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Message Heard

An ex-Al Qaeda jihadi turned MI6 spy and a former monk turned filmmaker, have been embedded at the heart of conflicts in the Middle East. Together Aimen Dean and Thomas Small unpack the realities of war, fundamentalism and their global implications through first-hand experience.

CONFLICTED

A rare public rupture has emerged between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Triggered by a dramatic escalation over Yemen in late December 2025, the dispute has exposed deeper ideological and strategic differences between the two Gulf powers.

In this episode, Thomas and Aimen step back from the battlefield to examine the historical roots of Saudi–Emirati rivalry and why Yemen became the arena where these differences finally collided in public.

They discuss:

 The 30 December 2025 Saudi airstrikes and the ultimatum to UAE forces

 Why Yemen is the arena, not the cause, of the Saudi–UAE dispute

 Continental vs maritime power in the Arabian Peninsula

 The British influence on the Emirati state

 The Buraimi Oasis dispute

 Tribal allegiance and ‘weird borders’ in Gulf geopolitics

 Why the UAE tolerates breakaway regions and Saudi Arabia cannot

 Whether this rupture will be patched up and what happens if it isn’t

Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm/ 

Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted

And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted

And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conflictedpod

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

Produced by Thomas Small and edited by Alan Leer.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Crisis in the Gulf: Saudi vs UAE

Islam is often treated as a civilisation apart — self-contained, resistant to modernity, and fundamentally at odds with the West. In this episode, Thomas speaks to Oxford professor James McDougall about why that framing is misleading, and how Islamic history is inseparable from the making of the modern world itself.

Drawing on his new book Worlds of Islam: A Global History, McDougall explains:

 Why Islamic and Western histories are deeply intertwined rather than civilisationally opposed

 The extent to which Islam is an imperial and political project

 Islam’s role in shaping global modernity before European dominance

 What made European power different in the nineteenth century

 How the Mongol sack of Baghdad reshaped the geography of the Islamic world

 The importance of Central Asia, Indonesia, and West Africa to Islamic history

 The debate over early Islamic sources and why scholarly scepticism has softened

 Whether today’s tensions reflect a clash of civilizations — or a clash of perspectives

Follow James on Instagram: www.instagram.com/jamesrobertmcdougall

Follow James on Substack: substack.com/@mcdougalljames

Follow James of Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jamesrmcd.bsky.social

Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm 

Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted

And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted

And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conflictedpod

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

This episode was produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzy Andrews.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Re-Thinking Islam’s Global History

As mass protests sweep Iran and President Trump declares the U.S. is ‘locked and loaded’, Thomas and Aimen revisit the event that shaped U.S.–Iran relations for the next half-century: the Iran Hostage Crisis. Then, in real time, the conversation veers into a fast-moving geopolitical shock: Venezuela, Iran’s global networks, and what a new era of American ‘muscle’ might actually look like.

They discuss:

 Iran’s 2026 protest wave: currency collapse, water crisis, and regime pressure points

 Trump’s ‘locked and loaded’ warning

 Why the embassy takeover began as ‘revolutionary entrepreneurship’

 How and why Khomeini endorsed the hostage crisis

 The shift to economic sanctions as America’s primary lever

 U.S. back-channel diplomacy

 Operation Eagle Claw: what the plan was and how it fell apart

 Hostage diplomacy after 1979

 The creation of the U.S. Special Operations Command

 The Iran–Venezuela–Hezbollah nexus, and why Washington’s focus may be shifting

Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm/ 

Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted

And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted

And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conflictedpod

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

Produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzy Andrews.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Crisis in Iran: The History Behind US-Iran Tensions

Amid controversy surrounding Zohran Mamdani’s rise to power in New York City, Hussein Mansour tells Thomas all about the history of Third Worldism — where it comes from, what it originally meant, and why the term has resurfaced.

Thomas and Hussein discuss:

 Zohran Mamdani as a symbol, not a cause, of a broader elite transformation

 The Third Estate, the French Revolution, and the revolutionary inheritance of modern radical politics

 Interwar Paris and the emergence of Third Worldist intellectuals

 Négritude, anti-colonial humanism, and the promise of historical redemption

 Decolonisation, revolutionary violence, and the crisis of postcolonial states

 How ideological failure was reinterpreted as structural oppression

 The migration of Third Worldist ideas into Western universities and institutions

 Edward Said, postcolonial theory, and the institutionalisation of grievance

 Third Worldism today less as a political programme than an elite posture

Subscribe to Hussein’s Substack The Abrahamic Metacritique here: https://critiqueanddigest.substack.com

Follow Hussein on X here: https://x.com/HusseinAboubak

Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm 

Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted

And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted

And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conflictedpod

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Zohran Mamdani and the Ascendancy of Third Worldism

As 2025 draws to a close, Thomas and Aimen take an unconventional tour of the Islamic world — looking beyond the usual headlines to the under-the-radar shifts that happened in 2025, with the potential to shape 2026 and beyond.

They discuss:

 Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger forming the Alliance of Sahel States and what a new Sahel bloc might mean

 The geopolitical ‘cluster fuck’ of the Sudanese civil war

 The European Union’s re-entry into Central Asia

 The Gabala Summit and the rising Turkic axis

 How Bangladesh is diversifying away from India

 Southern Thailand’s Malay-Muslim insurgency and why it’s so rarely discussed

 In Iraq, Kata’ib Hezbollah and the breakdown of state sovereignty

Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm/ 

Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted

And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted

And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conflictedpod

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

Produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzy Andrews.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2025 Year in Review

The war in Ukraine is back in the headlines as a peace agreement appears increasingly probably — though with major concessions to Russia. So as a Christmas present to our listeners, we’ve brought this episode from August out from behind the paywall.

In it, Thomas speaks with his old university friend Jakub — a former Slovak Army officer who volunteered to fight in Ukraine — about the lived reality of modern warfare, from trench fighting to FPV strike drones. Drawing on nearly eighteen months at the front, Jakub offers an unvarnished account of combat, morale, fear, boredom, and survival — and challenges many popular assumptions about how this war is actually being fought.

Thomas and Jakub discuss:

 Why Jakub left academia to fight in Ukraine

 Life as a foreign volunteer inside a regular Ukrainian infantry battalion

 The psychological reality of trench warfare

 How artillery, drones, and attrition have reshaped the battlefield

 The limits of NATO doctrine when confronted with peer warfare

 What this war suggests about the future of European security

Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm 

Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted

And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted

And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conflictedpod

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Inside the Trenches of Ukraine

What is ‘the Christmas story’ really? And how does it change when you tell it from within a different religious tradition? In Conflicted’s first-ever Christmas Special, Thomas and Aimen retell the Nativity as it appears in the Gospels and in the Qur’an. 

They discuss:

 Who were the Magi? Zoroastrian priests or Nabataean nomads?

 How the Nativity story differs between the Bible and the Qur’an

 A controversial theory about how local Christian traditions may have shaped the Qur’anic telling

 The overlooked reason why Qur’an presumes its audience already knows the underlying stories

 Christ’s ‘unfinished business’ in Islam: the Second Coming and the fight against the Antichrist

 The sharpest divergence: the Crucifixion and what it implies about Jesus’ mission

Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm/ 

Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted

And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted

And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conflictedpod

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

Produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzy Andrews.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2025 Conflicted Christmas Special

In this Conflicted Conversation, Thomas speaks with global finance and security analyst Giri Rajendran about the Trump Administration’s newly published National Security Strategy — what it signals, what it omits, and what it suggests about America’s role in a multipolar world.

Thomas and Giri discuss:

 How this report differs from previous US National Security Strategies

 The end of the old rules-based order of liberal internationalism

 The Middle East: a phase shift toward deeper economic engagement

 China: economic and industrial competition, not ideological crusade

 Europe: NATO burden-sharing, culture-war politics, and coercion by inducement

 Russia as a potential ally, no longer an enemy

 Whether global governance can exist without global institutions

Follow Giri on X here: https://x.com/Trajan1898

Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm 

Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted

And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted

And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conflictedpod

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy Means For The World

What does the future hold for the Middle East — and the world — in 2026?

In this special episode of Conflicted, Thomas instructs Aimen to peer into his crystal ball and offer his forecasts for the year to come.

In this episode, Aimen and Thomas discuss:

 How professional geopolitical analysts make forecasts

 The impossibility of foreseeing Black Swan events

 Why an end to the war in Ukraine could reshape Middle Eastern geopolitics

 The likelihood of a U.S. war against the Houthis in Yemen

 Renewed hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon

 The strategic importance of the Gulf states

 Iran’s nuclear programme, proxy network, and the risk of renewed confrontation

Add your predictions to your 2026 Forecast Card here: https://forms.gle/sMCbRFmFTBdcfEDd8 

Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm/ 

Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted

And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted

And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conflictedpod

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

Produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzy Andrews.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The 2026 Middle East Forecast

In this Conflicted Conversation, Thomas speaks with Lorenzo Vidino, Director of the Programme on Extremism at The George Washington University.

What happens when an ideological movement is neither a terrorist organisation nor an ordinary religious group — but something in between? One of the world’s leading experts on the Muslim Brotherhood explains…

 The early history of Islam in America

 The first Brotherhood-linked students arriving in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s

 The formation of the first American Brotherhood cells

 The Brotherhood’s gradual institutional influence across the 80s and 90s

 Why CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) is so controversial

 Germany’s three-fold classification system and what the U.S. can learn from it

Follow Lorenzo on: X, BlueSky, LinkedIn, and YouTube. 

Check out his books:

 
The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Columbia University Press, 2010)

 
The Closed Circle: Joining and Leaving the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Columbia University Press, 2020).

Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm 

Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MHconflicted

And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted

And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conflictedpod

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conflicted is a Message Heard production.

Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.

This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Crisis in the Gulf: Saudi vs UAE

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