To my sisters in Iran and Afghanistan— I write to you tonight not as a distant observer, but as one whose heart beats with yours. If I could, I would sit beside each of you tonight—on rooftops in Tehran, in courtyards in Herat, in dimly lit rooms in Kabul where the curtains stay half‑closed—and place your tired hands between my own. I would say, before anything else: you are not alone, and you have never been forgotten. I know that some days the weight is unbearable: the clo

In Iranian memory, the lion has long stood for courage and sovereignty; here it walks through a war‑torn orchard under the shadow of an eagle and a shrine‑beast. This is my way of speaking about Iran, Palestine, and Afghanistan in the current wars without maps or headlines—only animals, orchards, and the dangerous act of remembering the taste of our innate wisdom.

I want to tell you the truth: we Europeans and Americans are not innocent in this story. Our comfort is not neutral. When we fill our tanks, when we tap our cards, when we upgrade our phones, we are plugged into an order that feeds on someone else’s night. The quiet of our suburbs is insured by the sirens of Gaza, the hunger of Kabul, the sanctions suffocating Tehran, the rubble of Sana... We may not dismantle empire in a single gesture. But we can refuse, again and again, t

On being a Muslim woman between Kabul, Tehran, and San Francisco Bay Area By Anosha Zereh When I say I am Muslim, I am not offering you a party, a passport, or a political program. I am naming the wound and the wonder at the center of my being — the place where God looks at God through these borrowed eyes.

A people’s letter from Iran, Afghanistan, and the borderlands, this piece sits with Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s warning about Gharbzadegi and asks what liberation means when it is imposed from above versus awakened from within. It is a meditation on tyrants and martyrs, Western “saviors,” and the quiet, vast freedom that still breathes beneath our borders and our hardest days.

I understand the trauma and rage that erupt as celebration, but I cannot call the machinery of assassination and airstrikes a path to liberation. I was not born for empires or emirs. I do not belong to the turbans that ban my sisters from the sky, nor to the uniforms that baptize bombs as freedom. The regimes that rule my motherland Afghanistan and my adopted home Iran have broken my heart a thousand times, but I will not offer that broken heart to Washington or Tel Aviv as p