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the cenan empire was the the last Iranian Empire before the coming of Islam this family maintained uh hold on power for some 400 years it was a well organiz dynastic rule unlike Rome the cenans were the um the Prototype of um Iranian culture sort of ever ever since they uh they arose a lot of what we associate with um traditional um Persian stroke Iranian culture is is basically San that's the origin of the term the shaan Sha that's the old the King of Kings is the old Assyrian royal title which gets revived under Cyrus Dr Micha bner such a pleasure to have you on EPO times Persian it's a pleasure to be here thank you for inviting me Michael your main area of study was ancient Iran can you tell us more how you got interested in that subject and what Drew you in yeah well that's a very good question um I would say that my um earliest interest was in what you would call Classics it was Latin and Greek the language the culture um the history of the uh ancient world of the ancient Mediterranean and looming in the back crowned always was the Persian Empire and this was the case both from the very earliest days the um pelian war and uh all the rest of it all the way up to the you know the opening of the the Middle Ages and as interesting as Greece and Rome were I always thought that Iran was you know sort of the main uh show at the time and I wanted to know more about it so it was only a matter of time before uh I got to uh University when I thought that I should you know really seriously uh look into this and I began studying the language the classical language uh of uh uh Iran in the Middle Ages and everything just sort of went from there um eventually this turned into uh this turned into an interest in in in the sassanian world in the sort of pre-islamic uh Iran uh but that's a that's another story so um you had a book about the sasanian Empire so who are sasanians and um uh who were actually there and what is Empire important the cenan empire was the the last Iranian Empire before the coming of Islam so the dates there are sort of the early 3rd Century up until the death of the last cenan king in 651 which coincides with the Arab conquest of Iran they're called cenan because that's a family name um supposedly the the first king traced his lineage to a mysterious person called sasan which is the origin of uh sesanian exactly who this person was is not clear it's a bit of a mystery but there was some famous ancestor supposedly called saan this family maintained uh hold on power for some 400 years it was a well organized dynastic rule unlike Rome um closer to something that um you might find in sort of early modern Europe or uh you know Chinese dynastic rule um and it held good as I say for some for some 400 years it's the sort of prototype the cenans were of I would say a a well centralized you know organized uh Empire in late Antiquity which I think the Romans uh borrowed a lot from in in in their sort of military and and and civil organization but why why are they important in their own right the cenans were the um the Prototype of um Iranian culture sort of ever ever since they uh they arose a lot of what we associate with um traditional um Persian stroke Iranian culture is is basically cenan either in origin or the cenan state sort of codified it and and organized it and probably the most important example of that is the use of the term Iran uh Iran as the the name of the state this word is originally attested in zoroastrian scripture but it isn't uh associated with the previous two Iranian Empires this is something which the cenans seem to have uh put new life into or sort of attached to themselves for the first time this sort of uh scriptural zoroastrian idea of uh an Iranian Homeland they they use the term Iran or uh some Iran zamin or some sort of uh variation of that Aran Shah as well right exactly and it goes back to the um the scriptural term Aran V which is an avestan word and unfortunately I don't remember the exact uh scriptural reference but it's an idea that has a kind of religious tone to it that uh the Kings the cenan Kings used and it's stuck and it is still used to this day the Kings themselves they come from Persia which is a you know Force which is a essentially a a region or or province of sort of Greater uh Iran but um the uh the idea of a of a political order called Iran with a sort of mission in the world that is a basic basically a cenan idea um can you tell us a bit about the world in general at the time of sassanian Empire of course so the the most the most important thing to note I think is that Iran was a continental power um between roughly speaking Rome in the west and China in India uh in the East and then to the Northeast you have the sort of the step the the grasslands uh and deserts and so forth that stretch between basically Hungary all the way to um the borders of Korea basically and Iran's um purpose or Mission at the time was to sort of hold out amongst these sort of hostile Powers the most um hostile most dangerous of which were was the nomadic world of the north historians often place a lot of emphasis obviously on conflict with Rome since Roman historians were very keen to uh describe it um and that's practically the only notice that they took of their Iranian Neighbors when they were fighting but the nomads of the north uh posed a much greater threat the nomads would be well like um say the uh the hanss the um um the Turks before they the the the so-called um G Turk Empire before they moved Far West basically um the the people who inhabited the sort of um grasslands and and deserts sort of northeast of uh of Iran in what is now Central Asia um maybe sort of um the areas like tur Turkmenistan usbekistan Kazakhstan all the way uh into sort of sang and the borders of of China and many different peoples lived there but that was where the biggest threat was for uh Iran and otherwise you have the organizing principle within the Roman and Iranian States is basically a kind of state um religion in the case of um Rome in late Antiquity most obviously and famously it was Christianity in uh Iran it was Zoroastrianism and the cenan the rise of the cenan state seems to be associated with a a kind of Revival of Zoroastrianism after what seems like a period of disorganization and it's arguably the uh this sort of Revival uh under the first king ardashir the first uh that inspires the sort of constantinian uh Revolution to establish Christianity as a as a kind of ideology of of State um but the this idea of a kind of codifying of of of religion and a sort of unifying it with the uh uh the the ruling uh ruling Elite and so forth this was the this is a sort of conspicuous feature of late antique life and it's arguable that the cenan state started it so if you want to say one specific things about uh sasanians what would be that well let's compare them to Rome they are absolutely the the military equal if not um the Superior in some eras uh to the Roman State and they were no less sophisticated in in every other um capacity if you compare something like uh coinage between the two empires you find that Rome Rome obviously had um some sort of centralized uh uh capacity for for minting coins and sort of circulating them throughout the Empire but the the value of the coinage is constantly getting debased and and sort of fluctuating this there was a lot of inflation from time to time and it took a long time to get a kind of something approaching a uniform uh policy of Taxation that isn't the case in in Iran of the cenan period the coins were issued in in a very pure uh form of silver which didn't waver very much um which is certainly a sign of strong State capacity and and the unfortunately we know very little about the taxation system but since the coinage is so well attested within Iran and and we still find it quite far a field and the Purity hardly wavers that there must have been quite a stable uh fiscal system as well as a very strong uh bureaucracy and sort of civil Administration to organize all this their most impressive uh Feats though are probably U military the state the cenan state seems to have been very well organized for Warfare and consistently with some notable exceptions uh fought either fought Rome to a standstill or eventually in the uh early 7th Century conquered most of uh the Roman State up to the borders of uh uh up to this the U region of of Constantinople which is the capital at the time and you know there was uh as it seemed at the time it look you know it looked like that the cenan world was going to sort of permanently swallow up Rome and and uh you know sort of rule uh rule over the two empires uh as though the first and largest Iranian Empire founded by Cyrus had had returned but that wasn't to be the cenan state after that point is best remembered for um essentially ushering in the Arab conquest of Iran or I'm not sure necessarily ushering in is the right word but they they they fell to the uh Arab power after a great deal of uh resistance and fighting and it was um ultimately the U memory of the old cenan state that gave the uh the eventually gave the Arab Empire it sort of impetus for um uh statecraft and and sort of cultural uh Revival and so forth so you called your book The Last Empire of Iran in what sense uh is it the last it's a good question some people have uh quarreled with the title of my book because they say well it wasn't really the last empire there there were others and you know even um the gajar state they called themselves an Empire so yes I'm aware of that but the point is that there are two senses in which the cenans were last the most obvious one is that they're the last before the coming of Islam but they're also looking back in a kind of mystical religious sense to that to that idea of the of the uh Aran V which you could which gets translated as Iran Shah or Iran Zin they're looking back to this um religious concept and the kings of the cenan family are purporting to revive it or to create a political analog to this religious concept now they may not have as far as we know they may not have been the first to to attempt to do that but they were the last they were the last to invoke that ancient zoroastrian uh concept uh and sincerely attempt to uh to revive it Michael tell us about your approach to history when you wrote your book how did you treat your resources your sources that's a very good question the the the principal problem in writing um the history of Iran before Islam is that there AR aren't very many historical sources um that that are indigenous to Iran and that are um very few that were written in Middle persan there are the um inscriptions of the cenan kings that go back um to the early days of the Empire you find them at um nakam and nak rajab is that a real place or have I got that wrong they're all all in and around there in in um uh Southwestern Iran in fars and the there are some that are sort of attached or sort of added to the um uh ancient Aid uh monuments um like the uh u c z for example there's a that's a very old monument and C those sort of middle Persian inscriptions attached to it um those are useful they're in fact essential but they only crop up in the early days of the the Dynasty and later on we don't have um that sort of thing we have coins obviously um and we have a handful of monuments but you know very very few because they haven't um survived survived because they weren't built out of stone and there are no books or at least very few books there's very little um middle Persian pavi literature that has survived what has survived though seemed to be recycled accounts that were once in um they were they were once in middle of Persian and then they it seems as though they were par paraphrased or translated to some extent into Arabic um in the you know maybe late umad early Abbasid period these crop up uh most famously in the work of tab the um 10th 10th Century scholar but there are there are earlier accounts the very first of which is in a history by a Persian scholar by the name of dinari and um there are obviously many in in between much the same material also crops up in in feros Shah and this indicates that there's some kind of tradition or Traditions that ultimately go back to the cenan period but we don't have it in its original form we have it in Arabic and the something has happened to it where whereby the um original zoroastrian elements have been sort of filtered out so that's obviously very important we need to use that but we have to be very careful about how we use it um what I did or tried to do is to compare that that material with sources that we know we can trust or which we hope we can trust um a lot of Greco Roman sources some in Armenian and some in Syriac The Armenian sources are extremely useful um they are uh they seem to be based on very solid evidence uh some seem to be contemporary or nearly contemporary with the events that they describe and a lot of the writers take a great deal of interest in um what the cenan court is up to and what their motivations are um but obviously every Source or set of sources has its own um bias or sort of preoccupations and getting an accurate picture as to what the cenan world was really like and what the Kings and the court and so forth really aimed to achieve or how they viewed themselves that's often a very difficult um thing to to determine or difficult task um you know I I wanted to tell the story in a way that I thought would take a lot of the emphasis off uh very conventional approaches I didn't want to tell the story of this cenan world as though it's nothing more than conflict with Rome I think that that's a very boring way of um presenting it I wanted to show as best I could the connection that the Empire had with the wider world so that means the world of the step Nomads and China a little bit about India um but ultimately the the sort of the framework for viewing it as far as I was concerned is that I had to show how the Empire fitted into um not just great power conflict but the sort of the the movement uh uh sort of the migrations and movement of the step people peoples who posed by far the greatest threat to um both Iran and to Rome and a little bit of the Diplomatic history um embassies and so forth exchanged between um Iran and China for example uh try to get uh I don't actually read Chinese but I found translations so how was the relationship between China and Iran at the time there was a relationship embassies were exchanged um relatively frequently um the only problem with the sources there though is that we know that the embassies arrived to um to the Chinese Court we often know that they brought gifts we know when they happen they're very precise about the dates but we don't really know what was discuss or what anybody mentioned or what the ambassadors want wanted um that's from I think from our perspective that's odd but the Chinese um dynastic histories tend not to emphasize that kind of thing um the perspective is very much that China is the uh center of the world and that it's interesting to note the tribute that came but exactly what was the purpose of the embassy from the perspective of foreigners is is um very rarely mentioned which raises the interesting point well how do we make sense of it well what I try to do is I try to link the appearance of embassies with um events that are happening at roughly the same time or um often with sort of um migrations from from the step that um since since both China and Iran share uh borders onto the uh the step world that they're it seems reasonable I think to in to infer that that would have been of mutual interest but of course I'm only guessing and we also have one of the very last things that the historian tabur mentions about the uh The Last cenan King yasgar III he says that he sent a letter to to the uh the Tang Emperor asking for help uh against the Arabs and you know we don't know if that's really true or not but you know it seems doesn't seem like the kind of thing that you would make up but of course no answer came no answer from China noy uh and sort of as a final Coda to that it's also worth noting that the um the very last cenans not yasgar II he died in um 651 uh in the outskirts of mar which is now in turkistan but his family ended up in China they they they set up a a court in Exile in changan and that lasted for maybe about 150 years and there's a statue um in I guess it's now in a museum uh outside um what's now Shian and it's it's a statue of uh I think his name is peros or Fus you would say now uh and he's sort of last of the cenans um or one of the last and there's a a grave marker of um cenan uh uh Noble if I'm not mistaken and those are the last traces that we and they're written in Chinese very very attractive looking but um the uh those those are the last sesanian um uh monuments in China the late Shah of Iran Muhammad R sha he put a lot of emphasis on the figure of cus the great um the founder of first Iranian Empire your book is about the third Empire um which came long after that um what do you think the relation between the two empire were and then um why did sha chose um sarus The Great and not sasanians right so I argue and this is a controversial point I'm not sure um everyone agrees with me I argue that the cenan state was motivated by trying to imitate the ancient um Iranian Empire founded by Cyrus now this is not to say that they knew a lot about Cyrus the Great there's actually very little evidence that they did however um there is enough evidence to suggest that the memory of an ancient Iranian state was still very much there you have the the ruins of prepis the tomb of Cyrus um there may have been you know there there were obviously roads that the old Empire had built I don't know what condition they would have been in but all of these things would probably have been much more um Splendid than than they are now and even when you see them now they are quite impressive um so uh I don't really have much doubt that they were that ardashir and Company were inspired by by uh by the old Empire not only were The Monuments clearly visible in fars which is where arir came from but the early kings are very much keen on attaching their names or or putting up their monuments in the vicinity or in some cases literally right on the uh The Monuments in question so there must have been some sense that there was a kind of uh uh Heritage that they were trying to revive when Cyrus the Great who founded the first Persian Empire it's it's often said that that Empire begins properly with his conquest of the city Babylon and of course this is the occasion for his famous Cyrus cylinder uh which I think is now at the United Nations where he conquers Babylon and then there's a sort of decree that you know all the old religions and the temples have to be restored and everybody can go back to doing what they were doing before so the the conquest of Babylon is not so much the end of the um Mesopotamian tradition of statecraft and and monarchy it's there's a sense in which it's actually the Revival of it because that's what Cyrus is doing he's he's taken he's taken over the old Center of um Mesopotamian civilization and instead of you know he instead of saying it's all over and you know you're all um Persians now it's it's more a sense that Cyrus is going to continue the old traditions and revive them and that he will rule um as the Persian king he will rule over the uh peoples who have always live there as their own or as part of their own sort of indigenous tradition and that's the origin that's the origin of the term the shaan Sha that's the old the king of King Kings is the old Assyrian royal title which gets revived under Cyrus also you know Cyrus is mentioned in the bible um and Jews have always lived in Iran um there were of course also by the time of the cenan war there were also Christians so if anybody wanted to know about Cyrus and and and Xerxes and Artic xeres you know there's there's enough in the Bible that would have um um still been current and and and well known in some communities so I don't I some Scholars think that this old Empire was completely forgotten and the cenans knew nothing about them I I I don't think that that's true so part of the um one of the features of the Diplomatic correspondence between the cenans and Rome is this idea that the cenan Kings have a hereditary right to rule the parts of the Roman Empire that that used to belong to the Empire of Cyrus and then later on to the Empire of Alexander the Great who who conquered that Empire again it's controversial as to whether or not this this is this was made up by Roman historians or not I don't think that it was it it occurs quite frequently um in various different contexts I don't think that this is somehow an artifact of the sources I think that that was um a genuine piece of Iran pro-iranian propaganda although I don't know to what extent anybody actually seriously believed that the Iranian State could eventually swallow up most of the uh Roman Empire in in the early days of of cenan Persia that did end up happening though in the uh in the sth in the early 7th Century under the reign of hoso II so you know there's a sense in which Hos II is a sort of re Revival of of U the uh the old uh aeonid uh tradition of sort of Westward uh expansion you know he conquered Egypt in the same way that um cises did that's the son of uh Cyrus if I'm not mistaken and um you know there's a sense in which the two empires sort of are almost like deliberate the San Empire is almost like a deliberate mirror image of the Akim state so the question about the late sha why did he emphasize Cyrus so much well Cyrus is a very appealing figure I think um he was obviously greatly admired uh in his day um especially by um the Greeks who wrote about him he was obviously a very impressive uh figure and he's in the Bible um the the if you look him up in um the the the book of the prophet Isaiah you see there's nothing but good things said about Cyrus this isn't the case for the cenans though um the cenan state was a much more dangerous enemy to Rome than I think any that Rome had ever faced ardashir the first is described in Roman sources as though or the way I read the descriptions of him it seems as though they're really struggling to understand what motivates him like what what he's uh trying to achieve what he's all about um I think that from a modern perspective the Romans would have thought of him as something like a religious fanatic as a sort of um passionate revivor of of uh Zoroastrianism and and really an aggressive um you know uh uh aggressive sort of warrior king but of course eventually the Roman and the cenan states sort of settled down into uh uh you know a a relationship of mutual tolerance that still sometimes occasionally broke down but you know they they eventually got over the initial shock the Romans did um but no one in none none of the uh Persian kings in the west at least have really been able to replace uh Cyrus and his legacy and I think that that's probably part of the reason um because of the western image of Cyrus but what's from my perspective though I you know as much as I respect and admire the the late uh sha there's a sense in which the vision of Iran that he had is actually more similar to the s one than it was to the akid one that the first Empire of Iran there doesn't seem to be a very well-developed sense of um a sort of Persian or Iranian identity simply because that word Iran is not used anywhere um there's it doesn't appear until the uh until the cenan uh era and exactly how the the old aeonid or the later the parthan Kings viewed themselves or their role in the world is not entirely clear but it seems to have been quite different from um the sesanian sense of sort of mission and purpose in the world Iran as a kind of organizing principle to the world or as a kind of World System unto itself which is kind of similar to um Chinese visions of um uh of uh China as as an itself as an organizing principle or as a a world system but the the cenan vision is ultimately the origin of um what you might call Iranian nationalism or at least Iranian um identity and you know it's an interesting sort of counterfactual what if what if ardashir or the the the cenans had been taken as the uh the model of uh uh of of Iranian nationalism or Iranian identity I think that you know I don't I don't know how that would have turned out or what it might have meant but um you know the the other thing is that Cyrus is obviously very remote from the coming of Islam but the cenans are not is Islam didn't replace Cyrus Islam replaced um the the cenans and I think that there's a kind of discomfort with that not only because the the fall of the cenan state represents something sort of like an end or a break but then also later on because the Arab Empire eventually becomes more like a Persian Empire when the Abbasid uh the abbasids overthrow the uh the uh umad caliphate and then Persian culture makes a return actually that was my question and that does the appearance of Islam was a break from the past um there's a sense in which it was and there's a sense in which it wasn't there's that famous book I can remember the title but I can't remember I think it's by a guy called Zarin KUB it's called the uh do the two centuries of Silence um although I think that there are elements of that book that are greatly exaggerated and it's a little bit I think maybe a little bit too imaginative I think that there's a sense in which you've read the book I have I have um I think that it's there there was a break in the sense that W with with the death of the last king there's no longer any kind of organizing principle for for the zoroastrian um religion and then that means that it starts to fragment whatever state um Iranian um literature or um uh historiography and so forth was in it seems to have been mostly sustained by um a court culture and with the absence of that um it falls apart and you know this would have been I think a profound blow to um Iranian self-image and to um and in contrast with the uh spectacular series of Victor over Rome which obviously eventually came to an end in contrast with that you know there would have been I think quite a lot of um uh uh soul searching and and despondency about what had happened to the Iranian State uh afterward um but of course that title the two centuries of Silence you know it's not entirely true there it's not that I mean obviously people continued to speak Persian they didn't just stop or you know there must have been some sort of undercurrent of of of indigenous Iranian culture otherwise it could never have been revived uh but you know from that point we lose uh uh like we don't we don't have any attested um written historical sources for that period and the um the Arabic tradition which is admittedly later too but the Arabic tradition looking back on it it portrays uh it portrays the last days of the cenan world and what came after in a very negative uh light so there's a sense in which you can call it a dark age but it could never have been you know it couldn't be so dark as some people suggest because eventually obviously Persian culture um returned um with a Vengeance but probably a good comparison would be to um the I say a good comparison but it's not a perfect comparison with with Western Europe after the fall of Rome that there's clearly a period of of uh um Anarchy or or near Anarchy where um the Civil Administration has fallen apart and and you know has to sort of regrow um and and communities are sort of drifting apart and and from a central Authority and and so forth but eventually things do come back the difference is or one of the key differences that they came back faster uh in Iran so you are saying that we can say sasanian Empire have some something about Iranians uh self-image or what are the bearings um of uh like on the of sans on the subsequent Iran history the first thing I would draw people's attention to is the the the the sort of Touchstone of Iranian you know perso Iranian culture in the form of poetry the obviously I mean the language has changed a little bit and you have more Arabic words in you have a stream of Arabic words that have come into the language and there are poetic forms that are influenced by their uh Arabic counterparts but ultimately the the themes of the the the poetry and a lot of the sort of Illusions and and and so forth that that come out in it are of cenan origin like hro and Shirin or you know the story of uh um stories associated with that crop up in in in s or uh the uh the story of farod you know this's a huge amount of cenan Legends that um were remembered and which get sort of reasserted within this this new tradition and and the the first thing that I try to draw people's attention to is that even um the the late um Ayatollah wrote poetry in this style and even though he probably would not have outwardly approved of it his poetry or he I don't think that he was really a passionate cenan revivalist but he also refers to many of those same themes so there's there's definitely a kind of uh uh inertia and a a power to to those stories that have just sort of stuck and um the the greatest example of this though is obviously um the shahname which is the Iranian National epic comparable to some some some combination of say The Iliad The Odyssey um you know he's sort of like Milton he's like the Iranian John Milton or uh uman like the sort of Arthurian romance like it has elements of all this stuff the difference is that the the the shahname begins at the beginning of time and goes all the way up to the uh the Arab Conquest but although you know whereas feros he published that in in the year 1010 if I'm not mistaken so you know we're talking a good you know almost uh half a millennium after the the fall of the cenan era the legends that he is recycling took their form within the cenan era they became codified then and written down and this is often associated with this this tradition of the sort of the h n or you say which the Shah Nam seems to sort of allude to whatever that was this mysterious uh whatever it was it seems to be something like a kind of genre of of sort of courtly cenan Legends and and and L and so forth that go back to to um zoroastrian mythology and so forth but the point is that it took its final shape within the cenan world even though it's feros who who writes it down in the form that we now have it much later so that remains I think you know after all this time and despite the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that um Remains the Touchstone for uh Iranian um culture and and and civilization similarly there's also the tradition of what you might call wisdom literature including um I don't know what you would call it sort of like political advice from people like n or um the uh uh the golestan of s all the example maybe not all but nearly all the examples that that get sort of conjured up of sort of wise rulers and sort of great um learned viers and so forth they're cenan and um even outside that tradition in in in the sort of Arabian Knights or the sort of Thousand and One Nights genre the whole sort of frame story is cenan with then you know with the name Shah shahad or the king his name is shahon um you know this is a Persian story that is taking uh that is being told in Arabic but it's nevertheless a cenan um it must go back to some sort of cenan example so I I would say you know the the Shadow the shadow cast by the San world is enormous and it's still it still goes on uh still lasts to this day so you're saying 1 one night originally came in Arabic well we have it in Arabic but there there is a text is sort of hard to explain but there's there's a text called the um the the book list or the the fist in perso Arabic of a guy called IM Nadim he says that there was a sesanian book in Middle Persian it was called the hazar a okay so the Thousand stories and there's some description of it that includes a framing story that seems to have much the we only have a description of it but he seems to be describing something that sounds a lot like the story of Shah zamon and um Shah Shah or Shard or whatever her name was um so there's some there's some reason to believe that there was ultimately uh a cenan model of that uh story but even if there wasn't a text that actually originated within cenan Persia the names are all Persian and the story has a kind of Iranian tone to it that sort of seems to be very similar to The Epic tradition that you find in ferad and so forth and it doesn't have an Arab what is your view on the Contemporary Iran do you think Islamic Republic is going to last much longer my view is that it cannot it should not be able to last because of its internal contradictions I've written a couple pieces about that theme the problem is that every time it seems like it's about to fall which I think there have been many within my lifetime within recent memory that it just sort of doesn't fall even though it it should um I think that what we are seeing I think what we're seeing right now in the Middle East with um Hamas and um hisbah is a symptom of the uh failure of the uh failure of the Islamic Republic to sort of hold hold together or it's a reaction to insecurity let's say um they are very good the the um K and his people in the irgc they're very good at creating distractions and disturbances um throughout the world whenever uh or at least throughout the Middle East whenever um they feel they need to and um I think that we are seeing that now the irgc is arguably the main reason why the um state has not yet um collapsed however the in the in the event of collapse the rgc is very likely to take power I would fear or very likely to produce some kind of military um dictatorship in the absence of um K and and company that that I think is the worst possible outcome and it's one that I think would obviously harm Iran considerably and would probably be bad for the rest of the world also there is though an Iranian opposition but it isn't just one there are many different groups with many different needs I think I was I was looking at a poll some polling it wasn't just a poll but some polling um if I'm not mistaken the opposition to the uh the Islamic Republic is something above 80% but that that that's to say that they don't want any Islamic Republic at all they don't want a reform or some kind of tinkering or change they want it gone however exactly what should replace it is where the differences uh are found and what that means to me is um some kind of organization needs to be brought to to these forces um I don't think people necessarily have to agree on absolutely everything as to what should come after the Islamic Republic but they're going to have to agree on some key things I think before uh there's any hope of of uh getting rid of it uh I'm involved in in a in a group called ivil The International voices of Liberty that um seeks to do exactly this to organize um um the uh Iranian opposition abroad and um within Iran to to you know try to bring some kind of uh bring order to it organization and to um you know establish some key uh goals I think that the West in general should do much the same thing I think that that's what our foreign policy should have been from the beginning uh I'm very skeptical I've always been very skeptical about the idea of trying to do business with um K and his and his buddies um and I'm more skeptical than ever I mean nothing has no good has yet come of it as far as I can see and I don't expect um I don't expect the regime to become any more moderate or any nicer to anybody as it continues to encounter internal problems in fact I think it's going to get much worse and I think that we are seeing evidence of great insecurity and instability uh right now and I mean I don't want to speculate too much because I don't you know I don't I don't have access to uh the kind of information here that you would need to make solid predictions but K is an old man he's not going to be around for much longer but who is going to replace him who or what and you know the idea of a um of a entirely discredited um clerical regime continuing to last you know it's possible but I I would be worried of uh I'd be worried about um something more like a military uh um dictatorship um some power emerging from within the irgc to uh sort of replace the Islamic Republic which would be really quite a bad outcome thank you so much Dr Michael banner thank you for having me