Indeed, the more you learn about the Houthis, the less surprising it becomes that the group should have embarrassed the US Navy in 2024 and 2025 (in a foretaste of the second Iran war, Washington simply gave up firing its expensive missiles at Houthi forces), and fought a large Sunni-Arab coalition to a standstill between 2015 and 2019. Despite intense bombardments, and serious battlefield defeats, the Houthis have retained Sana’a, Yemen’s capital which they conquered in 2014. Only the Israelis, who briefly got into a missile exchange with the Houthis in 2025, have managed to deter them: they went after the Houthis’ oil supplies, energy infrastructure, ports, airports, and, perhaps most important, senior personnel. Sure enough, the Houthis stopped firing at Israel. But either way, it’s little wonder that the Houthis are now back, seizing land along the Red Sea littoral and the islands of Perim and Greater and Lesser Hanish, thereby putting into jeopardy Saudi Arabia’s capacity to export oil via its east-west pipeline.

More from this author

Spycraft will decide Iran's fate

By Reuel Marc Gerecht

Without outside support, Sunni Yemenis would have had no chance on the battlefield against their Shi’ite countrymen. The Houthis have received some support from Hezbollah and Iran — but not nearly on the level that Sunnis have received from foreigners since the Sixties. Islamic history has occasionally seen fervent, martial highland peoples descend into conflict with more numerous lowland believers — and usually get the better of them. The Houthis are in this line: mountain Shi’ites who have managed to gain the upper hand over the cosmopolitan and fractious Sunnis.

During the North Yemen Civil War (1962–1970), the Zaydi royalists of the old Imamate survived a massive assault by the republican forces that had overthrown them. The Republicans included predominantly Sunni Yemenis, but also Zaydi Arab nationalists, and were backed by around 70,000 Egyptian troops equipped with Soviet tanks and aircraft. The Zaydi royalists, meanwhile, adopted highly effective guerrilla tactics. Again and again, they descended from their mountain strongholds, absorbing heavy losses. They were not able to capture Sana’a — but they were repeatedly able to regroup and return to the fight.

The war today is vastly more sectarian. Few Zaydis now fight alongside Sunnis, giving the more cohesive, dogged, and fit Houthi forces the advantage.

Still, since the Nineties, support from Shi’ites in the wider region has been crucial in shaping Houthi objectives. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have actively sought to convert Zaydis, who follow a different creed and jurisprudence. These efforts have met some success: perhaps as many as 10% of Zaydis have accepted Iran’s “Twelver” branch of Shi’ism. These conversions are, however, just icing on the cake. Before the Lebanese and Iranians came calling, Zaydism as a faith had considerable revolutionary potential. Historically, Yemen’s Shi’ites have had activist imams: religious leaders who could also command troops. Where the Twelver Shi’ites of Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon could — before the Iranian Revolution in 1979 — sometimes look askance at clerics assuming political power, the Zaydis had no such reservations. Zaydi imams ruled as kings, more or less continuously, from 897 to 1962, when nationalist forces toppled the imamate. The main interruptions came during two periods of Ottoman rule, from 1538 to 1635 and from 1872 to 1918. Even then, the imams did not simply disappear: they retreated into the mountains, where they continued to exercise religious authority and, at times, lead armed resistance to the Ottomans.

Today, a spiritual alignment has unquestionably taken place — and a significant slice of the Zaydi community is now inside the Iranian orbit. The Houthis’ anthem — “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse be upon the Jews, Victory to Islam” — would have seemed bizarre to most Zaydis before the radical revivalist movement of al-Houthi. Cursing distant America, or Jews as if they were a global menace, or even Israel as a part of a defining, individual creed would have been too modern.

More or less at war with the “official”, internationally-recognized government of Yemen since 2004, the country’s Shi’ites are on a winning streak. Indeed, since the Saudis, Emiratis, and a coalition of other Arab states tried to humble them from 2015 to 2018, the Houthis’ regional ambitions have grown. They have created their own supply and sanctions-resistant support networks in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, sometimes piggybacking on the Iranians, sometimes moving independently. With Iranian assistance, they figured out how to defy a Saudi naval blockade and US satellite reconnaissance. Indeed, the Houthis have been able to incorporate Iranian strategic planning into their own ambitions as well as any Iranian proxy. They have proven sharp adopters of Iranian-supplied drones and missiles, learning quickly how to build projectiles from either clandestinely delivered parts or from scratch — indeed, they have proved enthusiastic adopters of AI. 

It’s also a foregone conclusion that if Iran can gain control of the Strait of Hormuz and charge tolls, the Houthis will attempt to do the same through dominating the Bab al-Mandab, the chokepoint for all trade moving through the Suez Canal — as well as for Saudi oil via its pipeline. Even if Iran fails to dominate the Persian Gulf, indeed, the odds are that the Houthis will still try to curtail Saudi shipping. If successful, the Houthi’s ambitions – and greed — may direct them towards other commercial shipping.

Yemen is a very poor country, and the Zaydi mountain heartland now offers little of the trade that once made the Zaydi elite relatively rich within it. Enormous anger towards Saudis is common. When I was traveling among Yemeni Shi’ites before 9/11 and I needed a conversation starter, aspersing Saudis always worked. So targeting Saudi shipping is a given for the Houthis; and preying on others could become an irresistible financial temptation if they control the Bab al-Mandab. Raiding British and Indian trade in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean in the 18th century was very good business for pirates of the Arabian Peninsula until the Royal Navy and Marines convinced them otherwise.

The US maintains Camp Lemonnier, its only permanent military base in Africa and the operational hub of US Africa Command, just across the Bab al-Mandab in Djibouti. President Trump wasn’t persuaded of the merits of using it to deny the Houthis a partial victory against his Navy in 2025. It’s a good bet that Trump will default the responsibility for stopping Houthi extortion onto European navies, especially the French, who also have a naval base at Djibouti. Trump is perennially capricious — but also firm in his conviction that Europeans are freeloaders.

Nonetheless, the problem that the West has with the Houthis is also a microcosm of the problem that the United States has with Iran: there is no clever, low-cost way to neutralize the enemy’s power. When, in 2015, he was the Saudi defense minister, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman clearly understood the long-term threat that the Houthis posed to his kingdom. The prince’s execution of the subsequent war may have been abysmal, but his analysis wasn’t. Neither the Saudis, nor the Emiratis, nor the Egyptians, nor the Jordanians, nor the Americans, nor the Europeans have been willing to put a lot of boots on the ground long enough to neutralise the Houthi war machine. Cairo’s unpleasant experience in Yemen in the Sixties — “Egypt’s Vietnam” — remains in the DNA of Middle Eastern military men. The combined Arab assault on the Houthis from 2015 onwards revealed a wariness of replicating the approach the Egyptians had used — trying to take the Houthis on in their heartland.

The Houthis know this. So do the Iranians, who have seen the most independent of their proxies become their most consequential ally. The strategic potential of Yemen’s Shi’ites now dwarfs the contribution of the Levantine Hezbollah to Iran’s remarkably consistent goal of weakening the West and their allied Arab governments in the Middle East. The Houthis aren’t nearly as sophisticated as the Levantine Shi’ites, who rival the Iranians in their formative contribution to the development of radical Shi’ism, and have proved rather better than the Iranians in maintaining the crucial interpersonal relations between Arab militants.

Yet the Houthis, who not long ago were mostly farmers and shepherds, have thrived in a primitive environment. Their relations with Somalia’s Al-Shabaab — a Salafist jihadist outfit, which in 2012 pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda and has often shown a savagery that rivals Islamic State’s — clearly show the Houthis have, like the Iranians, an ecumenical disposition toward anti-Shi’ite but anti-Western Sunni Muslim radicals. If left alone, the Houthis might well develop further, becoming emissaries of Iranian mischief far beyond the Gulf of Aden. Some Islamic militants — the Taliban in Afghanistan; Hamas in Gaza — keep their violence local. They don’t become members of the “global jihad” even though they may host or associate with Muslim radicals who do. But the Houthis’ creed certainly suggests an aspiration that could take them into a larger holy cause, especially if under the tutelage of more worldly Iranians and Levantines.

Suggested reading

Why America is running out of missiles

By Edward Luttwak

Regardless, the Houthis have offered Tehran the best bang for the buck of all its proxies. We don’t have reliable figures on what the Saudis and Emiratis spent on their multi-year war against Yemen’s Shi’ites, nor what the Iranian subventions were to their co-religionists, but Tehran’s costs were unquestionably a small fraction of those on the other side. The Islamic Republic is now in a deep financial crisis, but supporting low-maintenance, enterprising Yemenis may still be practicable. Strategically, it remains a steal.

If the United States, the Europeans, and most importantly the Arabs who border and depend on the Red Sea, are serious about thwarting the Houthis, then they should revisit the history of the Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula. They checked the rebellious Zaydi imams with the patient application of brute force. (Even if, as soon as the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918, a Zaydi Imamate came right back). That won’t happen again, however, unless the United States leads the way.

Today, there are so far no volunteers for this mission. The experience of the Egyptians in Yemen in the Sixties, like the more recent sojourns led by the Saudis and the Emiratis, all were bitter failures. The treasure expended didn’t match the gains. The Middle East excels at forcing cost calculations. The Houthis and the Iranians are banking that the years since 9/11 have worn down their enemies. They know that in a contest of wills, they have the unassailable high ground.

The Easter Rising of 1916 and the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala more than 12 centuries earlier may belong to radically different historical worlds. One was an abortive insurrection in the capital of “West Britain”; the other a 7th-century massacre on the plains of Iraq, when Husayn, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, was slaughtered with his family by the forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. Both, however, acquired their enduring force from the afterlife of sacrifice. In each case, bloodshed was transfigured into drama, defeat became moral victory, and death became a claim upon the living. Patrick Pearse, architect of the Rising, understood this instinctively. His language of “blood sacrifice” was not just a metaphorical flourish — but a statement of political theology. 

In their stupidity, the British supplied the necessary martyrs. What might have remained a failed rebellion became the founding narrative of the Irish state — a drama replayed in commemorations, monuments, and even the naming of railway stations after the dead heroes. The molding of martyrdom into nationhood also opens avenues for satire, when the language of redemption, once detached from lived suffering, becomes performance. Seán O’Casey saw this with pitiless clarity in Juno and the Paycock. His Captain Boyle, a man sustained by bluster and fantasy, converts St Paul’s grave defiance — “O death, where is thy sting?” — into music-hall bathos: “Death, where is thy sting-a-ling?” The line gets a laugh, but it should also give pause.

In Shia Islam, the paradigm is older, deeper, and more systematically ritualized. The martyrdom of Husayn is not simply remembered; it is re-enacted. Through the commemorations of Ashura — with processions, lamentations, ritual self-flagellations and passion plays — Karbala is made permanently present. It furnishes what might be called a “grammar of endurance”: oppression confirms rather than negates the moral order; suffering anticipates vindication. The parallel with Ireland is not exact, yet in both cases geography is secondary to narrative. What matters is the structuring idea: that unjust death generates authority, that sacrifice binds community, and that loss can be converted into a durable political resource.

Suggested reading

Will I ever escape the Strait of Hormuz?

By Anonymous Seafarer

This grammar acquired a specifically national form in Iran with the Safavid revolution of the 16th century. Here the new ruler Shah Ismail shifted from being the awaited imam or messianic figure of his Turkoman followers and adopted Twelver Shiism as the state religion. In Twelver Shiism, the true imam in the line of Ali and Husayn remains in “occultation”. This means that his awaited return, at which point he will bring about universal peace and prosperity, is deferred indefinitely. In adopting this theology, Shah Ismail did more than enforce a doctrinal shift. He also marked out a civilizational boundary. Iran came to define itself not only against its immediate rivals but against the Sunni ecumene dominated by the Ottoman Empire, whose legal and institutional life was shaped by Hanafi legal orthodoxy. The adoption of Shiism thus functioned as a form of geopolitical differentiation: a way of inscribing religious distinctiveness into the fabric of statehood, not dissimilar to the way Ireland resisted the imposition of Anglican Protestantism by embracing Roman Catholicism, a doctrine imposed on the ancient Irish church by enthusiastic Vatican appointees. 

Over time, Persian historical consciousness became fused in part with a sacred history whose emotional center, like that of Ireland, lay outside the nation’s borders, at Karbala, while its eschatological horizon pointed toward the return of the Hidden Imam — one whose return will signal the end of the world — in the line of Ali and Husayn. The result was a national identity underpinned by a narrative in which injustice, suffering and deferred redemption were not contingencies — but structuring principles.

Seen in this light, the resilience of the Islamic Republic — which has both confounded and annoyed Trump — is hardly surprising. What sustains it is not simply repression, nor even ideology in the narrow sense, but a historically sedimented fusion of religion, memory and nationhood. External pressure, instead of weakening resolve, risks activating precisely those symbolic frameworks that transform adversity into confirmation of purpose. This is not confined to Iran. Across the Gulf, in Bahrain and in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, Shia communities remain politically marginalized. In Lebanon, their more activist community faces obliteration by Israel. The 2016 execution of the cleric Nimr al-Nimr in Saudi Arabia was intended as deterrence. Instead, it functioned as martyrdom — a contemporary re-enactment of the Karbala paradigm, especially with its transnational resonance. Pressure on Iran cannot be neatly contained within its borders. It touches a wider theater in which sacrifice remains a potent political force.

The Irish comparison is illuminating precisely because it is asymmetrical. Irish Catholicism formed part of a universal Church extending far beyond the island, while Twelver Shiism was historically a minority tradition that became nationalized. Yet both sustained identity under pressure through narratives of suffering and perseverance. In Ireland, after all, Catholicism functioned as a carrier of national identity under Protestant domination; in Iran, Twelve Shiism performed a comparable role vis-à-vis a wider Sunni world. In both cases, martyrdom provides a language through which political weakness can become the catalyst for moral agency.

The complementarities are not total. Irish national identity, articulated largely in the English language after the erosion of Gaelic, and the Vatican’s historic preference for Latin over the vernacular, lacked the linguistic distinctiveness that often anchors nationalism. It therefore required symbolic intensification. The cult of 1916 compensates for that absence. Martyrdom, in this sense, becomes a substitute for language: a means of binding community through shared acts of remembrance rather than through linguistic difference.

Yet there are instructive parallels when it comes to education. In mid-20th-century Ireland, the Catholic Church exercised a form of soft theocracy, controlling schools, shaping curricula, and supplying a moral intelligentsia through institutions such as the famous Maynooth seminary. If the language of sacrifice helped sustain Irish Catholic identity under external domination, it was the later exposure of clerical abuse that corroded its moral authority from within. From the Nineties onwards, a succession of official inquiries — most notably the Ryan Report and the Murphy Report — laid bare a pattern that was not merely episodic but systemic: the abuse of unmarried mothers and their children by clergy and religious orders, compounded by institutional habits of concealment, transfer, and denial. What shocked Irish society was not only the scale of the wrongdoing, but the disjunction between the Church’s historic role as guardian of national virtue and its failure to protect the most vulnerable within its care.

The consequences were profound. A Church that had once exercised near-hegemonic influence over education, welfare, and the moral imagination of the state found its authority abruptly relativized. Attendance at Mass declined, vocations dwindled, and the deference that had long insulated clerical authority gave way to scrutiny, anger, and, in many cases, indifference. The symbolic economy of sacrifice — so central to both Catholic devotion and nationalist memory — was inverted. No longer did suffering signify redemption; it testified instead to betrayal.

For now, the Irish case may diverge from the Iranian one. After all, while the Islamic Republic has certainly faced its own crises of legitimacy, its clerical establishment has not been discredited by a comparably documented pattern of abuse against children within religious institutions. The persecution of gay behaviors, however obnoxious, may not yet be seen as conflicting with mainstream Islamic values. The erosion of authority in Iran proceeds along different lines — political repression, economic mismanagement, generational estrangement — rather than the moral implosion triggered in Ireland by revelations of clerical wrongdoing. But the crash may yet come: if and when the horrors of the brutal repressions earlier this year come to light. 

Perhaps Ireland will point the way. Maybe O’Casey’s instinct about the fragility of sacred language is instructive. Here the idiom of martyrdom that once underpinned national cohesion now carries a more ambivalent charge: still potent as memory, but no longer sustained by an unquestioned ecclesiastical authority. Once the credibility of the institution that utters it is compromised, the rhetoric of sacrifice risks tipping into parody. The distance between “thy sting” and “sting-a-ling” is not merely comic. It marks the point at which a culture ceases to believe its own consolations.

More from this author

The return of feudal diplomacy

By Malise Ruthven

There’s an irony here. The educational system overseen by the Church proved unexpectedly effective. The rigor of the Leaving Certificate, often contrasted favorably with the British A-level system, helped produce a highly literate and analytically capable population. The same structures that enforced conformity also cultivated habits of critical judgment. When the Church’s moral authority collapsed in the wake of abuse scandals, those habits enabled a remarkably swift cultural shift. Within a generation, Ireland moved from one of the most observant societies in Europe to one of the most secularized.

A comparable paradox may become visible in Iran. The Islamic Republic has invested heavily in education, expanding literacy and higher education to levels that place Iranian students in competitive global standing, particularly in science and engineering. Despite rules forcing them to adopt the headscarf, women have achieved striking levels of educational attainment. As the researcher Rasmus Nielsen has noted in his global survey of secondary science education, the teaching of science, including evolution, in Iran is on a par with that of most Western countries. 

The comparison with the Sunni world is instructive here. Even in relatively secular countries such as Turkey the teaching of evolution — a prerequisite for basic science education — has been marred by culture wars similar to those raging in parts of America. In Saudi Arabia, Iran’s principal Sunni rival, evolution is barely mentioned in secondary education texts except in advanced biology courses, where it is introduced as “a fallacious and blasphemous theory derived by the Englishman Charles Darwin, who denied Allah’s creation of humanity”. 

As in Ireland, Iran’s educational attainment carries an inherent tension. A system designed to reproduce ideological conformity has helped create a population capable of questioning the very structures that govern it. The protests that erupted with the 2009 Green Movement, and after the death of Mahsa Amini 13 years later, were not only about patriarchal rules and clerical authority. Instead, they revealed a deeper contradiction between clerical governance and an educational agenda oriented toward modernization.

The contradiction has intellectual and theological roots. Ernest Gellner’s distinction between Islam as a “cult of the Book” and Christianity as a “cult of the Person” requires modification in this context. It applies most neatly to Sunni Islam and Protestantism. But Shiism, with its focus on the Hidden Imam and its eschatological expectation of return, introduces a principle of personal mediation closer to Catholicism. Its theology, like Catholic Thomism, contains rationalistic elements that can assist the advancement of science. Authority is not confined to text; it is embodied, transmitted, and anticipated. This eschatological horizon intensifies the dramaturgy of sacrifice. Karbala is not merely remembered; it is unfinished. Its resolution lies in the future. 

The Iranian intellectual tradition reinforces this dynamic. Shia thinkers from the Ismaili tradition that holds to a Living Imam — that is, a living, present spiritual leader rather than a hidden one — articulated a vision in which reason and revelation were intertwined, and in which truth possessed dimensions that could not be reduced to text alone. One might call this “pre-verbal” revelation. Such frameworks facilitated Islam’s expansion into non-Arab intellectual milieus — from Gujarat to the High Pamirs — where conversion required philosophical depth as well as legal adherence. They also helped embed belief in a structure where adversity itself is meaningful, where suffering confirms rather than undermines the moral order.

What emerges from this comparison is not a simple analogy, but a warning. When sacrifice becomes foundational, politics is tempted to follow suit. The dead acquire authority over the living; compromise begins to resemble betrayal. Pearse’s rhetoric of blood sacrifice has long made Irish liberals uneasy for that reason. The revolutionary deployment of Karbala in modern Iran has similarly enabled the mobilization of grief as a political resource.

Predictions of imminent collapse in Tehran, whether issued from Washington or Jerusalem, have often proved misplaced. You can bomb bridges and clinics, assassinate leaders, tighten sanctions — or even blockade ports and take over ships. But what you cannot easily dissolve is a solidarity rooted in a narrative that interprets suffering as moral, even ontological, vindication. The retreat of the Church in Ireland shows that such structures can eventually unravel, but only from within, and often through the unintended consequences of the very institutions that sustained them. Iran may yet follow a similar path, but not by bombs.

Ali Larijani, whom the Israelis assassinated on Tuesday, was a ruthless propagandist who broadcast the “confessions” of dissidents broken by torture, and an apparatchik whose National Security Council oversaw the slaughter of thousands of unarmed protesters in January. Yet his long membership of Iran’s ruling clique at least gave him insight into the country’s external enemies. At a pro-regime rally shortly before his death, he observed that “Trump’s problem is that he doesn’t understand that… the more pressure he applies, the stronger the [Iranian] people become.”

For nations driven by patriotism, religion or both — Iran, the Palestinians, Ukraine, Russia, Israel — capitulation becomes more unthinkable the longer the casualty list. In this, the Iranian regime has form. Drawing on its experience of fighting Iraq in the Eighties, when the Islamic Republic was a production line of commanders going fearlessly to their deaths — recall one-armed Hossein Kharrazi, who was killed while diverting a subordinate away from enemy fire, and is remembered by his men for his valor and self-sacrifice — the state replaces fallen generals and politicians quickly and without fuss.

So far, at least 1,500 Iranians have been killed, including hundreds of civilians; much infrastructure has been destroyed. Now Trump is openly contemplating an invasion of the island of Kharg, off Iran’s southern coast, from where the country’s oil is dispatched to China and other more clandestine markets, while the CIA has been encouraging a rebellion among the Kurds in the country’s western provinces.

All the while, Mojtaba Khamenei, the country’s new supreme leader, who lost his wife, son and perhaps a leg in the attack that also killed his father and predecessor, Ali, promises a life without security for the regime’s enemies, both “domestic and foreign.” His Islamic Republic, a pariah state, tells the world’s most powerful military: bring it on.

That Iran derives strength from adversity and prefers heroic defeat to ungentlemanly victory derives in part from the foundation epic of Shia Islam. In 680, the Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, along with a tiny band of followers, was put to the sword by the powerful caliph, Yazid of Damascus, in what is now southern Iraq. Iran’s sectarian identity works in tandem with cultural exceptionalism. The Persian language emerged from the Arab invasions of the 630s energized and expanded, becoming a tool fit for the works of beauty that Persian poets went on to compose.

Similarly, Islamic beliefs and Persian forms merged to create a new aesthetic, visible in cities like Isfahan and Tabriz, and which spread as far as Central Asia and India. No one, then, has ever accused Iran of suffering from an inferiority complex. Or, for that matter, of excessive deference towards the parvenu Arabs of the Persian Gulf, the Arabs, in the words of an old bit of doggerel, grubbing around for lizards while the Persians sip chilled water.

Since the war began, Iran’s drones and missiles have exacted a death toll of fewer than 50 on the far side of the Gulf, but put the regimes in question, to say nothing of world oil markets, into a tailspin all the same. As for the people of Beirut, bombarded by Israel while calmly receiving hundreds of thousands of refugees from Benjamin Netanyahu’s furious assault on south Lebanon (itself prompted by Hezbollah’s feeble strikes on Israel following the elder Khamenei’s assassination), they poke fun at their neighbors in the Gulf for gathering up their dishdashas and running for the basement at the first sound of tinkling glass.

Many ordinary Muslims thrill to the spectacle of plucky Iran refusing to bow to the oppressors of the Palestinians. Pro-Iran demonstrations were held in Iraq and Pakistan following Khamenei’s assassination, the latter costing at least 22 lives, while, on 11 March, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a majority-Sunni country, pledged solidarity with Shia Iran. “We have but one religion,” he declared in parliament, “and that is Islam.”

Between US and Israeli attacks on military installations, gas fields, and the odd school, Iranian life goes on. Notwithstanding the danger and inconvenience, families convened yesterday to celebrate the Persian New Year, pride of place in homes being given to seven auspicious items (garlic; apple; a brown pudding with a base of wheat sprouts; sumac; the powdery fruit of the jujube-tree; vinegar; and coins), even if the traditional feast of herb rice and Caspian carp (beware: the tiny bones have a habit of lodging in the windpipe) has long been abandoned in favor of more affordable fare.

Yesterday I got through to Ali Dehbashi. An editor and literary doyen living in Tehran, I’d called to wish him Happy New Year. Dehbashi told me that his son Shahab had had a narrow escape that morning, when a house three doors down was obliterated in an Israeli airstrike. The target was Ali Muhammad Naini, the Revolutionary Guards spokesman: not that Shahab had any idea they were neighbors. His father is a pigeon fancier, but when I asked after the birds, Dehbashi told me that two pigeons and a canary had dropped dead from shock at the racket produced by Israel’s war machine. Having the misfortune to live on Palestine Square — which boasts a clock counting down the days to Israel’s longed-for destruction — he went on with typical understatement, “I suppose one is in the firing line.”

At the outset of the fighting, Trump urged Iranians to “take over your government” as soon as the dust had settled, for “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Since then, in one of those cognitive exercises he lets us observe, like a child showing off his ability to join one bit of playdough to another, he has changed his mind. The President now deems a popular uprising unlikely because the security forces “have people in the streets… machine-gunning people down if they want to protest.” A few inquiries beforehand would have saved him from any misapprehension on this score and the world a lot of pain.

The irony of Trump and Netanyahu’s war of liberation is that it has silenced those opponents of the Islamic Republic who continued to agitate for freedom even after January’s massacre. Many had urged Trump to bomb the country to oblivion, placing their hopes in a restoration of the monarchy under Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah. Now, three weeks into this conflict of unexpected intensity, the true sentiments of the majority are hidden behind an intermittent internet blackout. Treat with caution the prognostications of Iran specialists in the US who haven’t seen the country in decades.

That said, the longer the pounding goes on, the more schools are hit and the more damage is done to buildings of national importance — it’s the meticulously cut mirror pieces adhering to the muqarnas, or stalactite squinch, that fall like dandruff when a bomb slams into the barracks a block away — the greater the likelihood that feelings towards the aggressors will cool.

The authorities are taking no chances. The national police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan, has warned that should “scum, spies and hirelings”, his catch-all for pro-democracy protesters, return to the streets on the advice of Trump, Netanyahu or Pahlavi, they “will be treated as the enemy… our boys have their fingers on the trigger, defending their revolution, protecting their people and their country.” On Wednesday, three young men were executed for killing policemen in the January unrest.

For all his disagreeable qualities, Larijani’s removal has robbed Iran of an experienced negotiator who might have helped bring the war to an end before the country turns entirely to ashes — one of the reasons, it has been suggested, why Netanyahu targeted him. At present, peace suits neither the Israeli Prime Minister, who on Thursday said that the war would continue “as long as is necessary”, nor those Revolutionary Guardsmen for whom the current hostilities are an opportunity to militarize the Islamic Republic.

In all this, the hardliners may have an ally in Mojtaba Khamenei. His meager credentials as a Shia theologian are far from commensurate with the almost pontifical office, the guardianship of the jurist, which he lately inherited. The new supreme leader owes his elevation to the Guard. Assuming he stays alive — the attack that killed the father is thought to have left the son with life-threatening injuries — the clerical character of the Islamic Republic will fade and it will more closely resemble a uniformed dictatorship with a nationalist character.

Not a day passes without an official warning of threats to the country’s territorial integrity: code for foreign-funded agitations among the country’s Kurdish, Baluch and Arab minorities. But Iran isn’t in danger of falling apart. It isn’t Afghanistan or Iraq, modern confections of mutually antagonistic groups. Rather, it has a natural coherence based on the supremacy of the Persian language; its geographically logical homeland on the Persian plateau, ringed by seas and mountains; and the Shia Islam to which most Iranians adhere.

For centuries, indeed, these strengths have enabled Iran to survive invasions, violent changes of dynasty, famines, tribal uprisings, regicides and years of meddling by imperial Britain and Russia — not to mention the 1979 revolution itself. They will offset the centrifugal forces that Trump seems intent on stimulating. For the true danger to Iran is not disintegration, but implosion.

When Trump and Netanyahu decide that they have had enough, Khamenei and his friends in the Guard will have to deal with the same rotten institutions and ruined economy, the same seething anger and desire for change, that brought the people onto the streets in January — with the difference now that any chance of a diplomatic solution to Iran’s isolation has been foreclosed while Israel will continue to bomb the country and sabotage its institutions on a rolling basis. In the meantime, the “scum, spies and hirelings” haven’t gone away, and they have even less to lose. The police chief shouldn’t book any holidays.

Iran is experiencing the most evil days in its modern history. To mark an earlier catastrophe, the Anglo-American coup d’etat that ejected the country’s legitimate prime minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, in 1953, ushering in a quarter of a century of monarchical despotism, the poet Mehdi Akhavan-Sales composed the following lines which an Iranian friend of mine recently found himself reaching for.

“My house has caught fire, a soul-burning fire,
This fire burns in all directions,
Burning the curtains, the rugs, warp with weft,
I run aimlessly, crying, in the flames of the smoke-laden fire,
And amid my bitter laughter,
And the lamentation of my mirthless tears,
From a burning core,
I scream…”

My chief guide to the unsuspected riches of Islamic thought — particularly its mystical tradition, the subtle wisdom of the Sufis — is a French philosopher of the 20th century who, despite his formidable scholarly achievements, remains relatively little-known outside of academic circles. Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was, in the words of the literary critic Harold Bloom, a “scholar of genius” and “a wisdom writer of the highest eminence”. Other commentators have described Corbin’s special brilliance as “visionary scholarship” that combines “a refined spiritual sensibility with vast erudition and impeccable scientific honesty”. Having spent a year studying his work, I might add that, with his otherworldly concerns illumined by fierce intellectual acumen, there is nobody else like Corbin. His unique synthesis of Heidegger and Islam is as strange and startling as it sounds. Rarely since discovering the work of Friedrich Nietzsche in my early twenties have I been so entranced by an author and the cosmos he represents.

The country with which Henry Corbin is most closely associated is the one that screams from today’s headlines of war, massacres, oppression: Iran. But, enthralled by its civilizational splendors, Corbin shows us instead a land of the most exquisite spirituality and philosophical refinement. Moreover, the insights he discovered there, particularly those pertaining to what he called “the imaginal world”, suggest a missing, potentially regenerative link in Western thought.

The arc of his life indicates a mirroring of inner and outer worlds. Henry Corbin was born in Paris (let’s get it out of the way: he’s a Frenchman, so it’s pronounced Enree Corban), and his mother died six days later. A sickly child, he spent long periods in the enforced contemplation of convalescence. The young Henry had a keen aptitude for music, which would not be incidental to his later understanding of mystical ecstasy (he was to rhetorically ask, “But is it not frequent in the Bible for the Prophets to demand the assistance of a harp-player in order to open the eyes of their inner vision?”). He was raised as a Catholic, later moving to Protestantism because it allowed him greater freedom to engage with symbolism and sacred imagery. A brilliant student, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne while also studying numerous languages. During a period of “notorious asceticism”, he taught himself Persian and Sanskrit simultaneously, having already mastered Arabic, Greek, Latin, and various European languages. After finishing his degree in philosophy, he worked as a researcher at the Bibliothèque National, where he was much inspired by the pioneering scholar of Islamic studies, Louis Massignon. It was Massignon who made the decisive introduction that would set the course of Corbin’s destiny, by gifting him a manuscript by the 12th-century, Persian mystical philosopher Suhrawardi.

Known in the Islamic world as the “Shaykh al-‘Ishraq” (the Master of Illumination), Suhrawardi died a martyr’s death in Aleppo in 1191 and addressed his writings “to those who aspire at once to both mystical experience and philosophical knowledge”. Taking inspiration from Plato, pre-Islamic Iranian spirituality, and his Sufi forebears, Suhrawardi’s mystical theology held that reality is made of light, its gradations conjuring up the world of multiplicity we see before us. To Corbin, Suhrawardi would henceforth be “mon Shaykh”. He later told an interviewer that “with my meeting with Suhrawardi my spiritual destiny for the crossing of the world was sealed”. Following his studies, Corbin became a professor at the Sorbonne, commencing a remarkable career as a scholar of religion, philosopher, and eventually “Iranologist” — a pioneer in the field of Iranian Studies which he redefined through his philosophical and spiritual focus, and whose parameters he explores in the essays collected in The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and Philosophy.

In 1939 he traveled to Istanbul with the intention of staying for six months, during which he would gather for publication all of Suhrawardi’s extant writings. The outbreak of the Second World War kept him in the city for five years — a period of intensive immersion in Suhrawardi’s texts and the mysteries of Islamic gnosis. The work of this period strikes me as one of the great feats of sympathetic scholarship — a quiet heroism of the mind while the world raged and burned outside. Henry’s wife, Stella Corbin, remarked that her husband wanted to create a bridge between East and West such as existed, briefly, in the 12th century of Spain’s “Al-Andalus” and the Islamo-Hellenic thought which flourished contemporaneously in Persia. From Corbin’s immersion in arcane texts in Istanbul, three decades of extraordinary work would flow.

After the war, Corbin moved to Tehran, where he established a university department in Islamic philosophy. On arriving in Iran for the first time in 1945, he described it as “a country the color of heaven”. He was to live there for many years, spending only his summers in Paris. In 1949, he attended the Eranos Conference in the Swiss resort town of Ascona for the first time. He was to become a central fixture at this annual gathering of luminaries with an interest in metaphysical, psychological and spiritual matters. At Eranos he met the likes of Carl Jung, Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and the American depth psychologist James Hillman, who would write a short book inspired by him (Corbin’s concept of the mundus imaginalis would prove pivotal for Hillman’s rich work on dreams and the psyche).

Corbin’s mastery of Oriental and Islamic thought was matched by his deep erudition in Western philosophy. He described himself as a born Platonist (“just as one can be born an atheist, a materialist, etc. It is a question of the impenetrable mystery of pre-existential choices”), and he called the great Iranian sages he studied the “Platonists of Persia”. These Muslim philosophers had indeed absorbed classical Greek thought, and it’s well-known that they reintroduced Greek philosophy to Western Europe following the Dark Ages. Corbin was passionately engaged with the West’s visionaries and heretics such as William Blake, Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Gnostics and the Neoplatonists. Moreover, his intellectual outlook was decisively shaped by his engagement with the philosophical schools of phenomenology and hermeneutics. In fact, years before his journey to the East, Corbin was responsible for the first French translation of the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom he traveled to Germany to meet. In archives in Paris there exist copies of books by Heidegger owned by Corbin — in which his marginal notes are written in Arabic and Persian! Towards the end of his life, when Corbin was interviewed on his philosophical itinerary, it was published under the title “From Heidegger to Suhrawardi”.

Henry Corbin died of lung cancer in Paris just as the Islamic Revolution was catching fire in Iran — a development he observed with great sorrow. Even still, there’s a street named after him in Tehran, and his intellectual influence in the country remains potent (before anyone cries “Orientalism!”, it’s worth noting that prior to Corbin’s arrival in the Shah’s Iran, university philosophy departments taught only Western philosophers). Corbin translated and edited many critical editions of works of Islamic philosophy previously unknown in the West, and wrote numerous extraordinary books (his magnum opus, the four-volume En Islam iranien, remains untranslated into English). His History of Islamic Philosophy is a valuable work of reference with which to familiarize oneself with the names, disputes and concepts that comprise a tradition little-appreciated in the West.

More from this author

This book will send you to Hell

By Rob Doyle

But all of that is mere context: it can give no more than a hint of the intoxicating strangeness of reading Henry Corbin. Admittedly, at the outset the prospect can appear daunting. So much in Corbin’s world will meet Western readers as radically other, unfamiliar, mysterious, even suspect. Some might be put off by the titles alone: Corbin’s major works include The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism; Alone With the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’Arabī; Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, and Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran. A typical list of chapters partly reads:

The Heavenly Twin (Mandeism and Manicheism)
Visions of the Pole in Rūzbehān of Shīrāz
The Senses of the Suprasensory World
The “Heavenly Witness”
Black Light in the “Rose Garden of Mystery”

But to read these books is to roam through marvelous landscapes of the imagination — visionary topographies described in a lexicon of dazzling metaphysical exoticism. A sample of Corbin’s vocabulary might include: hypercosmos; the eighth climate; the barzakh; metahistory; Parousia; the Cosmic North; Sophiology; Cherubic Intelligences; prophetology, the eternal syzygy; precosmic eternal entities; hierocosmology; hierognosis; Zoroastrian angelology; superconsciousness; the Night Ineffable; the mountain of Qāf; the resurrection body; the earth of Hurqalya; the interworld; disoccultation; theomorphism; the supreme pleroma; supracelestial Earth.

While such language might suggest the kind of florid effusions to be found inside dubious books shelved in the “Mind, Body and Spirit” section, Corbin’s works are written to the highest standards of French scholarship. It’s as if Roland Barthes or Jean-Paul Sartre were philosophizing from inside the universe of Frank Herbert’s Dune. More importantly, the Islamic mystical philosophers whom Corbin meditates on — “theosophers” is his preferred term, marking the fact that Islam has never undergone a process of secularization by which theology and philosophy split into separate disciplines — are as rich, subtle and nutritive as they are initially unfamiliar. The cast of characters across Corbin’s books is immense, but three central figures are: Ibn ’Arabī, the mystical sage of 13th century Andalusia whose influence on the Islamic world has been without parallel (he is known as the “Shaykh al-Akhbar”, the greatest master); Suhrawardi, the aforementioned Persian philosopher, who looked back to Iran’s pre-Islamic spirituality — Zoroastrianism and Manicheism — to develop his “Illuminationist School” of Islamic theology; and Mulla Sadra, a 17th century Persian philosopher whose influence has likewise been vast.

So this is niche stuff… but only on the surface. The truth is that, insofar as one is willing to take any of this material seriously (and an entire philosophical orthodoxy resists this, about which I’ll say more later), Corbin’s engagement with such figures allows him to write passionately into the profoundest and most universal of themes: the nature of reality; the origins, purpose, and ultimate destination of human life; the true nature of the self; and the mystery of what will follow “the supreme ecstasy of death”. You don’t need to be a Muslim to find intellectual wonderment and spiritual insight in his books, any more than he needed to be one to write them. (Contrary to what is often assumed, Corbin never converted to Islam.)

The first of Corbin’s books that I read, Alone With the Alone, not only introduced me to a figure, Ibn ’Arabī, who has come to captivate me; it gave me a strikingly novel vocabulary and framework — almost a new mind — with which to understand religious experience… which in turn has revitalized a long-dormant curiosity about the monotheistic tradition I was born into as a Catholic. (In a time of religious war, it’s worth recalling the obvious fact that the Christian, Muslim and Jewish nations all fight in the name of the same, Abrahamic God.) Corbin’s elucidation of Ibn ’Arabī’s metaphysics persuaded me that, while he was intensely rooted in the Islamic faith, this sublime Spanish mystic created the visionary-philosophical framework for something like a universal meta-religion, wherein the ineffable divine mystery reveals itself to diverse peoples in their own unique theophanic forms — the many dazzling faces of an inconceivable radiance. Though only some 140 pages, Corbin’s later book The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism took me an entire summer to read, such is its compression of frequently startling insight. While many have intuited the lineaments of an invisible architecture of being beyond the realm of the senses, Corbin, with his restless trawling through humankind’s gnostic legacies, goes further by mapping it out, charting a means of ascension by which those who are compelled to might embark on an inner, suprasensible journey. Taking Man of Light a few pages at a time, I could feel it realigning my perceptions, altering my experience of being alive.

As a writer, Corbin might be categorized alongside other giants of comparative religion such as Mircea Eliade and the scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Sholem. But Corbin stands apart for how, without losing the run of his superlative scholarly faculties, he writes consistently from inside the experience of gnosis — knowledge of spiritual mysteries. Although he is not given to autobiographical divulgence, his work exudes the sense of an urgent philosophical quest fueled by ineffable private experience. In other words, Henry Corbin was himself a mystic, a gnostic, a visionary, even if discretion kept him from discussing such matters publicly.

Stella Corbin emphasized that across her husband’s work, “the real goal is self-transformation”. That is, Corbin did not merely collect picturesque lore from arcane faith traditions in far-flung lands; he sounded out the hidden depths in such traditions for what he called “salvific knowledge” — the elixir of gnosis that he believed enables human beings to discover who they truly are, thereby fulfilling the profoundest purpose of earthly life. For Corbin as for the Sufis, the divine is not a matter of mere belief, but is to be encountered first-hand in transfigurative inner experience. He saw no need to limit his investigations to any one era or faith. Ontologically, his instincts are multiplicative rather than reductive. Occam’s Razor — the principle that every concept should be explained in its simplest form — doesn’t get a look in. Corbin is a great one for complications, comparisons, finding resonances across ages and spiritual lexicons. He seeks the truth not only behind but within multiplicity. Concerned as he is with “events in Heaven” — not history but “metahistory” — he gathers evidence from a plethora of sources to get to the heart of a given spiritual phenomenon. This sees him ceaselessly shuffling through what one critic irritably calls “religion after religion”: schools, doctrines, languages, concepts, prophets, ontologies, cosmologies and mythologies pullulate in a way that can leave the reader dumbstruck. Everything in Corbin’s thought shoots for the baroque. Worlds and dimensions branch off into a dizzying, ever-shifting ontological anti-structure that suggests a limitlessly complex and mysterious “beyond” — a vast angelological meta-universe which the human intellect can only ever hope to penetrate in fleeting transcendental moments.

Nowhere in his books does Corbin lay out any definitive philosophical “system”. Like Ibn ’Arabī, he saw himself as a wayfarer in thought and ideas, never resting in one place for very long nor being content with final classifications. However, certain elements lend his body of work its unity. In one of his many arresting phrases, Corbin writes of “the metaphor of the phenomena”. To him, as to his beloved theosophers, the visible world is replete with signs and symbols pertaining to an invisible world that is more real than the one simultaneously revealed and veiled by the senses, and this higher world is a level closer to the absolute inscrutability of what the Islamic sages call al-Haqq, “the Real”. In the words of one commentator, “to invoke the name of Henry Corbin is thus to invoke the primacy of the invisible.”

More from this author

The new paganism of the digital age

By Rob Doyle

For those to whom all talk of mysticism (let alone angelology) induces automatic skepticism, one way to approach reading Henry Corbin might be to regard him as a sui generis literary figure who pioneered a singular form of avant-garde, scholarly-theological fiction. Jorge Luis Borges, who Corbin sometimes reminds me of, might have welcomed such a reading: the great Argentine claimed to appreciate metaphysics and theology as specialist branches of fantastical literature. It helps that, unlike many philosophers, Corbin writes beautifully. To enter his imaginal space is to be transported out of our habitual reality to an alien universe populated by hosts of numinous beings, enigmatic sages, ethereal prophets. Consider Khidr, the “immortal wanderer” of Sufi lore who visits solitary mystics in dreams and visions; or the “Hidden Imam” of Shi’ite apocalyptic theology who went into occultation many centuries ago and will reveal himself again at the end of time. I’ve found that reading Corbin’s work, which abounds with such Borgesian personages, can induce trances of amazed perplexity more akin to the effects of music than of fiction. In this sense, form mirrors content. Ibn ’Arabī has written: “True gnosis is bewilderment.”

But ultimately, whether one truly connects with Corbin’s work will depend on one’s openness to the possible existence of dimensions beyond the immediate realm of the senses, classes of experience beyond rational comprehension. Corbin’s philosophy is incompatible with the dogmas of scientific materialism that have gripped the Western mind since the Enlightenment and still dominate the 21st century’s skylines even as their foundations have come to seem unstable, inadequate, not modern enough. In an Iranian documentary that examines Corbin’s intellectual legacy, dubiously translated as The Seeker of Orient, one commentator remarks that Corbin was too advanced to be properly appreciated in the 20th century. The implication is that our own century, in which the scientific imagination has begun to harmonize with the religious imagination it formerly displaced — panpsychism, Simulation theory, a renewed interest in mysticism and so on are all in the air — may provide a more receptive context for Corbin’s geographies of the invisible.

His critics have noted that Corbin has little to say about Islam as a religion of laws and beliefs as practiced by millions of Muslims around the world — the fiqh (jurisprudence) and sharia (divine law) of the clerics and mullahs. It’s true that Corbin’s thought is predominantly in service to what I might call his spiritual individualism. In this regard, while his heart is in the 12th century, Corbin’s mind has a modern cast. The inner event of spiritual birth “implies a break with the collective, a reunion with the transcendent ‘dimension’ which puts each individual person on guard against the attractions of the collective, that is to say against every impulse to make what is spiritual a social matter”. To Corbin — and perhaps this only affirms him as an honorary Sufi — the challenge of religion is profoundly personal, both in that he urges a private, immediate experience of the divine, and by way of the diverse ontological schemata he reconstructs for understanding the soul as individuated phenomenon, site of unique theophany. To Corbin, the Nietzschean injunction to become what one is necessitates casting off the mask of worldly persona to unveil “the essential individuality, the ‘celestial’ transcendent ‘I’”. Like Ibn ’Arabī, Corbin fathomed oceans of meaning in a celebrated hadith: “He who knows himself knows his lord.” That is, self-knowledge not only entails knowledge of God, it entails God’s own self-knowledge. In the formula of the German theologian, Meister Eckhart: “The seeing through which I know him is the same seeing through which he knows me.”

Rather than its outward practices, Corbin’s concerns lay chiefly with the esoteric side of religion. This word, like gnosis or mysticism, will make some readers wary. But Corbin reminds us that alarm around the term “esotericism” forgets that, “in accordance with its Greek etymology, it merely expresses a notion current in every traditional culture: inward things, hidden things, suprasensible occurrences”. Elsewhere he writes, “The terms ‘esotericism’ and ‘initiation’ do not imply any exclusive claim to teach by some self-instituted authority. They refer, respectively, to hidden, suprasensory things, to the discretion which the words themselves suggest in regard to those who, not understanding, scorn them, and to the spiritual birth that causes the perception of those hidden things to open.”

Corbin makes frequent appeal to the Arabic word ta’wil: the exegetical practice of following an idea, symbol or sacred text back to its source, penetrating its interior meaning. An adjacent lingual pairing is that of the zahir — the exoteric, outward, sensible, phenomenal — and the batin: the esoteric, inward, suprasensible, noumenal. Corbin’s concern with veiled, interior meanings owed much to his earlier engagement with Heidegger’s hermeneutics. His procedure was not that of an academic vivisectionist, analyzing dead materials into ever more rigid states of unlife, but rather one of intensive, living identification — a marriage of scholarly attentiveness and visionary absorption. He presents Shi’ite sages of bygone centuries as vital, undimmed presences. During his lifetime Corbin faced hostility from within the academy due to his rejection of the dominant academic mode, historicism, in favor of the phenomenological. That is, Corbin insisted on studying a given phenomenon as it is experienced. The ideas within a religion were to be understood as they are experienced by believers in that religion.

The beating heart of Corbin’s work is what he called the mundus imaginalis, or imaginal world. The former is Corbin’s direct translation of the Arabic term found recurrently across centuries of Sufi thought: the Alam al-Mithal (the world of images). So, Corbin did not invent this notion, but unearthed and reanimated it for a Western mind which had long lost sight of it. The mundus imaginalis is an ontologically real zone of “metaphysical images” that exists in between the senses and the intellect, between pure matter and pure spirit. The italicized words in the previous sentence are crucial: to Ibn ’Arabī, Suhrawardi and their successors, the imaginal realm is the barzakh, the interworld by which human consciousness can interface with the divine realm of absolute, inscrutable being.

To Islam’s theosophers, this barzakh of freestanding metaphysical images is objective and consequential, just as the quandaries of nihilism and agnosticism that prevail in the West because of our losing contact with it are alien. Corbin reminds us that in the West our “official philosophy” admits only two sources of knowledge, namely empirical sense data and rational, intellectual understanding. We have amputated the vital faculty of the “active imagination” which is the locus of intuitive knowing and the site of vision, prophecy, dreams, and symbolic understanding. Note that we’re talking here of the imaginal and not the imaginary: to Corbin, the imaginal faculty became degraded in status in the West till it was confused with the imaginary, which denotes mere fantasy and make-believe. Contemplatives and visionaries of all traditions have cultivated this faculty by which may be accessed ‘a suprasensible world which is neither the empirical world of the senses nor the abstract world of the intellect’. In the secular West, it is left to poets and artists to draw nectar from this officially excluded realm.

Corbin discovered the “key” to this imaginal interworld in “the two ages of the spiritual world in Iran”, namely the Islamic and the pre-Islamic, as they were synthesized by Suhrawardi. Building on Suhrawardi’s thought, the Iranian philosopher Mulla Sadra argued that the imaginal faculty, which allows us to perceive the mundus imaginalis, is an organ of perception that exists independently of the physical body — and hence survives biological death. By way of such concepts, the Islamic sages make an unnervingly credible case for the persistence of postmortem consciousness in a hellish or blissful afterlife, each soul realizing a personal eschaton. Frequenting their philosophy could make words resound ominously, words I initially thought were uttered by the Prophet Mohammad, but which I now suspect I heard in a dream: “Death will meet men like a mirror.” Or the stark words in the Qur’an: “On that day, no intimate has he.”

To Corbin, the consequences for the West that ensue from “the loss of the interworld” are tremendous. No longer recognizing an inner organ of perception by which we can access the symbols, images and figures of the invisible world, we fall prey to psychic and civilizational maladies against a horizon of ever more suffocating nihilism. In the “Prelude to the Second Edition” of Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Corbin writes:

Our western philosophy has been the theater of what we may call the “battle for the Soul of the World.” […] Is it a matter of a battle that has finally been lost, the world having lost its soul, a defeat whose consequences weigh upon our modern visions of the world without compensation? If there has been a defeat, a defeat is still not a refutation.

In the 2020s it’s hardly controversial to observe that in the West something has gone catastrophically wrong. Corbin insists that our malaise is not to be located in this or that symptom, be it societal, political or cultural, but must be traced into the philosophical foundations of secular modernity itself. An orientalist by vocation and Iranologist by profession, Corbin’s zeal for the thought of the East was driven by a sense of the self-impoverishment of Occidental vision, and the ache of “a nostalgia that nothing has ever succeeded in snuffing out of the human heart”. Although he spent much of his lifetime in the Middle East, Henry Corbin always maintained that the true Orient he sought was not to be found on any map. The orientation his books encourage is a matter of inner adventure, an ever-renewed voyage to realms unknown.