Articles

As the Iranian mullah regime continues its relentless near-daily hangings of Iranian teenagers and young people — most of them schoolchildren and university students — from cranes, the Trump Administration has effectively declared an all-out economic war against the Islamic Republic, as President Donald Trump stated unequivocally in the early hours of Thursday. At a press briefing, the White House chief announced that the United States would shortly impose 'unprecedented' economic sanctions designed to completely isolate Iran economically. Later on Thursday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — now a sworn enemy of the mullah regime — was even more explicit, stressing that 'Iran will face the most severe sanctions ever imposed on any country,' and adding that U.S. authorities will take measures against any country that continues to maintain trade relations with Iran.

During one of my visits to Canada, I stopped, as I usually do, at Volume bookstore, which carries valuable intellectual works that are no longer in print. There, I came across a small book by a Canadian author, Michel Poulin: Vivre et laisser vivre . I picked it up immediately because it deals with how people live together, what we in Lebanon call “coexistence.” The book’s central idea appears simple: my freedom ends where another person’s freedom begins. But the real question is: who determines those boundaries? The book rejects two extreme ideas: absolute freedom, which leads to chaos, and total control, which leads to repression. In place of these two, it proposes another form of freedom: “responsible freedom.”

One does not have to look far to see that several wars are being waged, with Iran’s blessing, across the Arab world and beyond. In Yemen, the Houthis are trying to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait by seeking to retake the Yemeni port of Mokha, from which they were driven in 2014 by local Yemeni forces backed by the United Arab Emirates. Will Iran manage to control both the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the gateway to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, through the Houthis in Yemen? Iran has made no secret of its decision to pursue an offensive policy on several fronts. But for the Revolutionary Guards, the priority today remains maintaining Iran’s grip on Iraq. A genuine struggle is underway there, centered on the weapons held by sectarian militias affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards. These militias were brought together under the banner of the “Popular Mobilization Forces,” which receive funding from the Iraqi state budget and seek to exercise over the state the same dominant role played by the Revolutionary Guards in Iran.

Some human beings resign themselves to their fate, while others take their destiny into their own hands. This is all the more difficult when you are a woman in a man's world. And yet… some have not hesitated — they have chosen to fight, managing to shatter the taboos and dictates of their time. Throughout history, women have refused to be mere footnotes. Whether wielding a paintbrush, a pen, science, or their voice, they inhabited their era with a boldness that sometimes bordered on scandal. They were wanted as muses — they became creators. They were expected to be submissive — they chose freedom. They were meant to be silenced — they proclaimed their convictions louder and stronger than ever.

Several diplomatic and military developments marked Wednesday in the Middle East, with renewed tensions between Israel and Turkey over the Syrian issue. The latest episode unfolded on Wednesday, a day after Israeli aircraft bombed the Abu al-Duhur air base in the Idlib province of northwestern Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that he had "clearly" communicated to Turkey that it should not establish a base in Syria, implicitly acknowledging the previous day's strike. At the same time, Israeli Chief of Staff General Eyal Zamir warned that his country would not tolerate the presence of any "hostile force" near its borders, speaking during a visit to Israeli troops deployed in southern Syria.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna. The first, at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini, was entitled “The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Ismaili Neoplatonism.” Its text is presented here in a revised and expanded version, as part of a series of ten articles. This series explores the intellectual landscape of Neoplatonism in Islam through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. Although both thinkers share a broad Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by a metaphysics of emanation, a hierarchy of being, and a synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, they develop two distinct philosophical projects: Avicenna within the Peripatetic tradition of falsafa , and al-Kirmānī within Ismaili theology. Despite their different intellectual contexts, their systems remain in constant dialogue around the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody two contrasting conceptions of the political, illuminating different ways of understanding the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the organization of the community. This article constitutes the seventh part of this ten-part series.