From Persia to Iran: Islam, Empire, and the Politics of West Asia-Adnan on RevLeftRadio!

Adnan Husain: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. I'm Adnan Hussein, a professor of medieval Mediterranean and Islamicate world history at Queens University. And I'm also a host of a show on YouTube. My channel is at Adnan Hussein Show. And I'm also co-host of Guerrilla History Podcast.

Breht O'Shea: Oh, yeah. And people will be familiar with Guerrilla History. I was a longtime co-host of that show as well. You guys are still doing great work. Highly recommend people check that out and subscribe to your channel. Adnan is obviously a fan favorite. You've been here a million times. We had a whole show for several years together. So I'm positive RevLeft listeners will be familiar with you. And I just wanted to first kind of lay out why I wanted to have you on and what kind of discussion I wanted to have. So... Obviously, we're over two weeks in to the brutal war of aggression launched by Israel and the U.S. against Iran. Iran is fighting back valiantly in some ways. I think Iran was underestimated by the U.S. and Israel, and Iran is not backing down. They know that a ceasefire or a new round of negotiations... is just another fig leaf for Israel and the U.S. to recuperate and kind of build back up to launch another attack. Negotiations have been used several times as cover for belligerence and attacks. So Iran has learned that lesson in particular. But what I wanted to do differently here is I wanted to flesh out some of the history. When I hear people talk about Iran, regular people, the Americans now trying to make sense of what's going on at work or wherever I find myself, People have a monolithic, often very bigoted view of Islam that comes out of the war on terror and the propaganda pushed upon Americans since the war on terror and before, let's be honest. You talk about the crusading society, we'll get into it. It's embedded in a lot of ways in Western culture. We've talked about Edward Said's Orientalism and all these things are very much at play here. I've always said that Israel, in lieu of you supporting Israel outright, they will settle for you hating Muslims because that still serves their interests. And we see that full-on propaganda swing online in particular. So what I wanted to do is let's flesh out some of this history. Let's talk about Islam, the Sunni-Shia split, stuff like that, so people can have better grounding in that history to make more sense of the present. And I also wanted to bring in Turkey into this conversation, not least because they're a major regional power. You've spent lots of time in Istanbul in particular and throughout the country, so you have really on-the-ground experience with regards to Turkey. And there was a comment by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recently saying, that I thought really is something we should focus on. It kind of got washed out of the news cycle. But the quote was, Turkey is the next Iran. And coming from an Israeli head of state, we all know what that means. That they seek to destroy Iran, and the next they will turn their genocidal expansionist glare over towards Turkey as the actual last perhaps remaining regional threat to the greater Israel project and more or less Israeli hegemony. So that's why I thought it'd be important to bring in the history and present state of Turkey into this discussion, which is often not discussed in the current situation. So before I get into the first question, I just want to toss it back over to you for any opening thoughts or your thoughts on any of that.

Adnan Husain: Well, firstly, Brett, I want to thank you so much for inviting me to come on again. I always love our conversations and all the episodes we've done together, either online when we were co-hosting or when I've been privileged to be a guest on Rev Left Radio. And I really also have to commend you for your conception of the episode, because I think you put your finger on a few key components that are often lacking, even in, you know, really wonderful colleagues and comrades doing great anti-imperialist work. discussions on alternative left media, but that there are some issues that don't get as much attention. And I think you put your finger on several, including the historical background. also the Islamophobia and allied kind of dimensions of racism, Orientalism, that frankly contributed to exactly what you were summarizing in the very beginning, which is the underestimating, maybe we should say misunderstanding and underestimating. So to use the glorious phrase of George W. Bush, mis-underestimating. of Iran, right? And that is kind of a feature of what we've been witnessing is that it is shocking to the Western colonialist imperialist imagination that Iran could, A, survive the assassination, martyrdom of its supreme leader and many from among the governing political and military class without then falling apart because they wouldn't know what to do you know, without their kind of oriental despot leader would be helpless and paralyzed in this shock and awe demonstration of U.S.-Israeli Zio-American air power. That's one kind of component that they just couldn't really anticipate that and are having a difficult time processing that that mis-underestimation has now led them into a very dramatic and serious situation of a long-term conflict. So that's, I think, absolutely some of the things that need to be focused and also the history. We have heard Iranian officials from, you know, the president, Mahmoud Pazeshkian, to the charismatic foreign minister who's getting a lot of aura vibes. People are really digging what he's doing on media, Arachi. And I believe Ali Larijani, head of the sort of top official of the National Security Council and others, have all emphasized a very interesting thing to say, you know, when facing war from, you know, contemporary United States is to say, we have a 6,000 year history. It seems to matter to them.

Breht O'Shea: Yeah.

Adnan Husain: There have been very few people who have really bothered to explore what does that mean? What is the consequence of being such a long lasting culture, civilization and polity for much of it being its own political entity? when it comes now to attacking it and imagining that you could have regime change, as if a regime is just a kind of epiphenomenon sitting on top of the society, but isn't deeply rooted and embedded in that society, in that culture, and in a longer history that has its own consequences if you attempt to attack, subordinate, subjugate it, right? So I think These are two really important kind of components, appreciating Iran's history and recognizing the Islamophobia, racism, and Orientalism that has guided a lot of the propaganda, but more than just the propaganda and the portrait of Iranis and other Muslims and peoples of the region, but also the, you know, I don't want to put it as mistakes, we don't want them to be good at this, but the ways in which their own Racism has prevented them from really understanding the situation and actually being able to have an effective plan and are confronted with all of these surprising realities that they occluded reality, you know, as a result of their of that racism.

Breht O'Shea: Absolutely. Well, totally well said. And yeah, the Iranian culture, Persian culture goes back, as you said, millennia. It's really one of the crown jewel civilizations in human history. And these little settler colonial upstarts, right? America, 250 years old, Israel, not even 80 years old yet. You know, the arrogance, the belligerence, the violence, the bigotry to blow up and destroy and try to suffocate in blood this this longstanding, again, crown jewel of human civilization, this deep culture of art and architecture and philosophy and science, which none of these people know anything about. Certainly not in the U.S. administration. I mean, these are some of the most incurious, ignorant pig races. Freaks on the planet and and sometimes just talking to regular people because of the Islamophobia that is just embedded in our culture. They have this vision of Iran as if it's like this dead, like this desert, you know, underdeveloped kind of in Trumpian term shithole country. And I'm like, do you have any idea how developed this civilization is, right? It is a fully developed, fully modern techno-civilization. And I think that plays into the underestimation of them and their – not only their strength, but their contributions to human civilization. So before we get into the first question, I also just want to ask you one more question regarding your travels and expertise. So can you just remind people of why you in particular are a good guest for this sort of conversation?

Adnan Husain: Well, I mean, I can think of a lot of colleagues who also could do it, and I'm not a modern Iran specialist. I'm a medieval historian who the medieval Mediterranean and Islamicate worlds, as I said, what does that mean? It means I'm interested in interactions between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the pre-modern period and Islamicate history, that is the diverse histories of pre-modern Muslim lands that include, of course, And, you know, what is today modern Iran and connected regions, you know, stretching from Central Asia to, you know, central Islamic lands of what we think of as the Middle East or West Asia in Iran, Iraq and the Levant and so forth. So I've, you know, had a chance to spend some time in the region, in mostly in Turkey, as you've mentioned, fairly recently did a lot of studies of Arabic in Arab countries, Syria, Tunisia, have visited Egypt, Jordan, quite a number of Morocco, quite a number of the Arab countries. But in fact, point of fact, despite having studied Persian and Persian Sufi mysticism for my dissertation and in graduate school, because of the Islamic revolution, the sanctions and the, you know, very difficult, you know, diplomatic relations between Iran and United States all on the side, really, of the United States kind of making it difficult, banning people from going. If you, you know, travel to Iran, it used to be, you know, something that know could you could conceivably uh violate sanctions or violate u.s kind of rules about your use of your passport so on so it was difficult and i did and other places where they spoke persian like afghanistan have been subject to war for so many years both the global war on terror and before that civil war and before that of course the You know, jihadi kind of insurgency against the Soviets in Afghanistan. So you couldn't really go to Afghanistan. Tajikistan in the post-Soviet period, which is when I would have been interested, where they also speak a kind of Persian language. had been a Soviet socialist republic in the past, but in its post-Soviet phase was having civil war. And so it was like very difficult to go somewhere in this broader Persianate world that wasn't under, you know, kind of conflict and devastation or sanction. So last December actually was the first time I actually visited Iran. And it was really a fascinating opportunity to go with a friend and colleague from graduate school who is a modern Iranian historian who was going and he said, well, you're going to be in Turkey, Istanbul, it's easy flight, why don't you come and join me for a week? I said, when am I going to get a chance? Also, I don't know, you know, what the situation is going to be with this crazy U.S. empire, you know. And in fact, even then it was considered quite dangerous to be going then after the June war in June, July 2025. But I took the chance and I'm so glad I did to be able to connect with. You know what I've read what I've studied, make it less of an abstract place of historical interest and contemporary political interest but a living place in my experience and so I did have that opportunity recently, and I can talk a little bit about what it was like right before the protests started just five days after I departed.

Breht O'Shea: You really hit an interesting window there because things before and after really escalated.

Adnan Husain: Yes, yes.

Breht O'Shea: Yeah, like, you know, Tehran, Isfahan, these are cities that are the top of my list for, like, dream vacations and explorations. What cities did you visit before we get into the questions? I'm just curious.

Adnan Husain: Unfortunately, because it was a short visit and I was kind of going with a friend who, you know, had things to do in Tehran, we stayed in Tehran and we kind of did – sort of the anti-imperialist tours of Tehran, going to visit the former U.S. embassy, which is now a museum dedicated to U.S. espionage. It's called the Jassus Khan, the Den of Spies. And so you can see, like, you know, the... uh back rooms where the CIA cryptography and like where the satellite and surveillance information came in and all that and we went to other places like the uh War Museum which really is beyond just the iran-iraq war but really tells the modern history of Iran but is an incredibly good museum like with very intense, immersive kind of exhibitions and things. It was so well done. I was extremely impressed with it as a museum. And so we did things like that and explored the city. I definitely must, and if I get a chance and God willing, there won't be terrible damage to these incredible historic UNESCO World Heritage sites in Isfahan, but that's the city I most want to visit in Iran next.

Breht O'Shea: Well, that's wonderful. So we have a background in the deep history, the medieval history of these countries, and also on the ground experience, limited in Iran, but still meaningful and recent, and then much more time in Turkey itself. So that's why I wanted to have you on for this conversation. I think you're the perfect guest. And we always have wonderful conversations. So let's go ahead and move into the direction of the outline itself, which kind of starts with the deep history. We don't need to be super detailed here. We don't need specific dates as much as the broad thrust of of Persian history, and then we'll get into Turkish history as well. And maybe even before we get into that, it might be worth saying something about the difference between Persia and Iran, because Iran is a modern nation state with many nationalities and ethnicities. Persia is a sort of a different thing in particular. So maybe you can clarify that. But then my first question would be, can you kind of walk us through the broad historical arc from ancient Persia to the Islamic era and how the Persian world was transformed after the you know, engagement or the, you know, the Arab Muslim conquest, et cetera.

Adnan Husain: Yeah. And I think really it's related, this kind of broader question of Persia versus the modern nation state in its current territorial boundaries of Iran is kind of related to that earlier and deeper history of pre-Islamic, Persian Empire. So there are the Persian peoples, Persian speaking peoples, mostly situated in Fars province and Khorasan, these parts of what is today Iran, but on the basis of the long settled agricultural civilization in the Iranian highlands and particularly in this province of Khorasan, a strong integrated polity was formed that managed then to integrate a lot by conquest and integrate a lot of other peoples into these Persian empires, the most famous and very long lasting, one of which the Achaemenid Empire in the Bronze Age of history that people will remember, you know, was a great, well, it's framed from the Western perspective as a great rival of the Greek cities. But in fact, actually, these are vast empires. domains and these Greek cities, states on the peninsula were a kind of border limit, you might say, of where the Persian Empire stretched, but it included at different times Almost all of what we think of as the contemporary West Asian, Middle East, including some at some points, you know, in, you know, territory of what today would be Egypt, all the Levant, southern, you know, all of Anatolia and parts of many parts of the Balkans, all the way stretching, of course, Iraq, Iran. Today, these modern nation states and further into Central Asia in, you know, the steppe lands, close to the steppe lands and the former, what are now known as the former Soviet Socialist Republics of places like Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan that I mentioned earlier. and Uzbekistan, that these were all part of different Persian empires expanse. And so there were Persian peoples who were settled in these areas and they spoke Persian for some kind of variant and dialect of old Iranian, old Persian before later developments and transformations and changes in the language. But so they were kind of affiliated in the ancient world with the Achaemenid Empire and other empires. In the more recent kind of antique past, as a rival to the Romans, you have, for example, the Parthian Empire, which is just a different dynastic group, but containing many of the similar kind of lands. And after Parthian Empire's passing, you have the Sasanian Empire, which is the immediately pre-Islamic ruling kind of superpower empire that actually was a serious rival to Rome, to the Eastern Roman Empire, sometimes called the Byzantine Empire, maybe more commonly called centered in its capital in Constantinople. After it was sort of divided and severed from the western part of the Mediterranean, it situated itself in Anatolia, what is modern-day Turkey, and ruled much of the Levant through what is today's Palestine, Syria, Jordan, northern part of the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt and parts of North Africa, right? That's the Byzantine Empire in its heyday. And its great rival was the Sasanian Empire, which had its capital in very close to what is today Baghdad in modern day Iraq and further east. And so we had basically two competing empires that were fundamentally situated one around the Anatolian kind of highlands and the other the Iranian plateau. And the sort of regions between them in what we think of as the Middle East today were kind of a contested zone, you know, where they had lots of wars, they competed for influence. But my point here would be about Iran and about Persia and these Persian empires is that This is one, a long history of organized political formations. These were polities, whether empires or other kinds of states that have existed, you know, for a very long period of time, a couple thousand years, you could say, perhaps to the, you know, period of the common era, you know, like China. the birth of Christ era, as you've got at least 1,000 years of very recognized and probably longer of polities that were ruling major empires that organized life. What's interesting about Cyrus the Great, this Achaemenid Empire, he's one of the most famous figures, Khosrow in Persian, but Cyrus the Great, is that he created a concept of universal empire, politically speaking. that accommodated and had a place for all these diverse peoples with their diverse practice of worship and different gods and deities and pantheons and languages and cultures. Nonetheless, they were all part of the Achaemenid Empire and the great emperor or ruler, it redounded to his glory that he had all these peoples as part of his empire. He didn't try and eradicate the difference. He didn't try and change their religion. As long as they were loyal subjects to this empire, you could have a multi-religious, multi-cultural, multi-linguistic empire. That's something quite interesting. which we see is, you know, not so common in modern nation state, or I would say in forms of empire, colonial empires that are built upon exclusivist political kind of identity. You have to be a, you know, Britain, you know, you have to be an Englishman to be, you know, in the ruling kind of strata of the British empire, right? So that kind of thing. This was a very different model is this big land-based empire that encompassed many of these different peoples. And that kind of continues to go forward through the Parthians and so on. There's a little bit of a change with the Sasanians, but I want to make one other kind of key point here, is that also they had forms of governance and administration as a result of this. And so this will be valuable when we think of the contemporary situation when Iranian diplomats and political officials and leaders are saying, you know, you know, we have this long history. In a way, they're also referring to a long history and tradition of statecraft. They were rulers for many years. And then, you know, after fortunes, political fortunes change, they still and it's something I want to say about coming into the Islamic era. They still and that will transition to that in a moment. They still even if they weren't the military class rulers or the ruling dynasts. you know, the sultans or the caliphs, they very often were the heart of the bureaucracy, the people who actually governed the state, organized it, figured out how you keep records, taxes, who were in the chancery. So when it came to the written documents for correspondence with other rulers or with subordinates and governors, the people who wrote these kind of important missives and statements and declarations and administrative type documents were a Persian bureaucratic class. And they are therefore among the people who would give wise advice to Arab or Turkic. We'll come to that era in the medieval period where these rulers were ethnically different, Turks or Arabs earlier. The ones who gave them wise advice about the traditions of rule and governance, how to be wise and just rulers, how to, you know, correspond in diplomacy and conducted diplomacy, and even advice about things like, you know, how do you get information from the rest of your society? You know, they didn't have a surveillance state like we have today, where basically we're all providing information about everything we're doing and the government can collect it and figure out everything they want to know. about us to better rule and govern and also figure out where are the challenges to their rule where's the sources of rebellion who might be a dissident etc and they can crack down on you right well that was difficult when you didn't have these modern technologies but nonetheless they had state capacities and they thought about this question and problem so they would give advice for things like Like, well, use the Sufis. They wander around, the dervishes. Use merchants and make sure that you have a good relationship with those people because they go out in society. And if you need to know what's happening in XYZ province and you don't believe that your governor is really telling you the full story or is trying to hide things, you need other sources of information. So when it came to statecraft, when it came to diplomacy, when it came to how you organize your affairs and are a wise ruler, Even if they weren't the ruler, they have a tradition of governance and being part of sovereign states, right? So for all this time period. I guess I should say something about, you know, what happens when these ancient Sasanian, Parthian, Achaemenid, you know, these ancient empires in the late antique period in the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries where there are the rise of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula, And there is a spreading of Muslim political power through conquests and border conflicts with both the Sasanian Empire and the Roman Byzantine Empire that leads then to a new polity being founded. The question is, OK, what changes very often? It's portrayed and characterized that this was some radical departure because now there are Arabs, Arabic speaking people with a new religion and a religion that is particularly the almost exclusive religion of this ruling, governing political and military class. that this must be some kind of radical disruption and departure from everything that happened before. And a lot of times people mistake political dynasties with, you know, being descriptors of what's happening in society, in culture, and so on, when they are just a small ruling strata right at the top. A lot of things just simply don't change, which is one reason why, in fact, many of the Eastern Christians who were not part of the official Greek Orthodox Church welcomed, or at least weren't going to put up resistance when the Arab Muslims came as new rulers because they were being oppressed by the Byzantine Orthodox Church. And so they welcomed the opportunity to just continue doing what they wanted to do in terms of organizing their forms of worship and their communities under their religious authorities. And so there was an awful lot of continuity between the pre-Islamic and Islamic eras in the ancient Near East. And let's try and understand exactly why that might be the case. Well, Islam emerged from the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula who were really outside of the settled regions that had developed cities and these larger scale political structures. So when they came and managed to conquer these areas, they didn't want to disrupt the agricultural wealth and the society that was producing surplus. You know, they didn't, you know, replace populations, you know, get rid of them. And they also, in fact, didn't even at least initially seem to be all that interested in converting them. You know, it was more like this is our specific unique kind of military class religion for the Arab peoples who have, you know, come. and are now this ruling kind of strata, they left everything more or less in place. And in fact, they used the bureaucracies that already existed in the provinces for administering Eastern Roman lands in the Levant, Syria, Egypt, et cetera. And likewise, the Persian bureaucratic administrative secretarial class for the lands of the Sasanian Empire in Iraq and what is modern day Egypt. Iran and into Central Asia. So in many ways, it's an overemphasis to say that because there's a new political dynasty and they had a new religion, that all of this was a big disruption and change, and that Islam, which is often imagined in this way, was imposed by these Arab conquests. That's why I was careful to say Muslim Arab Muslim political rule spread. But that didn't necessarily mean in the initial stages that the community number of people who actually identified with and practiced Islam was that big. It was a small group of people who are now ruling over a much larger, settled, population that had a great deal of continuity rulers can't come rulers go it just so happens in this case there was a pattern of rule that managed to last and over time several centuries people did begin to convert and that had changes as a result on the nature of islam that became much more dem you know kind of uh multi-ethnic uh you know in its sort of character um and so The last thing that I would say about this is an interesting and key feature. I already alluded to some political, well, religious persecution of religious minorities, like Eastern Christians who were outside of, say, the Nicene Christianity, the Council of Nicaea being very important in establishing certain kinds of Trinitarian doctrines. The nature of Jesus was something that Christian sects debated a lot. Well, In this, you know, council, people who didn't accept the Nicene Creed as it became to be known were outside. They were still, you know, regarded as Christian, but maybe Christians in error. And it's also during the era of Constantine and subsequent developments among Eastern Christians Roman emperors who adopted Christianity, then for themselves converted to Christianity, then made by the end of the fourth century, what we think of as Orthodox Nicene Christian doctrine, the religion, official religion sponsored by and supported by the state. And what that meant in an area where you have diverse religious communities, and diverse, uh, kind of traditions and orientations and sects or denominations within even the dominant religion, that those become heresies or suppressed religious others, not just because there is, um, you know, they're, you know, not in the position of, of dominance, but because there is an official, you know, one and being in these other kind of communities puts you at a disadvantage, um, And so that's also kind of an important pattern to recognize and realize that, likewise, in the era of the Muslim empires that develop out of these early conquests, is that Islam becomes... the official religion of the state, but that it also accommodates, though in a kind of subordinate position when it comes to rulership and governance, of the other communities, whether they're Jews, Christians of all varieties, or Zoroastrians, which was the dominant and becomes the kind of official confessional religion of the Sasanian Empire in the pre-Islamic period. So you have great religious diversity. Iran starts to become Muslim, but there's still a lot for several centuries of Zoroastrians and varieties within the kind of Zoroastrian stream of religion that develops out of ancient Iranian religion. sources. So those are what I would say about the transition, except that very often modern nationalists, so here's how it comes to the contemporary situation, is that modern Iranian nationalists, particularly under the secularizing, modernizing, so-called modernizing westernizing of the Shah, the Pahlavi Shah, whose son now wants to return, it seems, to being installed as a U.S. vassal, as ruler of Iran, that under him there was a real valorization of the pre-Islamic Iranian history, right? To try and connect it to some other. And you see this with many forms of nationalism that they project back deep into time, some kind of continuity and identity of the people that we have this ancient past and we are those people who used to be in this land. And whether it's kind of very continuous or not, they then have to portray the Islamic era as somehow an Arab importation that is not indigenous and is somehow in conflict culturally and religiously and incompatible with Iranian-ness from these previous sources. And so they posit and portray the arrival of Islam as a form of colonialism, a form of suppression of the Iranian nation that now in the modern period under secularization, modernization can restore itself to this kind of ancient connection and ancient glory. So you see a lot of latent Islamophobia in the kind of ways of thinking that in order to be Iranian in this new secular nationalist kind of framework, we have to abandon Islam to get back to what it really means to be Whereas if you think about what is Islam and what does Islam really develop into is that, and this is something that many Muslims would, you know, have a real problem themselves with really recognizing and understanding, which is that Islam didn't come sort of fully formed into the social and legal and theological and intellectual, you know, and political system that ends up becoming Islamicate or Islamic civilization, you know, after a few centuries of development. it is you know some of the sources key sources like the quran traditions that are associated with uh the prophet muhammad but that all of the scholarship that kind of develops it into systems of law and systems of theology and um you know are the intellectual fruits of um the development of the Muslim religious sciences that make up really what the religion becomes were developed in these subsequent centuries. And that many, many of the most important famous scholars, even people who standardized the grammatical rules and understanding of the Arabic language were themselves Persians who spoke both Persian as their native tongue, native language, then learned Arabic for scholarship and for religious, but also just general scholarship for doing scientific study and so on. Arabic becomes the key kind of intellectual language in the same way that, you know, people in, you know, the Dutch lowlands, you know, what become like, you know, the Netherlands spoke a kind of Flemish and Dutch kind of variant of German. And people in southern France spoke Languedoc. That was the Languedoc. They had a Provençal language. And people in France or in London spoke either English, Anglo-Saxon, early Anglo-Saxon, or Old French or version of French. But if they wanted to become educated... They learned Latin and they wrote in Latin and they conducted their scholarship as well as their religious sort of studies and writings in this kind of universal language of scholarship and of religion in the church. Well, Arabic was similarly a lingua franca that becomes, you know, important in all of these Islamic lands and many of the top scholars who really are formative when it comes to Quran interpretation. study of Arabic language, theology and doctrine and a systematic understanding of it. They were from Iranian Persian land. So to claim, you know, whatever Islam becomes out of this historical process, to claim that it is somehow some importation that is incompatible, well, it's the Persians who made much of it themselves, just as, you know, in... North Africa, you know, many, you know, Amazigh peoples, you know, become scholars, learn Arabic, contribute to, you know, establishing the school of law, the Maliki school of law in the western lands of North Africa. The Maghrib, Morocco's name comes from that. They have their own local characteristics that makes it indigenous. They indigenize it and they are the ones who actually, the form of Islam as it develops is not something that is itself imported. There's many features that are imported from the culture of the Arabs, the language and so on, but that it is an expression of this synthesis that has many continuities with what came before. And some scholars argue that, of course, there are many new developments and doctrines of Islamic belief. They don't agree on the Trinity or the divine sonship and so on. But what has happened is that many of the intellectual trends or horizons, the theological kind of modes of thinking like dialectics and how you take a proposition and interpret a scripture to all of these things like that are like tribes, people of the Arabian desert who first converted to Islam when it emerged. in the seventh century didn't have all of that scholarship. That's something that happened because they went into the ancient Near East or late antique Near East, engaged with those cultures, governed with the help of the systems and structures that were already there, and likewise, came to elaborate and develop Islam as a global world, sophisticated religious system through this interaction.

Breht O'Shea: absolutely absolutely elite uh recapitulation of that fascinating and millennia-long history and you're emphasizing the continuity of a polity of political systems as such and you're emphasizing the dialectical interpenetration of religions as they travel and evolve same thing with christianity starts off in the levant moves up through europe as it engages with european pre-existing pagan culture it is altered and it alters Europe. Same with Buddhism, coming out of the Indian subcontinent, traveling through China, confronting Taoism in that instance, turning into Zen Buddhism that travels then to Japan. That is actually how religions unfold. And in every engagement with the new culture, there is this inner penetration. It's not just this domination of this new religion into the pre-existing culture. It is a... A dialectical engagement from both sides that the whole thing that comes out transformed by that meeting. And so that's important because, as you said, you know, in the case of the Shah, for example, trying to present Islam as alien. It would be like some Nietzschean right-wing nationalist in Europe do this where they treat Christianity as this alien thing and actually we're pagans and we should go back to that. But that's a reactionary, of course, trend that we see emerge in that instance. Before I move on, I just want to ask the obvious question. If that was the posture towards Islam from the Shah, what is the Islamic – and so far as you know, the Islamic Republic's posture towards – history of Persia? Like, how do they, because, you know, you think ideologically, they'd have to combat this view that Islam is this wholly alien force. And in so doing, they would have to wrestle with that Persian history. Do you have any insight as to how they how they do that?

Adnan Husain: Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know as much as I would like about how modern, say, education in the islamic republic of iran handles and discusses like any nation has to have its textbook history right and obviously there's a new textbook history that comes into play as a result of curriculum changes and so on with the islamic with the revolution the revolution in 1978-79 and the establishment of the islamic republic but you can even see that they are still very proud of this long heritage and you don't see for example uh you know uh suppressing or wiping out antiquities from the pre-islamic period um there are a lot of public architecture and sculpture that you know picks up on themes of ancient iranian you know mythology and For example, the Shahnameh is a Persian text in modern Persian. Persian undergoes a kind of development where around the over the course of a couple, three centuries, the old Sasanian, you know, middle Persian texts. undergo some kind of a transformation with all the social change and with incorporating a lot of new vocabulary from Arabic. And so it becomes a kind of new literary language, but it is a very powerful literary language. And some of these great Persian epics that You know, either were written or were, you know, passed down orally get reformulated within and preserved in a serious way. The ancient kind of book of kings is what the Shahnameh is and it's about, you know, these kind of mythos of ancient Iranian culture. You know, just like the, you know, the Greek myths are something about a kind of like, how did we come to be who we were, you know, and especially as a political force, because they were these large and important and powerful empires that were established that had long lasting traditions. consequences and duration themselves. They continued for a long period of time. So all that material is still there. It's still used. It's referred to. People know those stories. They retell these stories. They refer to them and they're part of the fabric of the culture. It's just that they understand at a certain point they adopted Islam as their belief. And I think in some ways, And we'll probably come to talk about this a little bit more, the Sunni-Shia sort of division, what's that all about, what does it mean? But one thing I would say in terms of the modern identity of Iran, the fact that it adopted Shiism at a certain point in its history, you could say perhaps gave it a distinctive religious culture in some ways, even within Islam, even in the broad tradition of Islam, that preserved in some sense some identity of Iranian nationalism. Now, of course, there are many Shia who are Arab in different parts of the Middle East. But, you know, the majority of Shia, I think, are Arab. you know in iran and our twelver or imami she is and we'll come to talk a little bit about those differences you know what are the strands of shiism but in terms of this iranian national identity the fact that it's rather distinctive and different in some ways from surrounding um sunni or arab lands and other sunni kind of non um Arab countries like, you know, the subcontinent and so forth, gives it perhaps an easier way to make these continuities to say, well, we've always been this kind of special, you know, community and just at a certain point we adopted Islam. And they sometimes don't emphasize the fact that for most of its history in the Islamic era, they were Sunnis living in Iran. At a certain point, they adopted Shiism, but it's perhaps something that helps give it a distinctive way of framing its connection with, you know, a pre-Islamic past as well, that we have been this distinctive religious community in some way or another, or culturally in some way or another. So while, you know, some of the stories of gods and, you know, metaphysical forces might not completely align with maybe an orthodox uh you know she theological you know understanding you know in a popular kind of level and sense you see uh actual pride in this long history and the culture that they've inherited and um you know they still for example uh uh annually celebrate Nowruz, the new year in March. It's actually coming up time of recording. It's like in a week or so in 10 days, maybe eight, nine days from the time we're recording in late, late in March, March, like 23rd, 24th, something like that is like Nowruz. And that is a pre-Islamic kind of calendar and system based on this agricultural cycle and the culture and civilization. And Iran is not distinctive in that a lot of areas where Islam comes, either in the seventh, eighth centuries, like in the case of Iran, Or in the 12th, 13th centuries, you know, 13th, 14th centuries, like in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and takes on, you know, greater significance in the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries. Or in Africa, you know, from starting in the like 8th, 9th centuries and, you know, into West Africa in like the 12th, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries. But it always integrates with existing structures of society, culture, you know, and community and even calendar systems and so on. So it's not like this is just a kind of Persian resistance survival that they're still trying to hang on to some of their Persian identity. That's the case wherever you see Islam is that it has been adapted and melded and you pointed out that that's also not something you know kind of unique to islam but what's interesting is how often and frequently islam is exceptionalized when it comes to history the story of religions you know you name it like for some reason this is exceptional and operates totally differently from our social scientific understanding our history etc and if we just restored it to being a normal religion of human society, I think we get beyond quite a lot of the problems that we have in understanding and interpreting our contemporary world.

Breht O'Shea: Absolutely. I mean, again, expertly said. And there's genuine beauty in how these religions spread across the world and engage with unique cultures and give unique expressions to the religion itself. And one of the worst things that you see, especially in the West, especially in the whole region as monolithic and treating the religion itself as monolithic. And not only do you just lose analysis and your brain gets scrambled, but you lose the beauty of actually trying to engage with curiosity, the fascinating, unique histories of all these different regions and all these different countries and all these different peoples engaging with and in the process changing and evolving and elevating, you know, in this case, Islam, but across the world, these different religious traditions. It's It's gorgeous. It's beautiful. It's fascinating. And we should have that posture. But you did mention the Sunni-Shia divide. And it's something that gets talked about. I think when you hear the ignorant statement that I hear all the time of, oh, these people have been at war forever. It's just what it is over there. I mean, oh, my God. There's so much to be said about that alone. But I think part of it comes with a dim understanding that This is part of that conflict, perhaps, even though many people couldn't even articulate the Sunni-Shia divide, to be honest, in the West. But can you kind of talk about the Sunni-Shia divide, how it's portrayed, kind of its ancient roots, how it evolved historically and kind of how it informs regional politics today? That's a big question. Take it any direction you want.

Adnan Husain: Well, I mean, I do think it unfortunately does inform regional politics today. And in the recent last couple of decades, it was worsened very much by the U.S. global war on terror and particularly the invasion in Iraq that confessionalized the and civic identity in a way that hadn't happened for all of the terrible faults of and oppression and corruption of the Arab nationalist Baathist regime under Saddam Hussein and even some of his forebears, though it really was much worse under him, that they had not emphasized very much. The Sunni-Shia division maybe existed, maybe didn't, you didn't have, you had some intermarriage, but maybe, you know, less because people married confessionally, but there wasn't a very kind of public and political confessionalization. But when you know, the Iraq War happened as they're reconstituting politics. The U.S. really stoked the sectarian divisions. And also it was used in a way to also mobilize against Iran and the dangers of Iran, which had already happened because of the Iranian revolution and concern among the conservative Arab monarchies and corrupt dictatorships of the region, most of whom were vassal states of the US or soon would become vassal states of the US if they had been part of the, say, Soviet orbit, you know, much more like, you know, Syria and Iraq had been. and were that, you know, the revolution posed a real threat to imperialist and colonial control in the region. And they mobilized, you know, sectarianism to help, you know, marshal resistance to that, to encourage Iraq to invade very early in the 1980s, you know, eight years of war. against Iran, supported by all of the Gulf monarchies, with massive amounts of funding and support. And of course, the West providing various weapons, including chemical weapons, which were used on several occasions against people in Iran. The threat and the danger essentially of decolonizing the Middle East, the overthrow of the Shah and the possible spread of that revolutionary message, was countered in some ways by Sunni sectarian fears of the kind of Wahhabist, Salafist Gulf monarchies, that's the form of Islam that they supported, and also stoked and increased also by u.s and western support at the same time that they were funding and operating a very sectarian oriented radical uh form of islam to participate in the jihad holy war in afghanistan against uh and recruiting all over you know the the you know the arab arab world of south asia etc so that was going on that kind of has made sectarian politics very important in dividing countries and in pitting them in alliances against Iran, and even in this idea of a Shia crescent that had to be opposed. That is, Iran's support for Shias in southern Iraq, a dominant population, and Shi'is in southern Lebanon that they had a lot of connection with as shared in their form of Shi'ism, and also even in Yemen, where a different version of Shiism kind of loosely could affiliate itself within the orbit of Iran's aid and sponsorship against U.S. empire and Israeli Zionist kind of dominance in the region.

Breht O'Shea: So really quick, just to clarify something, would you say that the axis of resistance kind of maps not cleanly, not perfectly, but generally onto this more or less sectarian divide?

Adnan Husain: Well, obviously the Palestinians are the exception here. The Palestinian resistance, well, firstly, of course, in its secular form doesn't map on, but then secondly, in the form of the Islamic resistance, whether it's Hamas or Islamic jihad and other resistance factions and groups, you know, are from Sunni Arab communities, whereas all the others that I mentioned are one kind of Shiism or another. So it's not perfect. But then there are lots of Shi'is that are not revolutionary. So look at Azerbaijan, which is majority, you know, a neighboring country to Iran and is a majority, is a Turkic language speaking people. Azeri is a Turkic language. But they are Twelver Shi, and they are in this alignment with very close allies with Israel, for example, and pose a real threat with animosity towards Iran geopolitically. So it doesn't map on perfectly that 12 or she's or forms of she's are part of the resistance faction and not all members of the resistance faction are she's. But you would say that there is an overlap that is noteworthy. What I would say is that it is the consequences and effects of of the revolutionary shiism that gets developed as a result of develop of you know events in iran as part of the revolution that there is a kind of new uh consciousness uh that is resistant and revolutionary that adopts uh political engagement, anti-imperialist politics, and affiliations and collaborations across the region with those who will take up resistance. And so that's a particular form of revolutionary 12-verse Shiism that emerges because of Iran's revolution in 1979, because of people like Ali Shariati, a great kind of Muslim sociologist and thinker who really is sometimes characterized, maybe it's too simplistic to put it this way, but sometimes characterized as you know, kind of Marxist inspired, but still kind of seeing Islamism. He's one of the kind of ideological exponents and developers of a kind of Islamism. That is the idea that Islam, if understood properly, can be a tool for social development, revolutionary and egalitarian politics and achieving solutions to, you know, this worldly kind of political sphere and not just for internal spiritual development. And that's something that Shiism was identified with for much of its history as being largely apolitical, quietist, and nothing like the Sunnis that had this whole history of You know, governance and rulership. And so when it came time for modernist and reformist types of Islam and like then 18th, 19th and 20th century, they were dedicated to confronting colonialism and imperialism. because they had that kind of history of governance. And so being subordinated, you know, under colonial rule was somehow, you know, going to elicit this response within Sunni Islam. But for Shias, it was thought of as something very different, which is why it was so surprising for many people when the revolution happened. Now, in order to explain that, We do need to now maybe talk a little bit about Shiism and how it developed and this sectarian division at its roots and its subsequent history. So these sectarian divisions emerge out of historical conflict that takes place in the early Muslim community, principally, you could say, over the question of succession to the Muhammad, Prophet Muhammad after his death. So already during Muhammad's lifetime, there was a polity formed. I don't know if we could call it a state. It's maybe not quite that organized. And it's also a charismatic kind of authority of the Prophet is present there, both bringing revelation and religious guidance, but also organizing social and what we would call political life, you know, in the absence of a state that's, you know, tribes don't have states. They are, you know, kind of a form of political social organization without like extraneous state structures. Right. But there is something else going on in early polity if not a state, at least some kind of organizing of relations of the tribes together in this new concept of a Muslim ummah or community or polity, you could say. And that once he passes away, there is a kind of problem of what is the fate of the community going forward how is it to be organized could somebody inherit his prophetic role or was that unique to him in which case what was the form of leadership that would be you know acceptable or divinely you know a legitimate you know in this new religion and there were differences that emerged over that question. There seemed to be kind of consensus that there should be a leader. There were some people who pulled some tribes that pulled out of the kind of polity in the sense that they said, well, we don't have to pay you know, this religious tax that was for recognizing Muhammad as the prophet. We're still Muslim, but we don't want to pay that tax. We don't want to be part, in other words, of this political community as integrated. We want to go a different direction. There were conflicts that resulted out of that. But the vast majority, the main grouping decided, yes, this polity should continue, but that there should be a leader And it was kind of a question, well, what is the sort of status of that leader? Are they continuing to have religious authority of some kind or not? How would that be understood? And what was the mechanism for succession when they disappear? So what ends up happening is that four companions of Muhammad end up succeeding him as caliphs, the fourth of whom is Ali, his nephew and son-in-law was married to the Prophet's daughter. And he was a very important person in the early Muslim community. And there were many people who felt he should have been the first succedor and that Muhammad had indicated that he had designated him for some kind of role after him. And others disputed and didn't accept that. And so we started to have a conflict over succession where the partisans of Ali's role as imam is how they characterized it. That is both religious and political differences. guide and authority figure that, you know, his imamate, him being imam, became a principle for them of the right religion and of the right kind of decision that should have been made politically for the benefit of the community. And so the partisans of Ali are known as the Shia. And that's what the Arabic word means is basically the supporters or partisans. So this word Shiaism that's probably not actually how she that's not really how she's think of themselves by this term they think of themselves as good muslims who are loyal to the family of the prophet and the decisions that he made and they venerate members of the family of the prophet and think that they have a important spiritual religious status so but they are known as she is because in this early period they were the faction that supported his claims to being the rightful and most legitimate religious and political authority. In essence, it was also really who is going to be the political authority. There were a war fought, war was fought over his succession for various reasons. There was a kind of conflicts that happened. The winners of this actually formed a dynasty, kind of an Arab kingdom, dynastic kingdom, and established their capital for all of these areas that had been conquered in Damascus. And they're known as the House of Umayyah. That is their kind of tribal, they were part of the same family, sort of tribal grouping of Muhammad from Mecca. And they established this dynasty. But there were some people who in the early Muslim community who never accepted this as legitimate. And they continued to support the imam of their time. Even after Ali was assassinated, they turned to his eldest son, Hassan, and then after his death to Hassan. Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet, right? The second grandson of the Prophet, Hasan and Hussein. And Hussein has a very important and significant role in history because the partisans of the House of the Prophet and this other idea of what was legitimate proper Muslim governance and religious authority encouraged him to rise up in rebellion and call people to recognize him as the rightful kind of leader. And as a consequence, the Umayyads sent a force to capture and kill him and eliminate him. And he and many members of his entourage, his family and supporters were massacred at a place called Karbala, which is in today's Iraq, not so far away from the city of Kufa, where they were trying to go because the people of Kufa had invited them to come and lead them. And so they were supposed to support him and he was on his way there to establish a kind of independent polity from which his leadership could be recognized. But the martyrdom of Hussein then becomes an incredibly important moment in the devotional history and culture of Shiism that they remember him being sacrificed as, you know, a kind of key moment, right, in recognizing the persecution of the Imams and the family of the Prophet. This kind of continues, they chose another leader, and the different kind of forms of Shiism develop in part from disputes over who was the next successor from some of these, and During this time, there were social changes that were taking place where there had been a lot more conversion now. And there were people who were known as non-Arab Muslims who were attached. The way it worked is that you had to be kind of sponsored to be part of this kind of ruling military, you know, political class. And so they were known as mawali, that is clients, clients. who had to have a patron, a patron and a client relationship and essentially be sponsored to be part of the Muslim community. And that created a two-tier kind of world, a social division between subordinates and kind of Arab elite. And as the numbers of Mawali grew, as new cities were established, this social tension ended up resolving itself in a more egalitarian, revolutionary and inclusive form of Islam. to replace the Arab dynasty of the Umayyads who had been ruling in Damascus, and I just mentioned had been responsible for the massacre and martyrdom of Hussein and his family, that there was a revolution that was taking place, a social revolution that was advertised as being under the banner of justice for the family of the prophet, right? All the people who their grievances, social and religious were kind of put together in this, this would be improved if the rightful people who should be in charge were restored to that. And so we seek justice for the family of the prophet. what ended up happening is that a different wing of the Prophet's family that was outside of this tradition of the partisans of Ali and subsequent groups that had formed to support various successors after Hassan and Hussein, joined this revolution expecting that the Imam Jafar al-Sadiq would be the one who would then now be put in place as ruler and spiritual guide of the Muslim empire. However, that didn't happen. And as a result, Jafar himself ended up saying, okay, from this time forward, this continuous attempt to contest the leadership politically, that phase is over. What we need now to do really is develop the religious dimensions and preserve the spiritual and religious knowledge that is being transmitted from the family of the Prophet and guard and protect This true Islam, right, that we recognize that we have access to and that has been abandoned by, you know, all these others who are supporting this, you know, corrupted, you know, dynasty and empire. And so that's when you might say it really took a sectarian direction. turn and started to have its own particular identity as a religious division within the Muslim world. But that happened also at the same time as it kind of took a quietist turn. Not everybody agreed with that. And so you have different Shi'i communities and groups that go in their own development that maintained this kind of continuous struggle against the corrupt empire. and established the Fatimid dynasty in North Africa, centered for a period of a couple of centuries in Egypt, which was a variant one that said, we need to have a proper caliph and imam. And they ended up doing so and establishing, you know, part of that territory under their rule. But the main line of she's that is the dominant majority today, are known as the Twelver Shi'is or Imami Shi'is, who had a continuous line of 12 imams who succeeded until in the 10th century, the last imam, after many times, many of these imams were assassinated by and persecuted by the governing authorities. And at a certain point, the 12th imam was, that they recognized had to go in hiding, you know, couldn't be out in public being the leader of the community. And this is when he was a young boy. So he was sheltered and went into hiding, but at a certain, and there were a few people who were designated to be go-betweens to continue to provide leadership on behalf of the imam in the Shi'i community. But after a certain point, when that 12th Imam didn't return to public kind of duties, too much time also had passed, there developed this doctrine within 12 or Shi'ism of the occultation or the going into kind of a more ontological hiding of the Imam who would return at the end of time as a rightly guided figure that's what the word Mahdi is, to restore justice at the end of time. But for this period, we would have to make do with the teachings we had inherited from the previous Imams. develop kind of our knowledge and understanding of the right way of practice from all of those and be in waiting and expectation and not be contesting political power or raising rebellions or, you know, saying here is the rightful ruler because there now was no Imam available to be the candidate for legitimate rulership over the Muslims, according to the Shias. That has since that time been the expectation of the Mahdi, and that's why Shiism was often characterized among many people for subsequent centuries. Their history looked like they were quietistic. They were waiting for the end times in a way. And there were other variants of Shiism that continued, as I said, to contest political power, and they had their own kind of traditions and identity. and the Ismailis are one that continued to have an imam, and also the Zaydis. After the fourth caliph, there was dispute after Hussein among some people, and they chose an imam that wasn't the same as what becomes the Twelver tradition of lineage there, and they ended up establishing themselves in Yemen, and so they are a form of Shiism, but a somewhat different one that has like a different law and different structure and different ideas about the nature of the imam and their authorities and so on than others, you know, developed. So that's kind of the snapshot of Shiism in this kind of early formative period. And it's in contradistinction to them that crystallizes later, really, you could say, an idea of Sunnis as the people who just accept the majoritarian, you know, kind of... tradition and compromise in a way and say it's not so important that we find who is the rightful ruler as long as it's somebody who will rule under the guidance of Islam and we can accept as long as they're acceptable on these grounds, they don't have to be a member of the family of the Prophet. They become known as Sunnis and they end up being the dominant majority. But there persists from this time these two wings, broad wings of Muslim religious practice that also have a different take on the history. and also a different narrative and a different theory about rightful and legitimate governance of Muslim lands. But I think that's the sort of deeper history of it. And I characterized it as somewhat kind of apolitical for much of its history. But something happens in the late 15th and 16th centuries which is that after the Mongol conquest, there was this period of political fragmentation, you might say, where there were a lot of local challengers to power, but they were also kind of competing with one another for legitimacy and authority and made appeals to religious vocabulary and universalist kinds of concepts. And so you see a lot of very interesting kind of experiments in like religio-political movements and formations emerging in this kind of ferment and, you know, of the post-Mongol kind of order collapsing. And out of that kind of century and a half, two centuries of various contestations where Sufi brotherhoods, their Sufi Sheikh becomes somebody who wields a lot of social power and can provide some sense of community in a kind of large regional way that connects people. They start making kind of claims potentially to being People who could rule in Central Asia, some Naqshbandi Sufi sheikhs become basically the rulers of Samarkand and Bukhara. And likewise, the Turkic tribal rulers who are really the ones who rule the dynastic rulers of much of the central Islamic lands for several many centuries are competing with one another for power and authority they start also characterizing themselves within a kind of religious vocabulary which had not been so common to do and some of them absorb Shi'i kinds of ideas Possibly that they are the Mahdi and the imam about to return. They are also Sufi, spiritually guided, perfect. In Sufi theosophy, there's this concept of the insan al-kamil from Ibn Arabi, the perfected or complete human being. you know, who has kind of achieved full spiritual self-realization. And so, you know, they're making kind of claims that combine political power and legitimacy with religious kind of status. And, you know, one group out of this really is very successful. This figure, Shah Ismail, who's head of the Safavid Sufi order, and at the same time is the head of a Turkic tribal confederation. And he... kind of promotes this idea this kind of ecstatic charismatic idea that he is the alexander of his age he is the shadow of god on earth he is the true imam come back he is also the perfect man he kind of coordinates a whole range of spiritual and political uh kind of uh claims to uh to legitimacy and authority and manages to actually galvanize a really charismatic movement among the Turkic tribal members of this Sufi order, who are known as the Qizilbash, the redheads, and are like his kind of shock troops that really just almost essentially deify him. He ends up starting to expand his power And, you know, in like the early 16th century and is really reshaping the central Islamic lands from Anatolia, eastern Anatolia, through Iraq and Persia and into Central Asia in this vast sort of territory. But he is defeated in 1516 by the Ottomans at the Battle of Chaldiran. Selim the Grim defeats him in this moment. And this millenarian and messianic kind of movement has to deal with this massive defeat. and the fact that they can't expand to a universalist kind of Muslim power, but really have to base themselves in kind of more or less what is today modern kind of Iran, a little bit more than what is today modern Iran, but essentially that. And so as a result, he decides that instead of this kind of charismatic kind of religion, he needs now a kind of stable basis in society that also still distinguishes it from, you know, kind of the Ottomans and other powers. And he decides to choose 12 or Shi'ism as the official religion. doctrine of the Safavid dynastic state that he is now kind of ruling in Iran. And he decides that we must impose Shiism as this official religion and forcibly convert Sunni Muslims in these territories and also the other Sufi groups, because there were other rival Sufi orders, some of whom were Shi, some of whom were Sunni, They flee from these lands and over a period of time, I'm not sure exactly how long it takes, but over the course of a generation or two, Iran becomes principally Twelvershi as it is and remains today. That's comparatively recent in its history, but it had this distinctive kind of revolutionary transformation. that shows that sometimes Shiism could be activated as part of a state program, a political program, and wasn't just a kind of quietest, you know, waiting for the end times sort of passive community. And very often people have forgotten Shiism. I think some of the earlier histories of Shiism, when they've promoted this idea or ended up being so surprised when later in the 20th century, Ayatollah Khomeini managed to be a leader in a clerical movement. if not completely led clerical revolution, but one where the religious community and authority provided a large, you know, kind of organizing structure and authority that came from their religious reinterpretation of Shiism that transformed it from this kind of let's wait and expect the imam to come and someday to a demand for justice against oppression and for right rulership and anti-imperialism today. That's what happened in the Iranian revolution.

Breht O'Shea: Man, magisterial. So much there. So much fascinating stuff. We will not be able to get into it today, but I highly encourage people who are interested in filling out their understanding of this history in particular to look into deeply the Iraq and Iranian War, because I think that sets the tone for so much that came after. And of course, learn more about the 1979 revolution, what came before and what came after. It's a complicated picture for those of us on the socialist and Marxist left, for sure, because they were a huge part of the Iranian revolution. They eventually... had sectarian divides within it, the religious component won out. That's a conversation for another day. I did want to mention, you mentioned Sufism. You and I have done work on that before. I'll link to that in the show notes. But you said something interesting. You said that there are Sunni and Shia versions of Sufism. And I'm wondering, because I've sort of maybe wrongly conceptualized as three branches, Sunni being dominant, Shia being the minority but still the second biggest, and then Sufism being a sort of third branch separate from the other two. But is that not a correct way to think about it?

Adnan Husain: Well, I would— I certainly agree with you that it has very distinctive orientations. But really, I would characterize it less of being a sect of Islam than being a devotional current and devotional stream that prioritizes spiritual knowledge of God. and all the things that we talked about in that episode about what Sufism is as a devotional and spiritual mystical current that informs practice of Islam and is certainly distinctive from other emphases like legal scholarship or theology, but doesn't necessarily map perfectly onto the sectarian divide, though It was developed principally early on in communities that would be more identified with Sunni law and Sunni theology. Partly, but it's very interesting because there is a lot of overlap in various ways because most of the Sufi brotherhoods and later Sufi traditions that crystallize into these communities in the medieval period, the Sufi turuk, the brotherhoods, actually in their chains of mystical ascription, like the lineage chain that they ascribe for how this connects them through various previous spiritual masters and sheikhs all the way back to the Prophet. Muhammad, which is what they want to do. They want to align this as a spiritual knowledge that was transmitted since the time of Muhammad. They almost all go through Ali, the first imam and the fourth caliph and nephew and son-in-law of Muhammad. So you could say in a way that this is, you know, something that looks very much like Shiism's love for the family of the prophet and valorization of the spiritual significance and religious importance of Ali that, you know, is similar in some ways to claims that the Shiite you know, partisans of Ali and Shih's make for why he should have been the first caliph. Now, Sunni Sufis don't really make that kind of claim or concern, but they obviously reflect some sense of his importance as a guide and as a important figure who carries forward the religious meanings and spiritual interpretations of Islam inherited from Muhammad. So there are some interesting overlaps. In the medieval period, some Sufi brotherhoods and orders do explicitly adopt a Shi'i kind of law and theology in this kind of sense of denominations or sects of Islam. But it shows that there is some ability for this to be a current within different legal, theological orientations, because it's the spiritual devotional orientation. And Shiism also does develop its own mystical kind of thought and thinking, even in the absence of, say, organized Sufi brotherhoods. They have a notion of irfan, gnosis, that is similar to, we might say, mystical theosophy of Sufism. So that's how I would think of it as the sectarian division of Sunni Shi'i. But that also has meant very different things at different times. Like, you know, there was a lot of crossover and interconnection. And Sunnis always did develop this idea that they also love the family of the Prophet. They revere Hassan and Hussein. They would also... Sometimes in the medieval period, we have evidence that Sunnis were, you know, interested in the martyrdom of Hussein, kind of commemorations that take place known as Taziya. That is where they reenact the events that happened and identify with them and, you know, you know, take this on as like a kind of spiritual performance of the memory of that tragic history, which is part of the devotional culture of public Shi'i devotion. And Sunnis were attracted and interested sometimes to this, you know. So the divisions could mean different things at different times, and there was a lot of overlap and interpenetration at different moments in history. And it's really, I would say, the Ottoman kind of adoption of a kind of Orthodox Sunnism as a sectarian difference to the division that Shah Ismail sort of created by establishing 12 Rishi-ism as the new political and social and religious identity of Sunni He was going to rule as the Safavid dynastic leader and empire in Iran, that that is what created for a period of time a sharpening of sectarian division that previously maybe in the centuries before, a few centuries before, there had been a lot more. overlap and and integration. But these lines become much more polarized as part of the geopolitical contestations and competitions between two rival empires, empires contesting rule of kind of central Islamic lands, one from based in the Anatolian Highland. Does sound familiar a little bit between the Roman Eastern Byzantine and the, you know, the Sasanians is that again, these are geographical loci where political states can be built around these as very important territories that are productive agriculturally and have a long tradition and history of being the basis for states formations or polities and so on. Again, we had this pattern where the Ottomans essentially inherit the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire. And in fact, actually, Mehmed the Conqueror, you know, who conquers in, you know, the middle of the 15th century, conquers Constantinople as an Ottoman, nonetheless, kind of styled himself as like, well, I'm the emperor of the Romans now, you know, and so we can we can see that that kind of pattern exists. was there in the early period, but that subsequent development, once the Ottomans conquered lands in central Islamic lands, in the Arab Middle East, and so on, they had to reformulate themselves, not to being a frontier Ghazi power that inherits the Byzantine authority, but actually to being Muslim legitimate rulers, and the way they expressed that was support, you know, of Sunni orthodoxy as their kind of state practice, right? So that's kind of what we have is the confessionalization of their political identities that affected sectarian division and sharpened it during that period of competition. Subsequently, with the waning of the Ottomans or the transformation of the Safavids into a different kind of dynasty with less expansive territories and less rivalry with Ottomans and others, you know, really more during the period where, you know, Russia and, you know, British Empire starts to encroach and establish, you know, power and authority in regions and exercise influence over Iran is like that sectarian division is really then less important and significant. it becomes again important later in like the u.s global war on terror where they you know incite this kind of confessionalization of politics in after the invasion of iraq and fears of you know iranian influence against you know in cold war you know dominated you know united states control of the region so that's what ends up being it's uh you know at stake these aren't static Kind of identities. Of course, they're meaningful, you know, but they aren't politicized and sectarianized all the time in the same way, I guess, is what I would say.

Breht O'Shea: So is it fair to say then after a lot of that, that there's this. The Sunni-Shia divide, as you say, is always oscillating, always changing. There's nuances within both. But you mentioned the Safavid Empire of Persia-Iran and the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. That's when it's fair to say perhaps that this divide becomes institutionalized politically. Is that right?

Adnan Husain: I mean, it's one of the big moments where the modern Middle Eastern, you know, modern inheritance of it, you could say this confessionalization, sectarianization that's attached to these really takes on, as you're saying, institutional and geopolitical identity in a pretty strong way.

Breht O'Shea: Okay, so what I'd like to do for the rest of the conversation, shift over to the Ottoman Empire bit. You don't have to go as in-depth if you don't want to, but we can. Then bring it up to the modern relationship between Turkey and Iran. And then I kind of want to touch also on your thesis about the crusading society, and then we can zoom in on maybe just a quick contemporary discussion of the current situation. Does that sound okay to you?

Adnan Husain: Sure, yeah, yeah. I want to be respectful of your time, as always. Well, I also, you know, probably need to be briefer also in like some of the, you know, you get me going on the history. It's so like, you know, interesting and fascinating. And so, so little of it tends to be part of like public knowledge and inform any current thinking. I'm not saying absolutely everything about this history is vital to know, but the larger processes and in order to understand those processes, we have to go into some analysis of the details and so on because this isn't familiar history to most people you know and even muslims get their history a lot through the sectarianization uh that we're talking about or modern nation-state and nationalist histories or westernized you know the garbzadegi occidentosis where they have to kind of reframe islam as this kind of retarding force that's preventing them from really entering, you know, history. So you end up getting lots of distortions, even in peoples of their own region, how they frame it. And I'm not saying like nationalist histories, Arab nationalist, et cetera, are, you know, totally invalid. But, you know, it's just they do give a certain kind of frame. And my frame is, as somebody who's studying it from an earlier period coming forward, it looks different to me when I'm looking back from the vantage point of looking forward in an earlier period, you know, I'm not taking, you know, trying to rationalize the contemporary nation states. You know, they're just constructs of a lot of these, you know, colonial processes and so forth. So I'm looking at this kind of longer Islamicate history, you could say. And so sometimes, you know, things will look differently to me. And I think it's worth having that other perspective as well. So what I would say here really about the Ottoman Empire, I mean, what's to say other than that it is you know, a very important multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire. You know, as I say, it sort of inherited in some ways the position of the East Roman Empire in its control of the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkan lands, right? So, For much of its early history, it was principally a European power in the sense that most of the territory of the Ottomans in its early period from the 14th to the 15th century, its early period, it was on this frontier and it made its territorial gains really in the Balkans, on the other side. of technically the division between Asia and Europe, right? Istanbul is divided the Bosphorus, you know, channel. One side is the Asian side, one side, you know, the Western side is the European side. Most of the territories that the Ottomans governed and ruled in the early formation of the state, and polity were in Balkan lands in the western side of the Bosphorus. But then, as I said, it did become a Middle Eastern power, in addition to being a Mediterranean power, a Middle Eastern power, By, you know, in, you know, Salim, the first conquests, I think, 1506, I think, in 1503 or six in like the Levant, Syria, greater Syria, what includes today, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine. occupied Palestine, Lebanon, and so forth, all in one kind of fell swoop, and then Egypt, conquered Egypt. So now it was like a major Middle Eastern power, and so it had to kind of managed a very large territory. As I said, it developed a bureaucracy that was capable. I'll say, you know, just getting back to our Iranian story, that the early period, there were a lot of, after the Mongol invasions in the 13th century, a lot of Persian-speaking scholars from Persia from Central Asia and Iran, those lands and territories escaped the sacking of cities like Marv and Khwarazm and so forth. They fled west and they helped the little Turkic statelets in Anatolia with their kind of knowledge about administration and governance and tax collection and this kind of stuff and served these emirs and later sultans The first, the Seljuk Sultans, who were a branch of a Turkic tribal group that governed in Anatolia since 1087, more or less. Uh, but the Ottomans are one of these groupings and some of the early kind of viziers and people who are important in state administration and helping build this state of conquest in the Balkans were Persian administrators, Persian speaking administrators and scholars. So, uh, they grow into this multi, you know, very, you know, it always was very multi religious in the sense that those Balkan lands were mostly Christian, right? Um, But then it, you know, kind of creates this system of accommodating religious difference and producing a kind of educated bureaucratic class that, you know, could do this in Turkish. And, you know, through bringing in people from outside and the devshirme, so many of the rulers of the Ottoman lands, like the governors, the viziers, the administrators, were actually from places like Albania and Bosnia and Turkey. you know, Croatia and so forth, like, you know, they were absorbed and became Ottoman. So when we think of today, Turkey as inheriting the Ottoman and the Ottoman Turk, yes, the dynasty was originally Turkic warlords, you know, fighters and Ghazis and that established the dynasty. You know, they were a Turkic tribal group of West Turks, the West Turks, the Oğuz Turks. But over time, you know, who's really governing is like... And also the Ottoman dynasts are intermarried with, you know, Byzantine princesses and Circassians and so on. And so it's like, ethnically, what did it really mean to be a Turk? It's really... kind of political category when you're talking about an Ottoman as an Ottoman Turk is that, you know, they had a certain kind of Turkish Islamic culture In the Ottoman kind of language, but it's actually a diverse ethnic kind of category really comes from diverse ethnic sources and they're ruling over a very multi ethnic and multi religious society. So by the time that it, you know, comes to be breaking up in the late 19th and early 20th century and into other states with the rise of other nationalist movements Arab nationalism. as well as a kind of Turkish nationalism that refounds the state under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the so-called Young Turk movement. You know, they have to create a nation state out of a diverse, you know, land empire, which is the story of what's happening actually today. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, similar in some respects. Also, the Russian Empire is undergoing these kinds of, you know, sorts of changes and then figuring out what's it going to do with the non-Russian kind of populations that are part of the Russian Empire. The after effects of this, of course, in the era of nation states leads to all kinds of issues, tensions, and problems. But that also was a major issue for the Middle Eastern states that never got to form their nations except under the divisions of colonial rule with the breakup of the Ottomans after World War I. the establishment with the League of Nations mandate and it's basically a colonial situation that was just authorized internationally for managing the lands of the Ottoman former lands of the ottoman empire that were not defended uh enough you know successfully enough uh to stay in this new turkish republic so balkans obviously greece had already had a you know an independence movement some of the other balkan states end up having their independence movements and of course world war one just sort of shatters the rest of what remains of the Ottoman kind of system. And the Middle East territories, the Arab territories particularly, are managed by these two colonial powers, the British and the French, especially the British. And the modern map that comes out of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and subsequently the Treaty of San Remo after the war, basically established the current boundaries that at the very moment we are recording are under extreme stress, right? There is a greater Israel project that is looking to rewrite the map. I regard it as an extension of the Crusader project, right? You know, is to continue the expansion. The Crusader states when they were formed were also meant to be kind of expansive and continue. You know, they write back to the Pope saying, you know, we intend to extend now that we've captured the center of the world, Jerusalem, Jerusalem being thought of as the kind of geographical and spiritual center, you know, of the world, that from there they would then expand from sea to sea, right? You know, like this kind of globalist sort of vision. And similarly, of course, Israel never has declared its borders and has always declared had and maintained the possibility of expanding into various forms of what they imagine the biblical kingdoms. Now we have a kind of you know, vision of greater Israel as possibly including, you know, Nile to the Euphrates. And so what is happening is on the other side, of course, also is that some of these colonial petty monarchies of the Gulf that were established basically by the British as a technique for helping them control access and access through the waterways to India and the resources there and also the oil that once it's discovered, they certainly don't want it to be shared out among the peoples of the region for their economic and social development as a whole. So they created these small, very weak and dependent, you know, little statelets by appointing, you know, an emir and establishing a dynasty or a king and so forth to divide the region. divide the region, you know, into these small little states in the oil-rich areas and divide the region from these little oil states so that they could be, you know, controlled and, you know, under the dependency as vassal states of the West. And what we're seeing, I think, at this moment, in some ways, It's phase two of Iranian revolution as an anti-imperialist decolonizing revolution. And that seems to be one of the goals and objectives is the removal of U.S. bases and power that have been established there and that enforce this dependency that supposedly were there for the protection of these, you know, oligarchic, you know, statelets. but in fact actually have proved to be what endangers them, you know, in this circumstance. So that whole security pact and bargain, you know, is being up to question. And there was in fact an Iraqi commentator recently on a program who apparently said, you know, said, well, what we might see end up happening is that, you know, the 17th province, I think it is of Iraq will be rejoined, meaning Kuwait, right? And something Saddam Hussein had said is that this belongs to Iraq and it was divided by the British, you know, and it was, you know, part of the governorate of Basra, which became absorbed into the modern nation state of Iraq. That is the Ottoman governorate of Basra. But the British, you know, pulled out this Kuwait part, um, He said, so he said that could happen. Bahrain could go to Iran, OK, because it has a majority Shia population, but is ruled by, you know, I think a wing, I think a kind of distant wing maybe of the Saudi people. family or tribe and clan, but is a Sunni emir or prince or king, you know, that has been established by the British over this population of mostly Shias, and that Qatar, you know, which if you look on a map is just an appendage out of Saudi, you know, back to, you know, into Saudi and UAE, if you look at that and the kind of curve of the Gulf is basically the desert of Oman and that that could go back there. So what is being contemplated is that there are different kind of political possibilities You know, that reverse some of the consequences of colonialism into more regional, regionally sovereign entities. That's what it really is all about. That is why Iran is subject to this imperialist war is because they are a sovereign entity. They had a revolution. They got rid of their vassal, you know, dictatorial ruler, the Shah. And since that time, they have existed outside of the U.S. imperial system and continue to be a challenge and a threat to the settler colony that is so important in Afghanistan. dominating and controlling this region in Israel. So that is how I see this kind of larger history is that Iran has always been a regional power. It has always been a basis for a large, powerful state in the region. And the war on Iran is to reduce it, to continue the process of trying to prevent it from exercising a decolonizing kind of character in the wider region and to challenge and perhaps even eliminate the Zionist state on behalf of liberating Palestine.

Breht O'Shea: Yeah, there's so much there. One is, you're right, the attacks on the Gulf Coast countries, particularly the American bases there, as well as some of the oil production there. Is Iran dismantling the facade that the U.S. is actually going to be a source of protection of these countries? It's obliterating that mythology and making those countries think twice and three times about what this relationship with the U.S. actually gives them. And they're taking some of their resources out from those countries, putting it towards the protection of Israel, which really shows the favoritism involved here. Israel is being hit harder than it ever has in its entire history. I think we should just pause on that right now. Iran is hitting Israel harder than it's ever been hit. It's starting to really have a toll on the impact of the settler crisis. colony as a whole and the settlers themselves, some with passports flee. The rest are now living this bunker life at night where they have to, you know, kind of retreat to the bunkers underneath Tel Aviv or these other cities to protect themselves from the barrage. And that really is shattering a lot of the mythology that I think Israelis even believe about their superiority to other countries in the region, militarily, economically, etc. The Sykes-Picot agreement, this colonial carve-up of the region, is now being invoked on behalf of the Greater Israel Project that there needs to be a new round. So we see that coming out. I think the Trump administration, it's befuddled. It's confused. It has no real vision. Maybe Trump thinks he could – or maybe he thought at the beginning that he could do a Venezuela-type situation, do a decapitation strike, bring somebody else that will be more willing perhaps to negotiate on some level. But that's not Israel's interest. Israel's interest is to turn Iran into the next Syria or Libya. It is to destroy it as a regional power at all and the axis of resistance so that it can pursue the Greater Israel Project. We've seen images coming out of IDF soldiers with Greater Israel patches showing that this is a very clear sort of vision that they have during this war going forward, that they want to continue to colonize and take over this entire region. Thank you very much. that the next regional power that they have to displace and overthrow and destroy would be Turkey. So with that in mind, I'm interested in what the relationship between Turkey and Iran is today, right? We understand what Israel's relationship to everybody is, kill them all, destroy everything, take over everything. But Turkey and Iran have this historically sort of contentious relationship. Erdogan in particular is really ambiguous in a lot of ways and tries to walk these balancing lines between these power divisions in the region. And I'm wondering if you could just help clarify what that relationship is today and what it might look like going forward.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, that's an interesting issue. Yeah. And also kind of a complicated one because the politics of Turkey's position in the region are pretty contradictory, you know, in a lot of ways. You know, it's a NATO power since, what, 1953, 52, some early 50s. It, you know, joined NATO. That has to be seen as a concession of Cold War geostrategy because of its location, you know, kind of controlling NATO. black sea access into the Mediterranean world, you know, warm waters of the Mediterranean, right? So this is it. And, you know, we remember during the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis that it was precipitated by the United States placing, you know, missiles that could strike targets in the Soviet Union particularly nuclear missiles that could be fitted with nuclear warheads in Turkey because it was a NATO power and an ally of the West under the kind of military sort of, I don't know if I would say military dictatorship, but certainly kind of authoritarian rule with the military as the kind of key force uh institution you know behind the state and state policy um in the post um you know ataturk era it's they carried on the kind of republican tradition but not the democratic kind of well there wasn't a democrat i mean ataturk was also kind of an author it was an authoritarian ruler but this republican ideal that is the secular westernized state and so they were affiliated and allied with you know, the U.S. very strongly in the Cold War. Huge number of troops from Turkey participated, for example, in the Korean, you know, peninsula on the side of the U.S. and so on. So there's that kind of history of it being very much a very important part. In And so it's kind of an important bulwark, you might say, of like European Western influence or kind of geostrategic interest. And its position, however, has, of course, changed a little bit after the end of the Cold War. And Turkey has undergone, you know, under Erdogan's AK party, a long period now where that secularist tradition, where Islam was not at all part of public culture. I mean, it's part of the society, of course, but there's a very French-type laïcité idea of secularism, right? that that has also changed and made open up the possibilities for Middle Eastern politics and set of relations based on being a important Muslim power, a big country, you know, that has economic potential, you know, agriculture, has a real manufacturing base and makes a lot of money. you know, appliances and does industry. So, you know, it's kind of a middle power. It's not like a very strong economic power. It doesn't have, you know, oil and so on the way Iran does, but probably similar kind of population. And, you know, it has been trying to kind of realign in some ways and have influence in the Middle East. For example, in like Libya, it had like, you know, it was on one side of, it had clients, you know, it's supported in the Libyan situation, the post-Qaddafi era. It obviously has intervened for years in the Syrian civil war and was a conduit for U.S., for, you know, dissident and militant groups groups that were part of that conflict. So, you know, it kind of has had as a result now this ambiguous sort of situation. Technically, you know, you would think that it would have some potential for cooperation with Iran in the region as two kind of major powers that, you know, could have a lot of trade and so on. I guess, interestingly, they are, you know, as part of a kind of, so there was like the Western kind of orientation and NATO, but Turkey was prevented from ever joining the EU, you know, it wanted to go through European accession, it was prevented. basically for Islamophobia. I mean, the head of like the EU or like titular head at one point, some French diplomat, Destang, I think was his name, said, we just can't have a nation of 70 million Turks, like 70 million Muslims in Europe. Like that just doesn't work. So there's that kind of potential sphere, but there was blockage. Then there was this kind of Muslim kind of Muslim Brotherhood-y politics. They were involved, of course, in helping and trying to support Morsi's Egyptian administration that was overturned, you know, by military coup with U.S. support and connivance after the you know, kind of Arab Spring type revolution that happened there. Then the other kind of orientation is pan-Turinism or Turkic community, you know, so of Turkic speaking countries, one of which is Azerbaijan that has a kind of conflicted relationship with Iran. So that's a very close ally of Turkey. In fact, Turkey has supported the Aliyev, you know, Aliyevs against in their conflicts with Armenia or in the Nagorno-Karabakh region where several kind of small wars, well, not so small for the peoples involved, a lot of casualties, but wars that were kind of regional, local to that kind of situation. Whereas Iran has developed pretty close and good relations with Armenia and increasingly good relations with Russia that Turkey has a kind of natural and historic problem with as well, just geostrategically, that they kind of control access for Russia into the Mediterranean. So that location is of concern. So there's a lot of kind of complex things that could pull them together, but also things that tend to also put them on opposite sides. And I would say the decisive factor recently has really been regional, commercial alliances, you know, with Azerbaijan, with Israel for gas and continuing to provide during this whole period of time, natural gas and oil, the fossil fuel energy and its position in, As a NATO ally that has a huge you know base injured like air base my mother actually worked at this base when she was a you know in high school it's close to the town where she grew up and that's a kind of. Not clear what its status, how involved it is with the, you know, surveillance, radar, and monitoring that's so important in the U.S.-Israeli kind of war effort, especially since the closer radar stations and all of that that were in the Gulf and all of those U.S. bases. It seems that many, if not most of those, have been destroyed. So that base may be very important. It's hard to know. There have been also reports of... You know, missiles heading in that direction. We don't know if those are false flags in order to foment a kind of greater animosity and bring Turkey more directly in with its own troops, since it does have like the biggest army. It does have a lot, has been investing a lot in military weapons and like all these NATO powers, has to be up to a certain degree. standard of interoperability and so on with U.S. and other NATO forces. So in some sense, it would be very much to the advantage of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and to recruit Turkey as a direct part of this. But what you started this off with was a very interesting suggestion that saying this kind of thing out loud and actually it's been several months since the overturning of the Assad government in Syria and Turkey's heavy involvement in that, sponsorship and support for the kind of former ISIS and Al-Qaeda groups that now have transformed themselves into HDS, sort of kind of protecting them and sponsoring and providing support for them, as well as Turkey occupying parts of northern Syria near the border, that it seemed then that with Israel's corresponding expansion during that period of chaotic anarchy, as this change in regime from one government to this new kind of network taking over, that Israel kind of took more territory from the Golan around Mount Hermon in southern Syria, bombed all over to destroy military capabilities of the former Assad government. And likewise, Turkey has extended a lot of its authority and power in Syria. That puts them in a kind of almost sharing a border, which they have not had in their history. And that kind of was a harbinger, and people in Turkey were talking already about that this might put them into kind of conflict with Israel, that Israel may not want a strong power like Turkey with a large military, with a lot of capabilities extending its power and influence in the region in a way that could curtail further expansion uh by israel i mean the fact is though that there's been a lot of commercial cooperation but that doesn't matter we realize and recognize there was also all the abraham accords and we're seeing that you know israel's sort of like busy trying to get saudi and uae and so on to be shot you know their ground troops for them and get them involved in this in this war and It doesn't really matter so much to them if they're bombarded and so forth. What's of concern to them is only the radar kind of systems that are part of the protection and early alert and warning for Israel. The last thing I would say on this is also that there's a conflict because of Cyprus. Perhaps you've picked up on... And listeners may have heard some interesting reports. Even in this recent, there's a big British air base because it was under British control earlier in the 20th century. And when it was finally given its independence, part of the agreement for Cypriot independence was that the British could maintain two major air base, major bases, military bases that are technically like under UK control. sovereignty, you know, like that's British territory. And there were some attacks and a lot of the U.S. equipment and personnel and warplanes that had to be evacuated from the Gulf because they were so vulnerable to Iranian missile and drone attacks and were moved to places like Cyprus. But also there's a lot of Israelis who have been involved with you know, in temporary, you know, getting second homes or getting, you know, EU rights and citizenship in Cyprus. It's like a short boat ride or short flight away. And You know, they have also given military support and established a kind of alliance with the Greek part of the island, whereas the northern part is under Turkish occupation from a war that they had in the early 70s because it used to be under Ottoman territory. So there was a Turkic speaking population. And when, you know, went through all of these transformations with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and so on, there were problems. You know, communal tensions, you could say, about the status of the island and Turkey fearing for the Turkish language speaking minority intervened and kind of took over the northern part and occupies the northern part. And so there is that is a kind of line of battle. And you could say also that that is being pulled into possible tensions between Turkey. Israel and Turkey, because it is supporting Cyprus and Greece, you know, there. So it's kind of like a real, like, open, it's like there's no clear, like, ideological. This is the problem, really. It's so hard to organize what's happening, because these are all based on geopolitical, military, economic, various interests, and... they're not organized around there being like a clear other than you know what Netanyahu tried to announce as some kind of coalition was this hexagon of alliances that he announced like a few weeks two three weeks ago and you know, among them, he was including basically Greece and Greek Cyprus, um, you know, of course, India, Modi was recently there. And then he said two Arab States, and we don't know which one, obviously UAE, but I don't know what the other one, you know, is, but he's trying to kind of frame that this is a kind of alliance that is capable of, um, uh, uh, You know, formulating basically the new shape of the Middle East and being a bulwark against what he sees as potential Sunni. He's still using this kind of language, the Sunni axis, which basically is like Turkey and Syria and Saudi. uh and on the other hand you know the axis of resistance iran and its kind of allies in the region so that might describe something but like most things that netanyahu says it's a lot of projection and it's a lot of propagandistic uh you know prospective what he's trying to do rather than what like really you know exists so um i don't know if that was at all helpful or coherent because there isn't actually um a clear position that you could say of whether there is animosity rivalry or amity and potential friendship and commercial and political and military collaboration that could happen between iran and turkey they're both kind of you know i mean iran is much more ideologically clear and committed it's for you know decolonizing the middle east it's for popular sovereignty uh and you know and and that kind of development it's part of a kind of geopolitical alliance of interests with Russia and China. You know, so that's kind of clear. But everybody wants to be part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. All these countries have been attracted by the potential and possibility of BRICS. You know, Turkey, you know, went forward trying to, you know, be a BRICS kind of, I guess, that intermediate like affiliate kind of power, you know, so It's not sort of that easy to figure out which of these kinds of interests and affiliations will be prioritized. My concern is that, unfortunately, as a NATO power, NATO is maybe the least flexible of any of these formations and alliances, and they may be tied very much to the interests from a security and military perspective of what the U.S. dictates.

Breht O'Shea: Yeah, absolutely. I think the whole region is in a real state of flux right now. I think you outlaid the complicated web of interesting conflicts that exist. There are some areas in which Iran and Turkey have obviously shared interests, many areas in which they don't. Syria is another site of struggle in which they took opposite sides in that conflict. The antagonism of Israel towards everybody. is putting interesting pressure on Turkey. The Turkish population, as far as I understand, is going to be overwhelmingly sympathetic with Palestine, like most of the populations in the region, despite the government's posture. And there's real threat, too, of any real conflict between Israel and Turkey, putting, as you said, pressure on this inflexible and already weakened NATO alliance, right? Like, could we imagine any sort of real open conflict between Israel and And a NATO country in the U.S. taking the side of Israel against a NATO ally would just be another nail in the coffin of NATO.

Adnan Husain: Under Trump, it might happen since he's ready to take Greenland against Denmark's interest, another NATO power, right? Yeah.

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

Adnan Husain: well i mean i haven't been following like the last few weeks the turkish press closely to know like any specific reactions to the statement by naftali bennett but as i said there already had been anticipation and expectations that with the change circumstance over the course of the gaza genocide and the you know fall of syria i mean they don't see it as a fall they see it as like okay we get you know important influence Some people accuse them of neo-Ottoman kind of pretensions and ambitions in the region because it reminds them of Selim I, who I talked about, kind of, you know, in the early 16th century, you know, starting to conquer and absorb these territories of the Levant, the Arab Middle East and Egypt. So some, you know, you know, Turkey, they see it as kind of a natural. We're an important regional power. And, you know, Syria is close and related to us and very connected. We have all this history and trade routes came through and so on. So they don't see it in the same way that Arab nationalists, you know, look at this as a very alarming event. you know, situation. But about Israel, they already had been for like about a year talking about the potential danger that Turkey poses. I feel some of these nationalists during the course of the early part of the genocide, of course, all those Turkish people, as you rightly pointed out, very much solidarity. You go to Istanbul, you go to any city in town, you will see that there are banners and there had been big marches and protests. And, but, you know, the people are extremely sympathetic and concerned about the suffering of the people in Palestine. They are, of course, also, they revere Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa as a very important religious site as well. You know, so they have all of those reasons to be very concerned, you know, about it. Some of, I think, the nationalist kind of looked at the lack of response by Arab neighboring states, who, let's be honest, their leaderships are corrupted Western vassals. Basically, the dividing line is that Iran and a few other places, Yemen, Yemen fought for its freedom from, they had these political problems and civil war and so on, And I encourage people, if you want to know more about the anti-imperialist sort of history of Yemen, go back and listen to a two-part series I did on my program with Isa Blumi, a historian of Yemen, that out of that crystallized a resistance movement that was anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, managed to survive years of war and devastation by the GCC countries, really led by Saudi and the UAE. So they are sovereign, and Iran is sovereign. These are like almost the only sovereign kind of spaces in the Middle East. And as a result, they reflect the people's will that we be in solidarity with Palestine, that we free this region from external sovereignty. control that tries to subordinate us and you know exploit us and all of that all these other countries the people feel similarly but they are ruled by authoritarian military dictatorships surveillance society all of that has ratcheted up and all of those uh kind of ruling elites whether the corrupt uh monarchies of the gulf or states like um uh um Jordan and Egypt that are neighboring to Palestine and Israel, they have an interest in controlling their populations using the high tech surveillance that, you know, Israel is so part of a web of development and testing for that, like, you know, they want to keep track of their people through apps and all that. And the Israelis, you know, have the tech and the know-how for, you know, controlling populations. That's what they've been trying to do. So as long as that kind of continues and you don't have revolutionary popular sovereignty in these other countries, they are going to be passive countries. You know, and controlled and have their interests aligned in a certain way with, you know, Israel's interests. And so the Turks have looked at the Arabs saying, oh, well, that's their problem. They're the neighboring countries. They're right there. Why don't they do something about it? Now, I think it could be interesting if they feel themselves targeted directly by Israeli expansionism. you know, that could galvanize the population, you know, to really, uh, be more, uh, demanding of intervention, confrontation and solidarity with Palestine. But that has yet to emerge, you know, that's really in Kuwait that has not, you know, uh, happened, but they, they, they have talked a lot about how they might be, you know, kind of next. And, um, I think the biggest problem for them is that there are so many other relationships that have been established as a result of this kind of Abraham Accord nexus of a certain kind of development and commercial ties and relations that there are some people whose interests are in continuing and perpetuating this kind of a status quo or even collaborative relationship with Israel that it divides and has contradictions for the state and society. And without those being resolved, you know um and maybe they will be resolved by just unrestrained Zionist aggression, and then they will have no choice. But if that is the choice that they end up having to face, that Israel targets them and tries to undermine their interests and degrade their capabilities and put them under military stress and all of that, what we've seen happen, if they wait to do so, from my perspective, rather than affiliate and align with the anti-colonial project of the Middle East, then you will be facing it alone. You know, that's the thing. It's like, you know, if Iran falls, you know, and you kind of collaborated in like Syria falling because you thought you could get something out of it for your own kind of immediate purpose. benefits and expansion of your power. But that puts you in the crosshairs of the Zio-American empire. And now there's nobody else in the region equipped and capable or even interested and willing to try and make common cause with you to defend yourself. This just seems like very foolhardish, foolhardy thinking. But the problem is, is if you're tied into NATO, how are you going to, you know, have sovereignty for you over your military policy? How are you going to actually chart a different, you know, pathway? I mean, sometimes Erdogan has seemed like he wants to do that. But, you know, as soon as the U.S. wanted like that pastor back, right, you know, there was this pastor who was held for being maybe complicit or involved with the coup attempt that happened several years ago, you know. And they had him, you know, jailed, etc. At a certain point, Trump was like, you guys have to set him free. And, you know, Turkey didn't want to do it. And then he, you know, kind of did some treasuries, you know, kind of currency manipulation, just like they've been doing basically with Iran that destabilized Iran and led to the initial protests that were then kind of infiltrated by, you know, kind of various external forces. Forces making common cause with, you know, disenchanted youth and stuff and starting to, you know, create the violent kind of riotous character of those protests on January 8th and 9th. Similar to that kind of destabilization of the currency trend. you know, under the first Trump administration, they, you know, within 24 or 48 hours, they had put in mechanisms that completely undermined the Turkish lira and sent it spiraling in its value. And so, you know, Erdogan immediately said, OK, you can have him have the guy back. Right. So the question is, like, what are the options? You know, do you just have to sit and wait for your turn to come because you know any attempts to like get involved you're now going to be directly uh in the line of fire or do you have to take the opportunity that at least there are other powers in a kind of collective decolonial project and that eventually one way or the other you know if you are not um you know part of this uh and this is what the gulf states learned is that they are not able to buy their way past the racism, past the Islamophobia, to being truly on the in crowd when push came to shove. You know, those anti-missile batteries, they got to go somewhere else because they got to protect Israel. They're not for you. They were there to attack Iran. They were not there to protect you. They were there to protect the U.S. bases that are there to attack Iran. And so, you know, like this is the sort of situation that, you know, that you see. They thought that they could buy their way into, you know, this kind of Epstein empire, you know. And some of them are part of this Epstein class, but they're not real members of the Epstein empire. And, you know, that's also going to be the case for Turkey. Like nobody is thinking nobody makes a difference. Look, Trump just recently was. I think he called up on some radio program or whatever, or maybe it was a Fox program by phone. And, you know, he's being asked about this war on Iran. And he was like, well, they're all ISIS. They're genetically, you know, different from like you and me. And basically, it's just rank racism. No distinction. If you knew anything, you would know that it is Iran that fought ISIS more than the U.S. in various theaters around the Middle East. And they have nothing to do with that kind of extremism. But the Islamophobia that's present operates so, you know... fully that there's no meaningful distinction to be made. And what little people know about Shi'i kind of theology and devotion and orientation, they simply seize upon something that's very much a projection of the evangelical Christian apocalyptic imagination, which is, oh, they're going to do anything because they want to bring the Mahdi back. So they're using the kind of Shi'i expectation of the Imam who's supposed to come and bring justice and end oppression, you know, which is basically part of their anti-colonial, anti-imperialist ideology. It isn't about imposing their vision on others. It is about freeing from the oppression that they have been under for 47 years, sanctions, subversion, you know, color revolution attempts, you know, sponsoring these riots, currency manipulation, you name it, right? And actual open attack. That there's this projection that they are religious fanatics. You know, you can't give a nuclear weapon in the hands of the mullahs because they would be so irrational with this expectation. They would just use this bomb to try and bring back the Mahdi and kill us all. Excuse me, the radical theocracy in the equation is the United States itself. And Israel, they are both more irrational and aggressive and apocalyptic in their approach to, you know, international relations. You know, Iran is the adult in the room here with like sober kind of demands and claims. able to kind of negotiate on the technical conditions of, you know, enrichment and all of that and make decisions and compromises. And, you know, they're acting in a very rational sort of way. But it is this Islamophobia and this Orientalism that is driving in some ways this, why I call it a sort of crusader sort of spirit is you've got a Hegseth, You know, who's got all these Jerusalem tattoos and deus levolt and sees this as Christian militarism and warrior ethos and basically identifies as a crusader. So much of the American military officer corps have been you know, recruited, it seems, from, you know, evangelical Christians who share the Huckabee, you know, ambassador to Israel worldview that, you know, the rapture is nigh. We need Armageddon. The Armageddon will take place with conflict with Iran. That's how they interpret the Bible. And that this is a step in precipitating the second coming and, you know, all of the events of the end times. This is part of the officer crew. We're told, we're telling people, you know, enlisted, you know, folks that like we're having this war as part of a divine plan. And there were a lot of complaints about this registered with the, you know, military, you know, Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey Weinstein, former, I think, major maybe a colonel, I think major in the U.S. Army, established this foundation to say, you know, this should be open to all faith and shouldn't be, you know, confessionalized. But that, in fact, actually since the Bush era, you know, it really, you know, has been. So that's why I think of it as a kind of crusader sort of aggression. Also, Pahlavi even said that, you know, when in this prank call, I don't know if you saw this one, Brett, where These two, I don't know if it was German, I think German or Russian kind of comedians did this prank call to Reza Pahlavi, you know, saying that they were kind of German security officials and that the German state was considering, you you know, joining, you know, in this war and wanted to have a call to kind of talk about this. And he was really pleased with this, you know, idea. And he even said, you know, it would be great to have more members as part of this crusade. Okay. So, you know, it's just like, I mean, I don't have to use my historical analysis. They are Hegseth, Pahlavi, Lindsey Graham said this is a religious war. I mean, my God, this is the religious theocracy. of imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, Christian millenarianism. I mean, what could be more dangerous than that in this moment?

Breht O'Shea: It is absolutely insane. It's crazy making the projection to watch it play out, to see these incurious brutes who have the lack of sophistication that some bigot at the end of a bar in a pub in middle America would have about Islam. Like, You know, the Trump administration, Hegseth, the way they view Islam, the way they view the whole region. I wouldn't be surprised if they've never heard the words Persia or Ottoman. I mean, except in some vague reference to something they learned in middle school or something. If even that. And that these people with these insane religious ideas, evangelical Christianity, Zionist Judaism, using their interpretations of the Bible as... In the 21st century, as the intentional force behind what they're doing, trying to bring about the end of the world, it's psychotic doesn't even begin to get at it. So I don't want to take up more of your time. I have one more question. The Crusading Society, I think you made that point and I'll link to other episodes you've done on that work because I think it is a crucial sort of heuristic device to understand Western society's approach to I'll link to your two part episode on Yemen as well. But there's one more thing we haven't talked about that I think ties in, which is Al-Aqsa Mosque. And, you know, we talk about the possibility of nuclear war. We talk about the possibility of the Samson option, you know, a brutally destabilizing escalation. And I think Al-Aqsa holds out a similar possibility for escalation. So can you, you know, quickly kind of just explain to us what it is, you know, that the construction of the third temple in Zionism and these ideas fit in here quite well. What it is and why it is like a red line throughout the Islamic world if Israel were to make any sort of attack directly on it.

Adnan Husain: Well, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the gold dome, the Dome of the Rock, Qubba al-Sahra, people have seen pictures of that as well. They're both located on this kind of plateau in the old city of Jerusalem. And it is a holy site for Muslims because of the Mention in the verse of the Quran about the farthest mosque. That's what Al-Aqsa means is the farthest mosque. So it was, of course, some distance from Mecca and Medina where the, you know, early Muslim community was, you know, receiving Quranic knowledge. revelations, the verses of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. So this was mentioned as part of his night journey, a kind of mystical and physical journey where he went to Jerusalem, visited it, prayed with the spirits and souls of all the previous prophets in that Al-Aqsa Mosque. And then when And then from there, you know, had something very much like Dante's otherworldly journey. In fact, some people feel that Dante's Divine Comedy is actually perhaps based on, you know, this night journey of Muhammad, where he then visited, you know, the seven heavens and the seven levels of hell and, you know, has this kind of brings back this eschatological kind of, you know, information for Muslims about the afterlife and so on. That is part of Muslim devotional culture and this night of the Isra, night journey and Mi'raj, the ascension, you know, into the heavens. is celebrated, you know, annually and remembered. But because it has a Jerusalem kind of context, it makes Jerusalem the third most important. Those sanctuaries, they are the third most important or holy sites after Mecca and Medina. And so as a result, there is universal Muslim devotion towards Jerusalem. as a holy place. And during the long history of the Islamic, you know, Islamicate rulers and dynasties and polities, These were open and accessible to Muslim believers and the other kind of holy sites associated, for example, with Christianity, the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Resurrection, Bethlehem and other sites related to, you know, gospel accounts of Jesus, you know, were also in the land and You had access to them. And of course, also Jews were allowed to live in the city, which they hadn't been when the Muslims came in 632 and, you know, took control of Jerusalem in an agreement with the patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronius. Part of the agreement was that, you know, Sophronius was interested in putting in the agreement, according to historical sources and documents, that Jews be continued to be prevented from taking up residence and spending time in the city because it was a Christian city. And that meant for them that it was exclusively a Christian, you know, that the temple had been destroyed. That was a very important thing in announcing that, you know, the Messiah had had come and that it wasn't the earthly Messiah that Jews expected. It was Jesus and the kingdom of heaven was at hand. And so it was very important that the holy city be preserved from being, you know, under destruction. you know, the sort of tainting presence of Jews. This was now a Christian city. But when the Muslims, you know, Arab Muslims conquered it, it then became open to Jewish settlement again. And for the next, you know, 13, 14 hundred years through to the Ottomans, The holy places were managed with access for all the different religious communities for their own, you know, sites and so on. But what has happened in the Zionist era, not the early Zionists, because the early Zionists were not particularly religious people. interested they just wanted this land because it was attached and associated and you know compatible with western kind of ideas of the appropriate place for the jews because of the shared heritage of the biblical you know kind of text of valorizing you know the biblical text so it was of course um uh, very important, really the Christian Zionism, you know, really preceded Jewish Zionism and Jewish Zionism. And that was a religious sort of form of Zionism and Jewish Zionism early on wasn't particularly a religious orientation. It was a secular colonial, uh, national nationalist. And, you know, you could say, um, in the kind of, uh, you know, dimension of colonial racism, also a supremacist kind of ideology. And in fact, actually a way of making Jews like Europeans, like white imperialists superior. Right. As long as they were trapped in Europe, they were considered subordinate. They were subjected to anti-Semitism. But this colonization project of settler colonials is what they thought would by giving themselves a national identity and a territory and a colonizing kind of mandate would then make them kind of modern Europeans, part of superior European culture and civilization. It's in that era that after further settlement, you know, has taken place, the Jewish immigration, there's been deep interest in having, you know, restoration of the third temple in the era of the Messiah. Because in many ways, you could say that the establishment of the state was meant to be the messianic you know, in the end times, the Messiah comes back. And that's when you have the ingathering and the, you know, reestablishment of a Jewish polity, right? Of a political state. The Zionist sort of orientation kind of flipped that order and said, well, let's just create a state for all these other secular reasons. We don't need to worry about this kind of Messiah sort of tradition. But subsequently, there have been forms of religious Zionism that have developed a kind of ultra, like older traditional Orthodox Jewish communities were waiting for the Messiah to return. And they thought this Zionist... kind of project was actually, you know, wrong and to be, you know, you know, stopped if possible. They certainly didn't want to be a part of it. They disagreed with this sort of approach. They regarded it as irreligious. But now there are variants and forms of religious Zionism and Jewish orientations that are looking to reconstitute what happens in the messianic age, which is the third temple. Now there are all these prophecies and people have probably heard about the red heifer and the certain kind of conditions are required to have sacrifices at a reconstituted temple. But so that's what they're trying to advance is, in fact, actually have that messianic age by destroying al-Aqsa, which they believe that that is the location where the Solomonic temple was and the new temple should be. And as a result, there needs to be a removal of the Muslim kind of holy sites in order to prepare for the building of the the Third Temple. And there's been some concern that there have been, you know, important, powerful groups in Israeli society and the government that have these ideological and kind of millenarian sort of views that you could say are sort of parallel in their own way to, you know, the evangelicals or the Mahdism, you know, but really very close to the evangelical kind of Christian messianic millenarianist apocalyptic kind of ideas. And there have been concerns that they've been trying to work towards this and that this war with Iran might be the conditions under which they could use ballistic missiles coming and so on. and claim that that's what destroyed, like by bombing it themselves, that's what destroyed, blame it on Iran and use that to prepare for taking over the religious, Muslim religious sites, which they have in the last decade or so increasingly prevented access by Muslims to them. And especially during Ramadan, this like last 10 days is usually a period where people would want to spend, who can want to spend the last 10 days in a kind of like, But, you know, solitude, what is it when you, I'm forgetting, blanking on the word, when you go into a retreat, you know, for spiritual kind of training. And in Arabic, it's this practice for this last 10 days is called irtikaf, but I'm forgetting what. how we might translate that into seclusion or yeah like like seclusion uh for uh solitude and spiritual training for the last 10 days and people would do that in the mosque and like go to the mosque spend 10 days there praying and meditating and contemplating, not really speaking, this kind of discipline. And that has been very difficult to do because access has been limited. Last Ramadan, I recall, and the previous couple of Ramadans, worshippers in the mosque during the last 10 days were assaulted and attacked. Settlers or these kind of extreme apocalyptic Zionists were allowed to go onto this sacred sort of precinct march and abuse others and start to perform some of the rituals that had been banned even by the Israeli authorities as too dangerous in precipitating possible conflict between the religious communities and inflaming Muslims not only locally, but worldwide. But can you imagine if there was destruction or serious damage to the Dome of the Rock or the Al-Aqsa Mosque, how devastating and how inflaming that would be? We saw what happened with the decapitation strike, so-called the assassination and martyrdom of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, how that has transformed into a revolutionary spirit of defiance in Iran, bringing people together, and also in other kind of parts of the Shia Muslim world. Can you imagine if that is something that is universally kind of revered by all Muslims, how potentially dangerous that could be, at least among the peoples. Again, we don't know whether the governments would do anything, but it would really, really be extraordinary and devastating for people and would be certainly one way of really activating a lot of deep concern not only because of the Gaza genocide and the solidarity that is universally felt, but now in a kind of absolutely alarmed and you know, you know, really, you know, horribly, horribly devastated sort of way of anger and so forth. So that's what it seems like is important to know about the, you know, Al-Aqsa situation. And the last little footnote on that is that the last time there was some kind of, you know, very serious damage well there has been with like these incursions and assaults and tear gas and various things in it but like damage damage was when the mimbar or the pulpit in al-aqsa mosque that actually had been commissioned by nur ad-din zhangi in the 12th century and then salah ad-din after he conquered the city of Jerusalem in 1187 from the Crusaders. He brought this mimbar, this pulpit that had been prepared and was sitting in the mosque of Aleppo. He brought it and put it where it had been built for, you know, had been built during the Crusader era, that when it is liberated, we want this you know, this pulpit to be placed in Al-Aqsa Mosque. That had been there since then. It's incredibly ornate, carved with inlay and all of that. But it was burned by a Christian fundamentalist from Australia, I think in either the late 60s or very early 70s. And sometime in the 70s, I think, should check on the date. But that actually so outraged Muslims around the world. And at that time, their governments, that the organization of Islamic... states, the OIC, actually, the Organization of Islamic Conference, or I'm forgetting the exact acronym, but it's the Muslim states kind of like international organization was actually founded in response to that. And I wonder if today what the kind of reaction or response, you know, would be, but it just shows how important at that time, at least, you know, the sanctity and protecting al-Aqsa, it galvanized like creation of a new international body to have cooperation between Muslim states that had as one of its goals that we really need to get organized around trying to liberate Palestine and at least get the, you know, the... the UN Resolution 242 dimensions established with an independent state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza and its capital in East Jerusalem, right? So that was something worth remembering is that it did at the time really galvanize not only the Muslim peoples, but also Muslim states.

Breht O'Shea: Absolutely. And I think the thing to remember is all that importance, there's an actual... intention and a reason why the millenarian apocalyptic Zionist cults, Christian and Jewish, would target al-Aqsa. And there's obviously, if that were to happen, going to be an attempt to lay it at the feet of Iran, who has no interest or intention or any reason whatsoever to attack Iran. Al-Aqsa and the idea that, well, it was a misfire. They're trying to hit something else and hit that total nonsense. We can say before it happens that if that does happen, we know exactly who the fuck did it. And it wasn't Iran. And I think the people in the region are going to know that as well. And insofar as we're political educators, we should try to reach our audiences and make that claim up front. because we know who has the reasoning to do it, why they would want to do it, and why they'd want to displace blame for who did it. We can see that before it even happens, so that's important to know. All right, my friend, Adnan, amazing as always. Over two and a half hours, but this is the sort of history that anybody who... wants to really understand the region and the players in this particular conflict. Well, you have to go through this history. You have to understand this rich, deep, millennia-long evolution of these societies and of these religions. and really cultivate a curiosity and an understanding that can only benefit any contemporary analysis that attempts to apprehend what's going on in the region and the unique character of all the individual countries and peoples involved. So absolutely expert analysis and beautiful going through of millennia of history by you, Adnan. It's an honor and a pleasure to have you on as always, my friend. Before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find you and your work online?

Adnan Husain: Sure. And just thank you so much, Brett, for having me on, for your patience as I go on through all of this, you know, long answers of lots of history. And I hope that your listeners find it useful if they have the patience to get, you know, all the way to the end. Apologies for making it so long. But I'm passionate about it, too. And I just love to be able to impart some of this knowledge. knowledge and analysis. And your questions are always so good and open up like really serious, real things that, you know, hopefully people find it useful and productive. So I thank you for that and the work that you're doing. If people want to like, you know, kind of keep up with what I'm doing, they can follow me on Twitter. I still do Twitter at Adnan A. Hussain. So x.com slash Adnan A. Hussain, A-D-N-A-N-A-H-U-S-A-I-N. And my YouTube channel, but you can also listen to it as an audio podcast. It's on all the usual platforms, just Adnan Hussain Show. I didn't have the creativity for a real name. But that's also on YouTube.com. at Adnan Hussein show. And, you know, hopefully there's a lot of good resources there. I've been having a lot of discussions about the Iran situation, other things related to history, both Middle East history and others. And You know, I know some of your listeners are interested in the spiritual. They're, you know, interested in the material and liberation, but they also connect that to their own interest in spiritual development as well. And so I do have a series that I like. A new episode will be coming out today when I publish it in the 99 Names series on spiritual my channel that is about the Muslim mystical spiritual Sufi tradition of the 99 names of God. And this week's or this next episode is Ar-Rahim, the compassionate. And I think right now in this world, there's nothing we need more than empathy, compassion, understanding of the other rather than this you know, cruel, barbaric and sadistic sort of power and politics that we have. So if you find something like that appealing, please do check it out.

Breht O'Shea: Yeah, I'll link to all that. I'll link to Guerrilla History. Really advocate people. Go and listen to your conversations you've been having on your YouTube channel. You have really unique guests. You know, you introduced me to a lot of thinkers and a lot of guests, and the conversations are always incredibly deep and well-informed, and anybody could benefit from engaging with it. So I'll link to all that in the show notes as well as some of our previous episodes together on St. Francis, on Sufism, et cetera, if anybody wants to follow those particular rabbit holes and learn more about those things.

Adnan Husain: The St. Francis episode got assigned in a course recently, not mine, somebody, a colleague assigned it. So people really, really loved that conversation. So do check it out if you haven't heard it.

Breht O'Shea: I did not know that. Absolutely beautiful. Yeah, if you have not listened to it, go check it out. All right, my friend, this is one and many more conversations you and I will have. Keep up the amazing work, and I'll talk to you soon.

Adnan Husain: Thanks so much, Brett. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim.