When the dead of a war are sorted into political categories before they are mourned, something more basic than compassion is lost: the condition that makes legal judgment possible at all. I heard that loss in a Telegram voice message from a friend, recorded as the ongoing conflict reached Iran’s southern provinces and people around [...]
A few weeks ago, while standing in a crowded Tehran metro station, I found myself facing a public display commemorating children reportedly killed in an airstrike on a school in Minab. The station continued to function around me with mechanical indifference: announcements repeating, passengers moving, bodies circulating through space as if nothing had been interrupted. [...]
A hot afternoon, a stifling café, the hum of talk around us. A companion nodded toward a woman nearby and asked me: “Who comes to a café wearing skin-tight leggings and carrying an aggressively feminine fake Gucci bag? It doesn’t match, does it, Malek? There’s something aesthetically incoherent about the whole composition—something excessive, almost irritating: [...]
You are reading the words of a criminal. Yes—I am a criminal. Why? Because in order to connect to the free global internet, I violated the law of my own country. I purchased a VPN, crossed the digital borders imposed upon me, and entered a world my government had declared forbidden. In the eyes of [...]
I once said it almost as a joke, but already with a seriousness I did not yet understand: “Be careful, I will kill you and say you were mahdūr al-dam (a person placed outside legal protection of life through judicial determination).” At that moment the phrase sounded like an excess of language, a fragment of [...]
“Ddddddd… rrrrrrr… ttttttttt!” My brother stares at me in complete bewilderment just as I hold a baby corn in front of my face, waving it with the solemnity of someone confronting a geopolitical enemy rather than a vegetable. “Ah, America… don’t hit me with your corn… I’ll eat your corn, and then you’ll see who [...]
I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across a post circulated by Iranian musicians and cultural activists responding to the flogging sentence imposed on Parastoo Ahmadi, and what struck me was not the legal formulation of the statement nor its political framing, but a sentence that refused to settle into any category, a sentence [...]
I do not have a home on the street; the street is my home. What I write does not originate in the stable architecture of academic theory, but in the unstable temporality of lived encounters, where thought is still forming, where language has not yet fully separated itself from experience, and where meaning is not [...]
I still remember the children in the courtyard of our apartment building. There were only two boys among a larger group of girls, and yet one of the most serious negotiations of their small world revolved around a strangely precise question: who would play the husband. What appeared, from the distance of adulthood, as a [...]
I am not particularly interested in football, which is perhaps precisely why it began to interest me as something other than football, since there are subjects that announce themselves through passion, through expertise, through a prior attachment that legitimizes one’s engagement with them as if understanding could only follow from caring, and there are others [...]
