What Iran Is Actually Saying
Iran's five conditions for ending the war aren't irrational. The US just doesn't speak the language.
Iran’s five conditions for ending the war have been called irrational, outrageous, and delusional. Cable news anchors shake their heads. Columnists reach for words like “hostage-taking” and “extortion.” Members of Congress compete to sound the most appalled. The consensus is broad and comfortable: these people are crazy.
They demand the attacks stop. They require guarantees the war won’t be restarted the moment it’s convenient. They insist on compensation for the damage. They refuse any settlement that doesn’t cover all fronts — not just the one the US feels like negotiating. And they assert their sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway they have controlled for centuries.
Does that sound crazy? Ask the people making the demands what happens when they try to negotiate instead.
On 1 April 2026, an airstrike hit the Tehran home of Kamal Kharazi — Iran’s former foreign minister, head of the Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, and an adviser to the late Supreme Leader. His wife was killed. He was pulled from the rubble gravely wounded. Just weeks earlier, he had told CNN: “Trump had been deceiving others and not keeping with his promises, and we experienced this in two times of negotiations — that while we were engaged in negotiation, they struck us.”¹
That sentence is not propaganda. It is a factual description of what happened — twice. And it was spoken by a man whose home has now been bombed.
Set aside, for a moment, everything you think you know about Iran. Set aside the cable news framing and the congressional sound bites and the op-eds that treat the Islamic Republic as a monolith of irrationality. Ask a simpler question: if a country were attacked during active peace negotiations, its leader killed on the first day, its universities and hospitals bombed, its civilians buried under rubble — what would that country ask for before it agreed to stop fighting?
It would ask for exactly what Iran is asking for.
The problem is not that Iran’s demands are irrational. The problem is that the United States does not understand the framework that produced them — the civilisational identity, the moral logic, the cultural and religious architecture through which Iran processes conflict, obligation, and resolution. And because the US does not understand that framework, it cannot read what Iran is saying. It hears noise where there is signal. It sees madness where there is a coherent tradition older than most Western legal systems.
This is not a defence of the Islamic Republic. This is not an argument that Iran’s government is just or its conduct beyond reproach. This is something more basic: you cannot negotiate with someone whose language you refuse to learn. And right now, the United States — from the Oval Office to the Pentagon briefing room to the Fox News desk — is negotiating blind, with a country it has decided in advance is incapable of reason.
That is not strategy. It is arrogance. And it has a cost that is measured in the lives of the people on both sides who will die while their leaders talk past each other in languages neither has bothered to understand.
The country the United States is bombing is not the country the United States thinks it is bombing.
Ask most Americans what they know about Iran and the answers will cluster around 1979: the revolution, the hostages, the ayatollahs. Maybe the nuclear programme. Maybe Ahmadinejad. Iran, in the American imagination, begins with the Islamic Republic and extends no further. It is a theocracy, a rogue state, a problem to be managed. It has no depth. It has no past worth knowing.
Iran has a past worth knowing.
The Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great was the largest the world had seen when it was founded in the sixth century BCE — more than two thousand years before the United States existed. When Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he did something no conqueror before him had done: he freed the enslaved, permitted exiled peoples to return to their homelands, and declared that his subjects could worship as they chose. The decree he issued — inscribed on a clay cylinder now held in the British Museum, with a replica at the United Nations — has been called the first declaration of human rights.² Scholars debate that characterisation, and they should. But the impulse behind it — that governance requires tolerance, that empire is sustained by consent rather than coercion, that diverse peoples can be administered under a common framework of justice — is not debatable. It happened. It was Persian. And it predated the Magna Carta by nearly two thousand years.
This is not ancient trivia. It is the civilisational identity that Iranians carry with them every day. Persian contributions to mathematics, astronomy, medicine, poetry, architecture, and philosophy shaped the foundations of what the West claims as its own intellectual heritage. The algorithms that power your phone trace their name to the Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi. The medical canon that European universities taught for centuries was written by the Persian physician Ibn Sina. The poetry of Rumi — the best-selling poet in America — is Persian. The gardens that gave English the word “paradise” are Persian.³
When Iran’s leaders speak about sovereignty, dignity, and the right to be treated as equals, they are not posturing. They are speaking from a civilisational memory that stretches back millennia — a memory that regards the current conflict not as a dispute between a superpower and a rogue state, but as an assault by a country barely two and a half centuries old on one of the oldest continuous civilisations on earth.
The American reader does not have to agree with that framing. But they need to know it exists. Because every signal Iran sends — every condition it sets, every demand it makes, every refusal to beg — is shaped by it. Miss this, and you will misread everything that follows.
Now place yourself inside Iran on the morning of 28 February 2026.
Negotiations were underway. Not hypothetical negotiations. Not back-channel feelers. Actual, mediated, internationally witnessed talks aimed at preventing a war. Three rounds of Omani-mediated indirect negotiations had taken place — the first in Muscat on 6 February, the second and third in Geneva on 17 and 26 February. On the eve of the third round, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told India Today that a deal was achievable and warned that war would be “devastating.”⁴ After the Geneva session concluded on 26 February, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi reported “significant progress.” Technical teams were scheduled to meet in Vienna the following week to begin drafting an agreement. On 27 February — one day before the strikes — Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News in Washington and told the American public that a peace deal was “within our reach.” He disclosed that Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium, to downgrade its existing stockpiles, and to submit to full IAEA verification.⁵
On 28 February, the United States and Israel struck. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day.⁶ Schools were hit. Hospitals were hit. Residential buildings were hit. Cultural heritage sites were hit. Within hours, Iran’s national security council issued a statement promising retaliation, and the country was at war — a war it had been actively trying to prevent through the very diplomatic channels the US claims to value.
From inside Iran, the sequence is not ambiguous. They were negotiating. They had made concessions. A mediator was on American television saying it was working. And then they were bombed. The supreme leader was assassinated. Their cities were on fire.
The US calls this a pre-emptive strike. Iran calls it a betrayal — an attack launched under cover of a peace process. And the historical record gives Iran’s reading considerable weight: the June 2025 ceasefire had already collapsed after eight months. The JCPOA — the nuclear deal Iran negotiated, signed, and complied with — was unilaterally abandoned by the US in 2018 while Iran was still in compliance. From Tehran’s perspective, the pattern is not complicated. The United States negotiates until it decides not to. Then it attacks. Then it asks to negotiate again.
That is the context in which Iran’s conditions were issued. Not in a vacuum. Not from a position of irrational aggression. From the wreckage of a peace process that was working until the other side decided to start killing people instead.
And the killing has not stopped at military targets. Ali Larijani — secretary of the supreme national security council, former speaker of parliament, former chief nuclear negotiator, the man who helped steer the JCPOA — was killed by an Israeli airstrike on 17 March 2026.⁷ His son died with him. His bodyguards died with him. He was the tenth senior Iranian official killed since the war began. He had been seen days earlier walking the streets of Tehran during the Quds Day rally. He had been considered one of the more pragmatic figures in the Iranian establishment — a man who might have brokered a transition at the end of the conflict. Israel killed him anyway. The US had placed a $10 million bounty on his head.⁸
Iran’s national security council announced his death in the language of martyrdom: “After a lifetime of struggle for the advancement of Iran and of the Islamic Revolution, he ultimately attained his long-held aspiration, answered the divine call, and honourably achieved the sweet grace of martyrdom in the trench of service.”⁹
Western audiences hear that language and dismiss it as propaganda. It is not propaganda. It is how Iran processes the death of its people. Martyrdom in the Islamic tradition is not a euphemism for dying. It is a theological category — it confers honour on the dead and obligation on the living. Every official killed, every civilian buried under rubble, every student who died when a university was hit — their deaths create a moral debt. In Iran’s framework, the blood of the innocent is not “collateral damage” to be regretted in a press briefing and moved past. It is an obligation. The dead have rights. The living owe them justice.
This is the worldview that produced the five conditions. Not madness. Not theocratic delusion. A civilisation processing an act of aggression through a moral framework in which unpunished harm to the innocent is an offence against God, and unanswered blood is unfinished business.
On 25 March 2026, as reported by Press TV and confirmed by NPR, Al Jazeera, CNBC, and PBS, a senior Iranian political-security official set out five conditions for ending the war.¹⁰ Foreign Minister Araghchi insisted these were not “conditions” but “what reason dictates” — a phrase that carries more weight than Western audiences realise. In Iran’s intellectual tradition, reason and faith are not opposed. What reason dictates and what God requires are understood to converge. Araghchi was not making a rhetorical point. He was invoking a framework.¹¹
Here are the five conditions, and what each one actually means.
Stop attacking us.
This is not a negotiating position. It is a moral starting point.
In Iran’s framework — shaped by both Islamic theology and Persian civilisational identity — war is only legitimate as defence. The Quran is explicit: fight those who fight you, but do not transgress.¹² The prohibition on aggression is not a guideline. It is a boundary with the force of divine command behind it. The demand that the aggressor stop is not the first item on a wish list. It is the precondition for any conversation at all.
Western audiences hear “stop the attacks” and think: of course, that’s what ceasefires are for. But Iran is not asking for a ceasefire. It is asserting a principle — that the party who started the killing has a moral obligation to stop before anything else can be discussed. From inside this framework, asking Iran to negotiate while the bombs are still falling is not diplomacy. It is asking the victim to set terms while being beaten.
Araghchi’s insistence that these are “what reason dictates” rather than conditions makes sense here. Iran is not bargaining. It is stating what it considers self-evident: the aggressor stops first. Everything else follows from that.
Guarantee it won’t happen again.
This is the condition that reveals most clearly why the US and Iran are talking past each other.
Iran is not asking for a ceasefire. Araghchi has said this repeatedly, in interviews with NBC, CBS, Al Jazeera, and the BBC: “We do not want a ceasefire. We want the war to end in a way that it does not repeat.”¹³ The distinction matters enormously, and the US either does not understand it or has decided it does not care.
A ceasefire is a pause. Iran has seen what American pauses look like. The JCPOA — the nuclear deal Iran negotiated, signed, and complied with — was unilaterally abandoned by the US in 2018 while Iran was still in compliance, because a new president decided his predecessor’s agreement was inconvenient.¹⁴ The June 2025 ceasefire lasted eight months before the US and Israel struck again.¹⁵ Now, in 2026, negotiations were underway — three rounds of Omani-mediated talks, technical teams scheduled for Vienna — and the US launched a war in the middle of them.
The pattern, from Iran’s perspective, is not complicated: the US negotiates until it decides not to. Then it attacks. Then it asks to negotiate again. And the people who do the negotiating get killed.
Ali Larijani — former chief nuclear negotiator, the man who helped steer the JCPOA — killed by an Israeli airstrike alongside his son on 17 March 2026.¹⁶ Kamal Kharazi — former foreign minister, head of the Strategic Council on Foreign Relations — pulled from the rubble of his own home on 1 April 2026, gravely wounded, his wife dead beside him. Weeks earlier, Kharazi had told CNN he saw “no room for diplomacy” with the US, but had also been quoted saying Iran had not shut down all avenues for negotiation.¹⁷ Both men were among the more pragmatic figures in Iran’s establishment. Both were seen as potential bridges to a settlement. Both were targeted.
So when Iran demands “concrete mechanisms to ensure the war is not reimposed” — it is not being difficult. It is responding rationally to a demonstrated pattern. In Iran’s legal and moral tradition, a binding agreement is fundamentally different from a truce. A truce is a pause in fighting — temporary, revocable, built on nothing but the other side’s word. What Iran is asking for is a contractual commitment with structural guarantees and enforceable consequences for violation.¹⁸ The historical model they draw from — the Treaty of Hudaybiyya of 628 CE — is a case in which the Prophet Muhammad accepted disadvantageous terms to secure a genuine, binding peace. Not a tactical pause. An end.¹⁹
Iran has watched the US break the JCPOA. It has watched the US break the June 2025 ceasefire. It has watched the US launch a war during active negotiations. It has watched its negotiators get killed. The demand for structural guarantees is not obstruction. It is the rational response of a country that has learned, through repeated experience, that American promises have an expiration date — and that expiration date is whenever America decides it is.
Pay for the damage — because the dead have rights.
This is the condition Western audiences are most likely to dismiss, and the one they most need to understand.
Iran’s demand for reparations is not a financial shakedown. It is a moral claim rooted in a principle that predates Western tort law by centuries: when you harm someone, you owe them. Not an apology. Not a press conference expressing regret. A material acknowledgment of what was done, with consequences attached.
In Iran’s moral tradition, the response to harm follows a hierarchy. The victim has the right to proportional retribution — but compensation is preferred, and forgiveness is praised as the highest response.²⁰ Forgiveness, however, is a choice the victim makes. It is not something the aggressor gets to claim by default. You do not get to bomb a country’s universities, hospitals, and homes, kill its leader, kill its negotiators, kill its civilians — and then expect the conversation to move on because you are ready to move on.
The dead have rights. That is not a metaphor in Iran’s framework. It is a legal and theological principle. Every civilian killed, every student buried under a collapsed university, every family destroyed by a strike on a residential building — their blood creates an obligation that does not expire when the news cycle moves on. Unanswered blood is unfinished business. For Iran, moving forward without that acknowledgment is not pragmatism. It is moral capitulation — a betrayal of the dead by the living.
And before anyone dismisses this as uniquely Islamic or exotic: the West knows exactly how this works. The Treaty of Versailles extracted 132 billion gold marks from Germany.²¹ The UN Compensation Commission made Iraq pay $52.4 billion to Kuwait over thirty-one years — funded by Iraqi oil revenue — for the damage caused by its invasion.²² Libya paid $2.7 billion for the Lockerbie bombing — $10 million per victim.²³ The United States designed those enforcement mechanisms. It built them. It operated them. It collected the money.
Iran is asking for the same thing. The only difference is who is asking.
Everyone at the table, or nobody.
Iran will not make a deal that leaves Hezbollah, the Houthis, or Iraqi militias exposed. Araghchi told Al Jazeera: “We don’t believe in a ceasefire. We believe in ending the war on all fronts … and that we witness peace throughout the region, in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Iran and other countries of the region.”²⁴
Western analysts hear this as obstruction — Iran linking unrelated conflicts to complicate negotiations. But inside Iran’s framework, these conflicts are not unrelated. They are threads in a single fabric. The groups Iran supports are not pawns to be sacrificed in a bilateral deal. They are allies under fire, and the prohibition on abandoning allies is foundational.
This principle goes back to the Constitution of Medina — the earliest Islamic political charter, which bound diverse tribal and religious communities into a mutual defence pact. The principle it established is simple: you do not make peace for yourself while your people are still at war. Leaving your allies behind is not pragmatism. It is dishonour.²⁵
The strategic dimension is real — Iran understands that the US wants to peel off its allies one by one through bilateral agreements, isolating each in turn. But the refusal is not purely strategic. It reflects a worldview in which solidarity under fire is a moral obligation, not a negotiating chip. The theological and the strategic align — and when they align, they reinforce each other in ways that make the position unshakeable from the inside, even when it looks inflexible from the outside.
The West, again, already understands this concept. The Allies did not negotiate with Germany while leaving Japan out of the conversation. NATO is a mutual defence pact — an attack on one is an attack on all. The principle of comprehensive settlement is not alien to Western diplomacy. It is just considered unreasonable when Iran invokes it.
Recognise our sovereignty over Hormuz.
This is the demand that generates the most outrage and requires the least explanation.
Iran has controlled the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz for centuries. The strait’s shipping lanes pass through Iranian and Omani territorial waters. The demand is not for new territory. It is for acknowledgment of something that already exists — and has existed for longer than the United States has been a country.²⁶
The monetisation angle — Iran charging ships for passage — has drawn particular fury. But Egypt charges for the Suez Canal and earns $700–800 million a month from it.²⁷ Turkey controls the Bosporus under the Montreux Convention of 1936.²⁸ Nobody calls them rogue states. Nobody calls their sovereignty over a strategic waterway irrational. The principle that a nation can regulate and profit from a waterway that passes through its territorial waters is established international practice — when Western-aligned nations do it.
Iran sees Hormuz as two things simultaneously: a sovereign right and a guarantee. If the US breaks its word again — as it broke the JCPOA, as it broke the June 2025 ceasefire, as it broke the Geneva negotiations — Iran retains leverage that does not depend on American honesty. Hormuz is the guarantee Iran can enforce itself, because it has learned that guarantees dependent on American goodwill have a shelf life measured in election cycles.
The legal picture is genuinely complicated — Iran signed but never ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and its position that innocent passage rather than transit passage applies gives it broader regulatory authority than most maritime lawyers would accept.²⁹ This article is not going to resolve that legal dispute. But the reader should understand that the demand itself — sovereignty over a waterway that passes through your territory — is not radical. It is normal. It is only treated as outrageous because Iran is the one asserting it.
There is something else nobody in Western media has identified, and it may be the most important signal Iran is sending.
Iran has anchored its conduct in international law from the start. Araghchi invokes illegality constantly. The war violates the UN Charter. It violates the sovereignty of a member state. It was launched during active negotiations. Iran’s public position — repeated in interviews with NBC, CBS, Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNN, and India Today — is that it is the aggrieved party operating within the law, responding to an illegal war of aggression.
But where Iran has deviated from international law, it has done so with a specific and consistent logic: it mirrors. It waits for the other side to cross a line, and then it crosses the same line — and only that line.
On 7 March, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi accused the US of striking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island, cutting water to thirty villages. His statement on X was precise: “The US set this precedent, not Iran.”³⁰ The next day, an Iranian drone hit a desalination plant in Bahrain.³¹ When Israel struck the Mobarakeh and Khuzestan steel plants, Iran declared six steel plants in Israel and five regional countries as retaliatory targets.³² When coalition strikes hit the South Pars gas field, Iran struck the Haifa oil refineries.³³ When strikes hit the Natanz nuclear facility, Iran fired on Dimona — the site of Israel’s own nuclear programme.³⁴ When the Tehran University of Science and Technology and Isfahan University of Technology were struck, the IRGC declared all American and Israeli universities in the region legitimate targets, and gave the US until noon on 30 March to officially condemn the bombing of Iranian universities — or face retaliation.³⁵
The pattern is not escalation. It is equivalence. Iran waits for the other side to open a category of target, and then it responds within that category. Desalination for desalination. Steel for steel. Gas for oil. Nuclear for nuclear. University for university.
Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, made the principle explicit on 10 March: the Islamic Republic would apply an “eye for an eye” policy.³⁶ He repeated it a week later. The phrase is not a metaphor. It is a direct reference to the Quranic principle of proportional retribution — respond with the equivalent of what was done to you, no more. The Arabic term is qisas: like for like, measured, bounded.³⁷
Whether you agree with this or not — and there are strong arguments against it, particularly when the “equivalent” targets are in countries that did not start the war — it is a coherent moral framework. It is operating. It is shaping targeting decisions in real time. Iran sees itself as the disciplined party in this conflict — the one that held to international law until the other side violated it, then applied its own principle of equivalence category by category. The US hits whatever it wants and calls it strategy. Iran hits the equivalent and calls it justice.
The reader does not need to accept Iran’s framing to understand that it exists. But they do need to understand that it exists — because it is shaping every signal Iran sends, and the US is either not seeing it or has decided it does not matter. Both options lead to the same place: a negotiating table where one side does not understand the language the other side is speaking.
The United States is in a war it launched during a peace process, against a country whose civilisational identity it does not understand, whose moral framework it has never bothered to learn, and whose conditions for ending the war it has dismissed as irrational — while making identical demands every time it finds itself in the same position.
This is not the first time.
The United States invaded Vietnam — a civilisation with a thousand years of resistance to foreign domination — and reduced it to a domino on a board game. It lost. It invaded Afghanistan — a civilisation at the crossroads of Persian, Central Asian, and Indian cultures, governed by tribal structures, honour codes, and community obligations the US never made any effort to understand. It spent twenty years there. It built nothing that lasted. It left. It invaded Iraq — Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation, the land of Babylon and the Abbasid Caliphate that preserved and advanced the knowledge Europe forgot during the Dark Ages. It dismantled the state, disbanded the army, and imposed a governance model with no understanding of the sectarian, tribal, and religious dynamics that actually hold Iraqi society together. It created ISIS. And now it is bombing Iran — one of the oldest continuous civilisations on earth — and it cannot tell you what the other side’s conditions mean, where they come from, or why they take the form they do.
The pattern is not complicated. Ancient civilisation with deep internal logic. American intervention with no cultural literacy. Catastrophic failure. Withdrawal. And then the same mistake again, somewhere else, against someone else the US has decided in advance is incapable of reason. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq. Iran. The laboratory changes. The experiment is always the same. And it always fails — because the United States does not lose wars on the battlefield. It loses them at the negotiating table, where it sits down across from people it has never bothered to understand and discovers, too late, that it doesn’t speak the language.
Iran’s five conditions are not crazy. They are the product of a civilisation processing an act of aggression through a framework built on three things the US has refused to engage with: a civilisational pride that stretches back thousands of years and will not accept being treated as a subordinate; a religious and moral obligation to the innocent dead that does not expire when the news cycle moves on; and a principle of proportional, bounded response that Iran has applied with more consistency than the country bombing it.
Every one of these conditions has a Western precedent. Reparations — Versailles, Kuwait, Lockerbie. Structural guarantees against recurrence — NATO, the Marshall Plan. Sovereignty over a strategic waterway — Suez, the Bosporus. Comprehensive settlement covering all fronts — the Allied settlement of the Second World War. The demands are not foreign. They are only treated as foreign because Iran is the one making them.
You do not have to agree with Iran to understand Iran. But you do have to understand Iran to negotiate with Iran. And right now, the United States is not even trying. It has decided in advance that the other side is incapable of reason, and it is conducting its diplomacy accordingly. The results are on the evening news every night. They were on the evening news after Saigon. They were on the evening news after Kabul. They were on the evening news after Baghdad. And they will be on the evening news after Tehran — because the United States refuses to learn the lesson that every failed war has tried to teach it.
Understanding is not agreement. Understanding is not sympathy. Understanding is the minimum requirement for competent diplomacy. And the United States has never met it. Not in Vietnam. Not in Afghanistan. Not in Iraq. Not now.
That failure has a name. It is called arrogance. And it is measured in bodies.
If this resonated with you, consider sharing it — that’s how the fire spreads.
James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Banner image: Azadi Tower, Tehran, October 2020. Photograph by Mojde fr / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Endnotes
¹ Kamal Kharazi, interview with CNN, quoted in Al Jazeera, “Iran’s ex-foreign minister Kharazi ‘gravely wounded’ in attack on his home,” 2 April 2026. Kharazi’s home in Tehran was struck on 1 April 2026; his wife was killed and he was hospitalised with serious injuries.
² The Cyrus Cylinder (539 BCE) is held in the British Museum, with a replica at the United Nations headquarters in New York. It has been widely described as the first declaration of human rights, a characterisation promoted by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in the 1960s and endorsed by the British Museum for its US tour in 2013. Specialist scholars on the Persian Empire, including the British Museum’s own C.B.F. Walker, have noted that the cylinder is more accurately described as a building inscription in the Babylonian tradition. The debate over its characterisation does not diminish the substance of its content — religious tolerance, the return of exiled peoples, the restoration of temples — which was remarkable for its time.
³ The word “paradise” derives from the Old Persian pairidaēza, meaning an enclosed garden. Al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–850 CE), born in Khwarazm (modern Uzbekistan) in the Persian cultural sphere, gave his name to the concept of the algorithm; his work Kitāb al-Jabr also gave English the word “algebra.” Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037 CE), a Persian polymath born near Bukhara, authored The Canon of Medicine, which remained a standard medical textbook in European universities into the seventeenth century. Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, 1207–1273) has been described as the best-selling poet in the United States; see Rozina Ali, “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi,” The New Yorker, 5 January 2017.
⁴ Araghchi’s pre-Geneva comments reported by India Today, 25 February 2026. He warned that war would be “devastating” and stated that a deal was achievable.
⁵ Al Busaidi’s CBS News appearance, 27 February 2026. He described the talks as “really advanced, substantially” and disclosed Iran’s agreement to never stockpile enriched uranium, downgrade existing stockpiles, and accept full IAEA verification. See also Al Jazeera, “Peace ‘within reach’ as Iran agrees no nuclear material stockpile: Oman FM,” 28 February 2026.
⁶ US-Israeli strikes on Iran began 28 February 2026. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day. See Congressional Research Service, “U.S. Conflict with Iran,” R48887, 26 March 2026; Wikipedia, “2026 Iran war.”
⁷ Ali Larijani killed by Israeli airstrike, 17 March 2026. His son and bodyguards died with him. He was the tenth senior Iranian official killed since the war began. Patrick Wintour and Lorenzo Tondo, “Iran’s national security council confirms death of its chief, Ali Larijani,” The Guardian, 17 March 2026.
⁸ The US offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on senior Iranian military and intelligence officials, including Larijani, as part of a list of ten figures linked to the IRGC. The Guardian, 17 March 2026.
⁹ Statement of Iran’s supreme national security council on Larijani’s death, quoted in The Guardian, 17 March 2026.
¹⁰ Iran’s five conditions reported by Press TV, citing a senior Iranian political-security official, 25 March 2026. Confirmed by NPR, Al Jazeera, CNBC, and PBS.
¹¹ Araghchi’s “what reason dictates” phrasing reflects the concept of maṣlaḥa (public interest/welfare) in Islamic jurisprudence — a foundational principle in which reasoned assessment of the common good is a legitimate source of legal and policy guidance. In Twelver Shi’a jurisprudence, the role of ʿaql (reason) as an independent source of law is a distinguishing feature of the Ja’fari school.
¹² Quran 2:190: “Fight in the way of God those who fight you, but do not transgress. Indeed, God does not love transgressors.” The word ʿudwān (transgression/aggression) carries legal weight across all major schools of Islamic jurisprudence, including the Ja’fari (Twelver Shi’a) school that governs Iranian law. See N.A. Shah, “Use of Force under Islamic Law,” European Journal of International Law, vol. 24, no. 1, 2013.
¹³ Araghchi’s rejection of a ceasefire in favour of a permanent end to the war stated in interviews with NBC (”Meet the Press,” 8 March 2026), CBS (”Face the Nation,” 15 March 2026), Al Jazeera (18 March 2026), and at his weekly press conference in Tehran (16 March 2026, reported by Xinhua).
¹⁴ Trump announced US withdrawal from the JCPOA on 8 May 2018. At the time, the IAEA confirmed Iran was in compliance. General Joseph Dunford and Secretary of State Pompeo both acknowledged Iran’s compliance. See Jim’s “Just for Fun: The War in Iran, Part II” (Fireline Press) for detailed documentation.
¹⁵ The June 2025 ceasefire (Twelve-Day War ceasefire) was brokered by Qatar on 24 June 2025. Trump declared it a “victory for everybody.” The US and Israel struck Iran again on 28 February 2026, approximately eight months later.
¹⁶ Larijani killing: see endnote 7.
¹⁷ Kharazi attack and CNN interview: see endnote 1. Additional reporting: Shargh, Etemad, and Ham Mihan newspapers confirmed Kharazi’s hospitalisation. Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall, reporting from Tehran, confirmed the attack and Kharazi’s grave injuries.
¹⁸ In Islamic jurisprudence, ṣulḥ (conciliatory agreement) is a contractual commitment distinct from hudna (temporary truce). It must fulfil three conditions: (1) terms must be clearly quantified to exclude ambiguity; (2) the agreement must not involve anything forbidden; (3) it must not waive something that cannot be alienated.
¹⁹ The Treaty of Hudaybiyya (Ṣulḥ al-Ḥudaybiyya, 628 CE) was a ten-year peace agreement between the Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh of Mecca. Muhammad accepted terms widely regarded as disadvantageous to secure a binding peace. The treaty was broken by the Quraysh, not by the Muslims — a point consistently misrepresented in counter-Islam literature. See Mustafa Abu-Sway’s analysis (Palestine-Israel Journal).
²⁰ Quran 2:178 establishes the hierarchy: qisas (proportional retribution) is permitted for intentional harm, but diyya (compensation) is preferred, and ʿafwa (forgiveness) is praised as the highest response. The concept of diyya applies to any harm caused, not only homicide, and functions as restorative rather than punitive justice.
²¹ Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919), Article 231 (the “War Guilt Clause”) and Articles 232–247 established Germany’s obligation to pay reparations. The London Schedule of Payments (1921) set the amount at 132 billion gold marks (approximately $33 billion at the time).
²² United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC), established 1991 under Security Council Resolution 687. Iraq paid $52.4 billion to approximately 1.5 million successful claimants over 31 years, funded by Iraqi oil revenue. Iraq completed its final payment in January 2022. See UN News, “Iraq makes final reparation payment to Kuwait for 1990 invasion,” 9 February 2022.
²³ Libya’s Lockerbie settlement: $2.7 billion ($10 million per victim of Pan Am Flight 103), finalised 2003, with additional payments through a $1.5 billion fund established in 2008 covering Lockerbie, the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing, and UTA Flight 772. See Kreindler & Kreindler case history; Al Jazeera, “$2.7billion Lockerbie settlement reached,” 14 August 2003.
²⁴ Araghchi interview with Al Jazeera, 18 March 2026. See also “Iran rules out ceasefire: Araghchi says aim is to end war ‘on all fronts,’” The National, 18 March 2026.
²⁵ The Constitution of Medina (al-Ṣaḥīfah, c. 622 CE) established a mutual defence pact among the diverse tribal and religious communities of Medina, including Muslim, Jewish, and pagan groups. Its provisions included collective defence obligations and prohibited separate peace agreements that would leave allied parties exposed.
²⁶ Iran’s control of the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz is longstanding. In 1971, Iran took control of the Greater and Lesser Tunbs islands west of Hormuz, extending its control of the navigation channels. Both Iran and Oman expanded their territorial seas to 12 nautical miles, effectively closing the strait under their combined territorial waters by 1972. See Wikipedia, “Strait of Hormuz”; Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “Clarifying Freedom of Navigation in the Gulf,” July 2019.
²⁷ Egypt’s Suez Canal revenue: $700–800 million per month in a typical year, though revenues dropped sharply during 2024–2025 due to Red Sea disruptions. See CNN, “Iran has a new demand to end the war — and it could bring in billions,” 28 March 2026.
²⁸ The Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits (20 July 1936) governs passage through the Turkish Straits (Bosporus and Dardanelles), granting Turkey sovereignty and regulatory authority over the waterway while permitting certain categories of transit.
²⁹ Iran signed UNCLOS in 1982 with a declaration that only states parties would benefit from its provisions, including transit passage rights. Iran enacted a 1993 national maritime law asserting the right to require prior authorisation for warships and nuclear-powered vessels exercising passage through its territorial waters. The US has not ratified UNCLOS but treats transit passage as customary international law. See EJIL Talk, “The Legality of Iran’s Closure of the Strait of Hormuz,” March 2026; Lawfare, “The Strait of Hormuz and the Limits of Maritime Law,” March 2026; ASIL Insights, “Transit Passage Rights in the Strait of Hormuz.”
³⁰ Araghchi statement on X, 7 March 2026, following the alleged US strike on a desalination plant on Qeshm Island: “Water supply in 30 villages has been impacted. Attacking Iran’s infrastructure is a dangerous move with grave consequences. The US set this precedent, not Iran.” See Al Jazeera, “Schools, water, industry: What civilian targets have US, Israel, Iran hit?,” 30 March 2026; Wikipedia, “2026 Qeshm Island desalination plant attack.”
³¹ Bahrain Interior Ministry statement, 8 March 2026, confirming Iranian drone damage to a desalination plant. See Al Jazeera, “Bahrain says water desalination plant damaged in Iranian drone attack,” 8 March 2026.
³² Israel struck the Mobarakeh and Khuzestan steel plants in Iran. In response, Iran declared six steel plants in Israel and five regional countries as retaliatory targets. See Tasnim News Agency, reported in CNN, “Airports, plants and ports: The civilian targets increasingly under threat in the Middle East,” 30 March 2026.
³³ Iran struck the Haifa oil refineries in response to coalition strikes on the South Pars gas field. See Ynet News, “’The fire isn’t random’: Iran’s retaliation strategy shows command and control still intact,” 1 April 2026.
³⁴ Iran fired on Dimona — the site of Israel’s nuclear research centre — in response to strikes on the Natanz nuclear facility. See Ynet News, 1 April 2026.
³⁵ IRGC statement declaring all American and Israeli universities in the region legitimate targets following strikes on Tehran University of Science and Technology and Isfahan University of Technology. The IRGC gave the US until 12:00 noon Iran Standard Time on 30 March to officially condemn the bombing of Iranian universities. See Inside Higher Ed, “Iran Targets U.S. Universities in the Middle East,” 30 March 2026; The Tribune (India), “All Israeli, US universities in region now ‘legitimate targets,’ warns Iran,” 30 March 2026.
³⁶ Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, 10 March 2026, declaring Iran would apply an “eye for an eye” policy. Repeated 17 March 2026. See Ynet News, 1 April 2026.
³⁷ Qisas (proportional retribution) is a Quranic legal principle (see Quran 2:178, 5:45) permitting response in kind — but only in kind. The principle establishes an upper bound on retaliation: the response may not exceed the original harm. In practice, compensation (diyya) and forgiveness (ʿafwa) are presented as preferable alternatives.