Mashhad

Don't bother me.

Today I was talking to a Mashadi boy.

He told me, our minhag in Mashad was even if we have a cup of milk, we wait three hours before we have meat.

I'm like, are you serious? This is like more makhmid than any book you'll find ever.

There's no book that writes such a minhag.

It's the Mashadis.

I said, what about Shabbat? That's our minhag.

No,

Uh, I wouldn't really bet on either of them.

Do you remember, were you in Mashhad when, uh, I talked to...

when Phil Giraldi and I were there?

Yeah, yeah.

And so Phil came up to me afterwards and he thanked me for saying that, and he said someone needed to say that.

Of course, Mikko Pelot, after I said that, tried to get me expelled from the conference.

Uh, I would be wandering around in the desert outside of Mashhad if it were up to Mikko Pelot.

Uh, but anyway, um, Phil went back.

And I believe that, first of all, that the son of Ali Khamenei, who is currently the supreme leader, is not in Tehran.

I believe he's in Mashhad.

Mashhad has long been prepared as the the place where the government will go when Tehran is put under risk.

And I believe that he operates with a shot.

It's an easier security environment for those who protect him.

And we know, I know how these strike packages are put together, having put together a couple myself.

You know, so we know a lot.

And the Mashhad construction was done in a similar time period to some of the sites that have already been struck, which implies that the potential of the engineering diagrams to have been compromised is real.

Some drivers were limited in how much they could buy.

The shortage hit other big cities too, like Mashhad and Kerman.

People panicked.

On August 25th, Tehran pumped almost seven million gallons of gas in a single day.

But when we're thinking about this increasingly restrictive and tightened regime of visas that have to be renewed constantly, of residency permits, there was more space for Afghans to be caught up in the dragnet of deportations.

So we had literally families of Afghans that had been living in Iran for decades being forced to leave their children that grew up in Iran, had never really known Afghanistan, very habituated to living Tehran or Mashhad or Isfahan, having to essentially come to terms to living now in what was for them a foreign country in Afghanistan.

The forced nature of the deportations tends to be absent from state media coverage.

[on radio]

This way, he wants to assure the clergy how important Islam as an essential foundation of Iranian society is to him, despite focusing his politics on the West.

With his public appearances and his annual pilgrimages to the city of Mashhad, which is one of the seven holy cities of Islam, he hopes to keep the clergy securely on his side.

He saw religion as his last line of defense.

He saw religion as his most powerful stronghold within the country.

Hmm

... that is the subject of my forthcoming book, and a facsimile edition was published in 2024 by, um, Professor Karimi-nia, who was the one who noticed it in the library in Mashhad and said, "Oh, this is..." So I think there, there are probably quite a few things that we don't know about, so I want to be cautious about saying we only have this many manuscripts.

No, that's great.

Yeah.

So-

Okay

... um, this is from the Mashhad Codex, which is that one in, in present-day Iran, and it is an erasure between two words that, uh, currently don't have anything in between them.

Maybe it's, I don't know the dimensions of it, but it's maybe about an inch or an inch and a half long, and something was clearly written there.

Iranian human rights activists have alleged that 23-year-old Najma Amini has been sentenced to death for blasphemy over a social media post.

She's being held in the Kilabad Central Prison in Mashhad.

Amini, an accounting student, received 12 years, six months, and one day in a separate revolutionary court case.

The charges include acting against national security and propaganda.

Amini told the court she posted the remarks while hallucinating after taking psychedelic mushrooms.

The judge rejected that defense.

Security forces arrested Amini on January 31st at the Ferdowsi Shopping Center in Mashhad during nationwide protests.

Rights monitors claimed she was held in isolation in a security ward for nearly three months.

Mohammad Javad Hajinijad, 30, from Jiroft, detained August 1st, and Malik Mohammad Shabaksh, 35, from Zahedan, detained July 29th.

For four others, Sadegh Safari, 34, from Esteban in Fars Province, Parson Ahad, 34, from Mashhad, Reza Badawi, 40, from Arak, and Hadi Safari, 50, from Delejan.

No arrest dates have been made public.

The NCRI stated it withheld the identities of additional detainees, citing protective concerns.