Luke Markham is a final-year student in Classics at the Sorbonne Université.
On the day before his assassination on 17 March 2026, Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, called on the Islamic Ummah (community) to join Iran’s resistance against “the great and the little Satan”.
Such an evocation of the US and Israel reflects a longstanding religious configuration which places Iran in perpetual opposition to the West. By considering blasphemous the existence of Western society, which has been modelled on a heretical system of Christian values, Islam impregnates the Iranian political mind with an eternal jus ad bellum for the struggle against the West. The UK cannot avoid entering into a war with Iran by appeal to a unilateral European definition of the modalities for starting one: the Quran – not the United Nations Charter – is Iranian scripture.
In his Initiation to Islam, the medieval Iranian (Persian) philosopher Al-Ghazali recommends the wazhî-fa, the Islamic liturgy, on the grounds that its practice liberates Muslims from “illusion”. This formalises the teaching in the Quran that earthly life is a game and a distraction (Surah 6.32); only through submission and reverence to Allah may the faithful escape terrestrial delusion and accede to the truth found in the world above. Al-Ghazali prescribes sleep to any Muslim unable to worship Allah: in death he may preserve his faith and not live in illusion by not living at all.
The construction of a cosmological condition along the axes of delusion and truth insulates the believer from the system of earthly life and death in which the non-believer is imprisoned. He who is killed on the path of Allah is not dead (Surah 2.154); belief and service preserve his real being in preparation for his accession to the real world. Those who travel the contrary false path of Taghut are lost for no clemency will be shown to them. The promised preservation of the devotee strengthens his arm against the non-believer and protects his mind from the temptation to join him.
Prima facie, Western philosophy promulgates the same division between the enlightened and the unenlightened. The World of Forms provides the Platonist with an assurance that he may look with indifference at the shadows on the cave wall; to be a philosopher is to immunise oneself against death. On his death bed, Socrates tells Crito to offer a cock as thanks to Asclepius, the god of healing, because his ascension to the world above has cured the disease of life. Christian thought expresses the same assurance of the follower’s immortality. Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life”: the path of Jesus leads to the accession to the real life in the celestial realm.
This distinction between the freed believer and the deluded non-believer has been for both Christianity and Islam a motor of religious war. However, the union of religion and knowledge in Western ideology has provided it with an internal dialectical system through which it has gradually developed away from violence.
The Ancient Greeks’ conceptualisation of truth (alētheia, lit. ‘not forgetting) is a reminder of the eternality of the divine knowledge which must be washed out of souls before reincarnation in Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness. In the Biblical Greek, Jesus is the way, the life and this alētheia. The knowledge of good and evil which man possesses fastens his understanding of this truth to a system of morality inside of which, imago dei, he may be a Creator. The divine essence which exists in him makes him a representative of the world above on Earth. Moral epistemology shows him the path to self-criticism and self-improvement.
By contrast, Al-Ghazali prohibits the pursuit of science (a word which European languages have inherited from Latin scientia, ‘knowledge’) on the grounds that it is a tool of Satan which alienates one from Allah. There is no Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Quran; because Man was formed from mud, he cannot exist as an agent in his own system of moral decision making. He does not need to live above the natural order because he has everything prescribed to him by Allah. As Created and not Creator, it is his recognition that he is only a representation of the world above which gives him his existence. The heretic is therefore a false prophet and, because has alienated himself from his own existence, a false being; by virtue of what he says, he is himself a lie. He can be easily destroyed because he does not really exist.
The metaphysical conceptualisation of heresy in Islam prevents a liberalisation of the same variety to which Christianity has shown itself receptive. The non-existence of the non-believer is a universal value; his dehumanisation is fixed. In contrast, Christianity’s ethical conceptualisation of heresy assigns a moral value to the non-believer; his demonisation re-affirms the existence of his divine soul. In the Christian internal dialectical system, the salvation of the non-believer is therefore a plastic concept which centuries of self-questioning has turned away from total purification to spiritual reformation. However, Islam, in which epistemological enquiry is a profane pursuit, eradicates the possibility of such a system: for the Muslim, the necessity of the destruction of the non-believer is unquestionable.
In the context of all of this, it is hard to see how the UK Government’s reliance on its own conceptualisation of ‘international’ law has any force in the outcome of its relationship with Iran. The legality of its grant of the use of RAF bases to the USAF did not prevent Iranian attacks on Akrotiri and Diego Garcia. Current militarised conflict with the UK is only the latest externalisation of a jihad which Iran has been conducting for a long time. Last October, the Director-General of MI5 said that the agency had tracked “more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” since 2024; in May five Iranian men had been arrested for plotting a terrorist attack in London.
The Prime Minister has erred in projecting a European definition of war and international law onto a civilisation which does not recognise it: legal pedantry amounts to nothing if the referenced legal framework is not respected by all parties. This approach appears to be endemic in the Government. In taking two months to decide to authorise UK special forces to arrest ships in the Russian shadow fleet which sail through British waters – by quite some measure a more clear-cut issue – he has revealed his commitment to a policy of strategy through lethargy and unilateral observation of legal trivialities. It would appear that on the Iranian issue he has again taken recourse to this pedant’s plod to the lawyer’s Pyrrhic victory.
Larijani’s address began, like all official addresses in Iran, with the Basmala (an invocation of Allah), which should serve as a reminder that in the imam system of government political power is invested in pious men. Any suggestion of peace therefore between Iran and the West ought to be viewed with great scepticism: pious men do not make deals with the Devil.
Luke Markham is a final-year student in Classics at the Sorbonne Université.
On the day before his assassination on 17 March 2026, Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, called on the Islamic Ummah (community) to join Iran’s resistance against “the great and the little Satan”.
Such an evocation of the US and Israel reflects a longstanding religious configuration which places Iran in perpetual opposition to the West. By considering blasphemous the existence of Western society, which has been modelled on a heretical system of Christian values, Islam impregnates the Iranian political mind with an eternal jus ad bellum for the struggle against the West. The UK cannot avoid entering into a war with Iran by appeal to a unilateral European definition of the modalities for starting one: the Quran – not the United Nations Charter – is Iranian scripture.
In his Initiation to Islam, the medieval Iranian (Persian) philosopher Al-Ghazali recommends the wazhî-fa, the Islamic liturgy, on the grounds that its practice liberates Muslims from “illusion”. This formalises the teaching in the Quran that earthly life is a game and a distraction (Surah 6.32); only through submission and reverence to Allah may the faithful escape terrestrial delusion and accede to the truth found in the world above. Al-Ghazali prescribes sleep to any Muslim unable to worship Allah: in death he may preserve his faith and not live in illusion by not living at all.
The construction of a cosmological condition along the axes of delusion and truth insulates the believer from the system of earthly life and death in which the non-believer is imprisoned. He who is killed on the path of Allah is not dead (Surah 2.154); belief and service preserve his real being in preparation for his accession to the real world. Those who travel the contrary false path of Taghut are lost for no clemency will be shown to them. The promised preservation of the devotee strengthens his arm against the non-believer and protects his mind from the temptation to join him.
Prima facie, Western philosophy promulgates the same division between the enlightened and the unenlightened. The World of Forms provides the Platonist with an assurance that he may look with indifference at the shadows on the cave wall; to be a philosopher is to immunise oneself against death. On his death bed, Socrates tells Crito to offer a cock as thanks to Asclepius, the god of healing, because his ascension to the world above has cured the disease of life. Christian thought expresses the same assurance of the follower’s immortality. Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life”: the path of Jesus leads to the accession to the real life in the celestial realm.
This distinction between the freed believer and the deluded non-believer has been for both Christianity and Islam a motor of religious war. However, the union of religion and knowledge in Western ideology has provided it with an internal dialectical system through which it has gradually developed away from violence.
The Ancient Greeks’ conceptualisation of truth (alētheia, lit. ‘not forgetting) is a reminder of the eternality of the divine knowledge which must be washed out of souls before reincarnation in Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness. In the Biblical Greek, Jesus is the way, the life and this alētheia. The knowledge of good and evil which man possesses fastens his understanding of this truth to a system of morality inside of which, imago dei, he may be a Creator. The divine essence which exists in him makes him a representative of the world above on Earth. Moral epistemology shows him the path to self-criticism and self-improvement.
By contrast, Al-Ghazali prohibits the pursuit of science (a word which European languages have inherited from Latin scientia, ‘knowledge’) on the grounds that it is a tool of Satan which alienates one from Allah. There is no Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Quran; because Man was formed from mud, he cannot exist as an agent in his own system of moral decision making. He does not need to live above the natural order because he has everything prescribed to him by Allah. As Created and not Creator, it is his recognition that he is only a representation of the world above which gives him his existence. The heretic is therefore a false prophet and, because has alienated himself from his own existence, a false being; by virtue of what he says, he is himself a lie. He can be easily destroyed because he does not really exist.
The metaphysical conceptualisation of heresy in Islam prevents a liberalisation of the same variety to which Christianity has shown itself receptive. The non-existence of the non-believer is a universal value; his dehumanisation is fixed. In contrast, Christianity’s ethical conceptualisation of heresy assigns a moral value to the non-believer; his demonisation re-affirms the existence of his divine soul. In the Christian internal dialectical system, the salvation of the non-believer is therefore a plastic concept which centuries of self-questioning has turned away from total purification to spiritual reformation. However, Islam, in which epistemological enquiry is a profane pursuit, eradicates the possibility of such a system: for the Muslim, the necessity of the destruction of the non-believer is unquestionable.
In the context of all of this, it is hard to see how the UK Government’s reliance on its own conceptualisation of ‘international’ law has any force in the outcome of its relationship with Iran. The legality of its grant of the use of RAF bases to the USAF did not prevent Iranian attacks on Akrotiri and Diego Garcia. Current militarised conflict with the UK is only the latest externalisation of a jihad which Iran has been conducting for a long time. Last October, the Director-General of MI5 said that the agency had tracked “more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” since 2024; in May five Iranian men had been arrested for plotting a terrorist attack in London.
The Prime Minister has erred in projecting a European definition of war and international law onto a civilisation which does not recognise it: legal pedantry amounts to nothing if the referenced legal framework is not respected by all parties. This approach appears to be endemic in the Government. In taking two months to decide to authorise UK special forces to arrest ships in the Russian shadow fleet which sail through British waters – by quite some measure a more clear-cut issue – he has revealed his commitment to a policy of strategy through lethargy and unilateral observation of legal trivialities. It would appear that on the Iranian issue he has again taken recourse to this pedant’s plod to the lawyer’s Pyrrhic victory.
Larijani’s address began, like all official addresses in Iran, with the Basmala (an invocation of Allah), which should serve as a reminder that in the imam system of government political power is invested in pious men. Any suggestion of peace therefore between Iran and the West ought to be viewed with great scepticism: pious men do not make deals with the Devil.