarity of sharing watermelon. Listening to the Luli is to hear echoes of a Persianate world unsettling the tidy narratives of modern nationalisms.

The post Hidden in Plain Sight: Field Notes from Central Asia’s Luli Communities appeared first on Ajam Media Collective.