Hello. Today we are joined by Christopher de Belag, one of the most elegant and perceptive writers on the

modern Middle East. Christopher is a journalist, historian and author whose work has consistently

challenged easy narratives about the region. His books that include Rebel Land and Patriot

of Persia combined deep archival research with the intimacy of lived experience,

bringing readers inside the texture of Iranian and Turkish political life in ways that very

few writers that I know can manage. Most provocatively, Christopher wrote the Islamic Enlightenment,

in which he asks us to rethink one of the most persistent assumptions in modern history,

that the Muslim world somehow missed out on the Enlightenment. Instead, he shows how reformers,

thinkers and activists in Cairo, in Kosovo, in Istanbul, and Tehran wrestled with modern ideas

of reason, of science, of constitutionalism, and of rights on their own

terms. It's a book that I can't recommend highly enough. It refuses both Western condescension

and regional fatalism, insisting instead on a more complicated and more human story. Afro and I wanted

to get Christopher to come and talk to us about the deep history of Iran,

about the prelude to the bombing attacks that started on the 28th of February, and to think about

what Iran looks like from the inside. Thank you for listening. I'm sure you've joined us, Chris. Thank you so much for giving up your time.

I know you've thought deeply about Iran and worked on it for a long time, both with your books,

but also try to analyse the world of today.

But take us back to the 19th century and towards Iranian intellectual, intellectual traditions.

There's a lot of people here, I think, in the West who listen to this,

who see Iran and the Islamic world

as kind of yet to go through a set of enlightenment and a set of intellectual

revolutions. Talk us through ideas about how intellectual thought in Iran, how sophisticated

...