What Empire Cannot Erase: Fatemeh Keshavarz-Karamustafa, Omid Safi & Mays Imad

About this episode

The episode explores Persian poetry and the spiritual legacy of Iran through the voices of its scholars and poets.

Persian Poetry, Radical Love, and the Soul of Iran “The path to God goes through that most difficult of beings, the human being.” – Omid Safi Recorded live at a SAND Community Gathering (April 2026). Watch the full conversation on the SAND Website .   We are watching, once again, what empire does: not only to bodies, but to the long memory of a people; to the libraries and sacred sites; to art, language, and the ruins that hold the oldest threads of human spiritual inquiry. We are thinking of the civilization that gave us Rumi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam, Forough Farrokhzad — mystics and rebels and lovers of paradox who understood something about the human soul that we are still, centuries later, trying to catch up to. This gathering invited us to come together: to read poetry aloud, to hear from Iranian voices, to sit with grief and beauty together rather than alone. We work with political and moral vocabulary shaped by Iranian thinkers such as Ali Shariati, who wrote against domination, spiritual emptiness, and the violence of imposed power. We make space for what doesn’t fit into headlines or talking points—the complexity of empire, the difference between a government and its…

People in this episode

Guests: Fatemeh Keshavarz-Karamustafa, Omid Safi, Mays Imad

Topics covered

• Persian Poetry
• Radical Love
• Iranian Culture
• Spiritual Inquiry
• Resistance to Domination

Keywords

• Persian Poetry
• Omid Safi
• Iran
• Radical Love
• Ali Shariati
• SAND Community Gathering
• Spiritual Inquiry

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: SAND

Books & works: Rumi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam, Forough Farrokhzad

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