The philosopher and the ayatollah
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In 1978, Michel Foucault went to Iran as a novice journalist to report on the unfolding revolution. His dispatches — now fully available in translation — shed some light on the illusions of intellectuals in our own time.
By Wesley Yang | June 12, 2005 | Boston Globe
“IT IS PERHAPS the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and most insane.” With these words, the French philosopher Michel Foucault hailed the rising tide that would sweep Iran’s modernizing despot, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi Shah, out of power in January 1979 and install in his place one of the world’s most illiberal regimes, the Shi’ite government headed by Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini…
Foucault was virtually alone among Western observers, Anderson and Afary argue, in embracing the specifically Islamist wing of the revolution. Indeed, Foucault pokes fun at the secular leftists who thought they could use the Islamists as a weapon for their own purposes; the Islamists alone, he believed, reflected the “perfectly unified collective will” of the people…
And so on. Yes, Foucault was wrong, but isn’t this article a typical bit of right-wing intellectual-baiting? In the context of the time Foucault’s enthusiasm is understandable, misplaced as it was because Foucault was in fact supporting ultra-conservatives opposed to everything he really stood for, including Foucault’s own identity as a gay man, as the Boston Globe article points out.
There is a long tradition of Western intellectuals going abroad to sing the praises of revolutionaries in distant lands and finding in them the realization of their own intellectual hopes. But the irony of Foucault’s embrace of the Iranian Revolution was that the earlier intellectuals who had sung hymns to tyrants tended to share a set of beliefs in the kind of absolutes — Marxism, humanism, rationality — that Foucault had made it his life’s work to overturn. Rather than pronounce from on high, Foucault sought to listen to what he took to be the authentic voice of marginal people in revolt and let it speak through him. In practice, this turned out to be a distinction without a difference.
Anderson says that the debate over these 25- year-old writings has relevance when some leftists focus more energy on criticizing an administration they scorn than on speaking against a radical Islamist movement that also violates all their cherished ideals.
“It’s not that radical Islamism is getting a pass from Western progressives and liberals, but it is the case that many are not being critical enough,” says Anderson. When certain polemicists are spreading simplistic ideas about “Islamo-Fascism,” he continues, “there’s a tendency to say that this isn’t so. But the fact is that while radical Islamism has many features and faces, everywhere it is antifeminist, everywhere it is authoritarian, and everywhere it is intolerant of other religions and other interpretations of Islam.”
“These conservative, reactionary movements,” Anderson says, “may be in conflict with a conservative Bush administration — but that doesn’t make them any less conservative or reactionary. The debate on Foucault helps to throw all this into high relief.”
But what had gone before? And why might the Ayatollah’s revolution at first have seemed appealing? Here is one interesting account by NPR Producer Davar Ardalan. And here is another: Former Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, Fereydoun Hoveyda, “speaks to Global News Net for three hours on issues of both heart and mind. These include his thoughts on the dangers of fundamentalist Islam; the past and future of Iran; Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and son; the forces which resulted in the Iranian Revolution of 1979; the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and Yassir Arafat; George W. Bush; and the lasting legacy of his martyred brother, former Iranian Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda.”
See Wikipedia on the last Shah of Iran, a very mixed blessing that one. See also The United States and the Shah.
Sadly, the worst of Iran seems likely to triumph in the current elections there. It could be argued that George Bush’s sabre-rattling has assisted these Iranian troglodytes.
And as for Michel Foucault: he remains nonetheless one of the best and most useful of the post-modernist thinkers of the late 20th century.
