Sohrab Ahmari

Sohrab Ahmari is a journalist, editor and author. Raised in Iran in a family that practised Islam only nominally, he rejected religion as a teenager and went through a Marxist (Trotskyist) phase before entering the Catholic Church in 2016 while working as a journalist in London; he announced his conversion hours after the killing of the French priest Jacques Hamel in Normandy in an attack attributed to the Islamic State, and has said it was "in large part inspired by Benedict's writings" (Catholic News Agency; The Catholic Thing). His conversion memoir is From Fire, by Water (Hachette India).

Career. A Catholic Herald author biography says he spent nearly a decade at News Corp, as an editor and columnist on the Wall Street Journal's opinion pages in New York and London and as op-ed editor of the New York Post, co-founded Compact magazine and is US editor of UnHerd (Catholic Herald). His books also include The Unbroken Thread and Tyranny, Inc. (2023).

Postliberalism. In 2019 Ahmari's First Things essay "Against David French-ism", prompted by a library drag-queen story hour, argued that conservatism premised on neutral public institutions could not meet what he called a cultural and moral emergency. He then debated the National Review writer David French at the Catholic University of America in an event moderated by Ross Douthat (The American Conservative; The American Conservative). A critical review that treated his Tyranny, Inc. together with Regime Change by Patrick Deneen, a co-founder of the newsletter Postliberal Order, noted that this political project has been variously labelled national conservatism, populism, Orbanism and integralism (Los Angeles Review of Books; 3 Quarks Daily). See integralism and postliberalism.

Ahmari is not a traditionalist media figure in the liturgical sense; he is profiled here because the postliberal and integralist current he helped publicise overlaps with traditionalist Catholic media and audiences.