What We Owe Each Other

I did the algebra without thinking about where it came from. I've used the word algorithm my whole life without knowing it's a Latinized mangling of al-Khwarizmi's name — the man whose book gave us the word "algebra" itself, working in Baghdad a thousand years before anyone in Rio Arriba County dug a ditch. I know the acequia outside my door by its Arabic root, as-sāqiya, carried through Al-Andalus into Castilian and then into this valley. I have neighbors whose grandmothers still balance hot and cold, wet and dry, in the body — a medical system that ran through Avicenna's canon before it ever reached New Mexico, humoral theory with Persian and Arab fingerprints on every page. None of this is trivia. It is the actual architecture of ordinary life here, and almost none of it is native to the West.

This week the United States completed its fifth straight day of strikes on Iran. A naval blockade went back up on its ports. Iran struck seven commercial ships in seven days, killing or wounding nearly a dozen sailors who had nothing to do with any of this. I felt the contradiction physically — the same week I was tracing a debt, my country was widening a wound in the civilization I owe it to.

But sitting with it longer, I don't think "contradiction" is even the right word. It's not new. This has been going on between us for twenty-five hundred years, and it has never run in only one direction.

The Persians invaded Greece first — Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, a hundred and fifty years of on-and-off war that Herodotus built his whole history around. Then the West returned the favor with interest: Alexander burned Persepolis to the ground in 330 BC, the ceremonial heart of the Achaemenid empire, reportedly in a drunken act of vengeance for Xerxes having burned Athens a century and a half earlier. Nine centuries after that, it was Arab armies who ended Sassanid Persia for good, folding the last great Zoroastrian empire into the caliphate — not a Western act, but a conquest all the same, and one that cost Zoroastrians their political home permanently. The wheel has never needed the West specifically to keep turning. It just needed neighbors with grievances and the power to act on them.

And Persia's own record with the minorities inside its own borders is not a clean counter-story to tell against everyone else. Safavid Persia forced periodic conversions on its Jewish population — the Jadid al-Islam, "New Muslims," families who kept practicing in secret the same way conversos did an ocean away, for the same reason. Baháʼís have been persecuted in Iran continuously since the faith's founding in the 1800s, and that persecution didn't end with the monarchy — it continues under the Islamic Republic today, a fact worth holding next to everything else in this piece rather than letting the current war's urgency crowd it out. None of that erases the other half of the story — Cyrus the Great's cylinder, twenty-five centuries old, records a Persian king freeing the Jews of Babylon and letting them rebuild their temple, the oldest surviving act of religious toleration on record from any empire anywhere. Persia has been, at different centuries, both the freest place in the ancient world to practice a minority faith and a place where minority faiths were forced underground. Empires don't hold one character for twenty-five hundred years. Neither do civilizations that call themselves the West.

The modern chapter is shorter and more documented, which makes it harder to look away from. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence engineered the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran's democratically elected prime minister, after he nationalized Iran's oil — and reinstalled the Shah, whose secret police became one of the more feared instruments of political repression in the region for the next twenty-five years. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, the United States provided intelligence support to Saddam Hussein's Iraq while Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers — a fact that gets less airtime in this country than it should. Iran, for its part, took American hostages for 444 days starting in 1979, and has backed proxy attacks on American and allied personnel and civilians across the decades since, including forces implicated in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed 241 American servicemembers. And this year, Iran's Supreme Leader was killed by joint US-Israeli strikes that opened the current war — described, even by people inside the US foreign policy establishment, as without real precedent in the modern era.

None of that is a ledger you can total up and declare someone the winner of. That's the point. Both civilizations have spent twenty-five centuries wounding each other, forgiving each other, borrowing from each other, and then wounding each other again, and the current war is not a break from that pattern — it's the pattern, wearing this decade's uniform.

What I keep coming back to is that the debt runs underneath all of it the whole time, unaffected by whichever direction the violence happens to be moving in that century. Persia gave the West algebra while the West was busy warring with Persia's ancestors. New Mexico inherited an irrigation system and a medical tradition from a civilization my own country is bombing this week. The transmission of knowledge and the infliction of harm have never waited for each other's permission — they've run on parallel tracks, sometimes for centuries at a stretch, and most people alive during any given decade only ever notice the track their own moment happens to be running on.

I don't think remembering the debt is supposed to stop a war by itself. Geopolitics doesn't bend to gratitude, and I'm not naive enough to think a Persian scholar's twelfth-century arithmetic is going to move a naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. But I think forgetting the debt makes the violence easier to do without noticing what it costs. It's simpler to bomb a country you've decided is only an adversary. It's harder — not impossible, but harder — to do it while holding in your other hand the fact that the numbers on your own construction permits, the medicine in your own grandmother's kitchen, and the water rights governing your own family's ditch all run back through the same civilization currently absorbing the strikes.

I don't know what ends this war, and I'm suspicious of anyone who tells me they do. But I know what I want to carry into whatever comes after it: not innocence about either side's history, and not a scorecard either — just the plain fact that we have been doing this to each other, in both directions, since before either of our countries had the shape they have now, and that the people on the other end of every strike this week are not a civilization we have no relationship to. We are already, and have always been, entangled with them.

we have wounded each other for twenty-five centuries and borrowed from each other the whole time — the least we owe each other now is remembering both halves of that at once.