"The Seductions of Islamism:

Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution"

Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, New Politics

February 2004 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the Iranian Revolution. From September 1978 to
February 1979, in the course of a massive urban
revolution with millions of participants, the Iranian
people toppled the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah
Pahlavi (1941-1979), which had pursued a highly
authoritarian program of economic and cultural
modernization. By late 1978, the Islamist faction led
by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had come to dominate
the antiregime uprising, in which secular
nationalists, democrats, and leftists also
participated. The Islamists controlled the slogans and
the organization of the protests, which meant that
many secular women protesters were pressured into
donning the veil (chador) as an expression of
solidarity with the more traditional Iranian Muslims.
By February 1979, the shah had left the country and
Khomeini returned from exile to take power. The next
month, he sponsored a national referendum that
declared Iran an Islamic republic by an overwhelming
majority. Soon after, as Khomeini began to assume
nearly absolute power, a reign of terror ensued.Progressive and leftist intellectuals around the world
were initially very divided in their assessments of
the Iranian Revolution. While they supported the
overthrow of the shah, they were usually less
enthusiastic about the notion of an Islamic republic.
Foucault visited and wrote on Iran during this period,
a period when he was at the height of his intellectual
powers. He had recently published Discipline and
Punish (1975) and Vol. I of History of Sexuality
(1976) and was working on material for Vol. II and III
of the latter. Since their publication, the reputation
of these writings has grown rather than diminished and
they have helped us to conceptualize gender,
sexuality, knowledge, power, and culture in new and
important ways. Paradoxically, however, his extensive
writings and interviews on the Iranian Revolution have
experienced a different fate, ignored or dismissed
even by thinkers closely identified with Foucault's
perspectives.

Attempts to bracket out Foucault's writings on Iran as
"miscalculations," or even "not Foucauldian," remind
one of what Foucault himself had criticized in his
well-known 1969 essay, "What Is an Author?" When we
include certain works in an author's career and
exclude others that were written in "a different
style," or were "inferior," we create a stylistic
unity and a theoretical coherence, he wrote. We do so,
he added, by privileging certain writings as authentic
and excluding others that do not fit our view of what
the author ought to be: "The author is therefore the
ideological figure by which one marks the manner in
which we fear the proliferation of meaning" (Rabinow
1984).

Throughout his life, Foucault's concept of
authenticity meant looking at situations where people
lived dangerously and flirted with death, a site where
creativity originated. In the tradition of Friedrich
Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, Foucault embraced the
artist who pushed the limits of rationality and he
wrote with great passion in defense of irrationalities
that broke new boundaries. In 1978, Foucault found
such morbid transgressive powers in the revolutionary
figure of Ayatollah Khomeini and the millions who
risked death as they followed him in the course of the
revolution. He knew that such "limit" experiences
could lead to new forms of creativity and he
passionately threw in his support. This was Foucault's
only first-hand experience of revolution and it led to
his most extensive set of writings on a non-Western
society.

Distinctive Positions

FOUCAULT FIRST VISITED IRAN in September 1978 and then
met with Khomeini at his exile residence outside Paris
in October. He traveled to Iran for a second visit in
November, when the revolutionary movement against the
shah was reaching its zenith. During these two trips,
Foucault was commissioned as a special correspondent
of the leading Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera,
with his articles appearing on page one of that paper.
He published other parts of his writings on Iran in
French newspapers and journals, such as the daily Le
Monde and the widely circulated leftist weekly Nouvel
Observateur. Student activists translated at least one
of his essays into Persian and posted it on the walls
of Tehran University in the fall of 1978.

Foucault staked out a series of distinctive political
and theoretical positions on the Iranian Revolution.
In part because only three of his fifteen articles and
interviews on Iran have appeared in English, they have
generated little discussion in the English-speaking
world. Many scholars of Foucault view these writings
as aberrant or the product of a political mistake. We
believe that Foucault's writings on Iran were in fact
closely related to his general theoretical writings on
the discourses of power and the hazards of modernity.

Long before most other commentators, Foucault
understood, and this to his credit, that Iran was
witnessing a singular kind of revolution. Early on, he
predicted that this revolution would not follow the
model of other modern revolutions. He wrote that it
was organized around a sharply different concept,
which he called "spiritual politics." Foucault
recognized the enormous power of the new discourse of
militant Islam, not just for Iran, but globally. He
showed that the new Islamist movement aimed at a
fundamental cultural, social, as well as political
break with the modern Western order, as well as with
the Soviet Union and China.

The Iranian experience also raises some serious
questions about Foucault's thought. First, it is often
assumed that Foucault's suspicion of utopianism, his
hostility to grand narratives and universals, and his
stress on difference and singularity rather than
totality, would make him less likely than his
predecessors on the left to romanticize an
authoritarian politics that promised radically to
refashion from above the lives and thought of a
people, for their ostensible benefit. However, his
Iran writings showed that Foucault was not immune to
the type of illusions that so many Western leftists
had held toward the Soviet Union and later, China.
Foucault did not anticipate the birth of yet another
modern state where old religious technologies of
domination could be refashioned and institutionalized;
this was a state that combined a traditionalist
ideology (Islam) with the anti-imperialist discourse
of the left, but also equipped itself with modern
technologies of organization, surveillance, warfare,
and propaganda.

Second, Foucault's highly problematic relationship to
feminism becomes more than an intellectual lacuna in
the case of Iran. On a few occasions, Foucault
reproduced statements he had heard from religious
figures on gender relations in a possible future
Islamic republic, but he never questioned the
"separate but equal" message of the Islamists.
Foucault also dismissed feminist premonitions that the
revolution was headed in a dangerous direction. He
seemed to regard such warnings as little more than
Orientalist attacks on Islam, thereby depriving
himself of a more balanced perspective toward the
events in Iran. At a more general level, Foucault
remained insensitive toward the diverse ways in which
power affected women, as against men. He ignored the
fact that those most traumatized by premodern
disciplinary practices were often woman and children.

Third, an examination of Foucault's writings provides
more support for the frequently-articulated criticism
that his one-sided critique of modernity needs to be
seriously reconsidered, especially from the vantage
point of many non-Western societies. A number of
Middle Eastern intellectuals have been grappling with
their own versions of the Enlightenment project over
the past century. The questions in the Middle East are
quite concrete. Should such societies, which are often
dominated by secular or religious despotic orders,
ignore the juridico-legal legacies of the West? Or can
they combine aspects of Foucault's theory of power and
critiques of modernity with a modern secular state?
This is an issue that is hotly debated in many Middle
Eastern countries today, especially in Iran and within
Iranian exilic communities. Indeed, there are some
indications that Foucault himself was moving in such a
direction at the end of his life. In his 1984 "What Is
Enlightenment?" essay (Rabinow 1984), he put forth a
position on the Enlightenment that was more nuanced
than before.

Foucault's Analysis

IN FRANCE, THE CONTROVERSY over Foucault's writings on
Iran is well known. For example, during the debate
that followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks
on New York and Washington, a prominent French
commentator referred polemically and without apparent
need for any further explanation to "Michel Foucault,
advocate of Khomeinism in Iran and therefore in theory
of its exactions," this in a front-page op-ed article
in Le Monde (Minc 2001). Even French commentators more
sympathetic to Foucault have acknowledged the
extremely problematic nature of his stance on Iran.
Biographer Didier Eribon (1991), himself an editor at
Nouvel Observateur and a friend of Foucault, wrote:
"The criticism and sarcasm that greeted Foucault's
'mistake' concerning Iran added further to his
despondency after what he saw as the qualified
critical reception" of Volume I of the History of
Sexuality. Eribon added: "For a long time thereafter
Foucault rarely commented on politics or journalism."
Eribon has furnished us with what is to date the most
detailed and balanced discussion of Foucault and Iran.
Another French biographer, Jeannette Colombel (1994),
who was also a friend of Foucault, concludes that the
controversy "wounded him."

The English-speaking world has seen less discussion of
Foucault's Iran writings. One exception is the
intellectual biography by the political philosopher
James Miller (1993), who characterized Foucault's Iran
episode as one of "folly." Miller was the only
biographer to suggest that Foucault's fascination with
death played a part in his enthusiasm for the Iranian
Islamists, with their emphasis on mass martyrdom.
David Macey, the author of the most comprehensive
biography of Foucault to date, was more equivocal.
Macey (1993) regarded the French attacks on Foucault
over Iran as exaggerated and mean-spirited, but he
nonetheless acknowledged that Foucault was so
"impressed" by what he saw in Iran in 1978 that he
misread "the probable future developments he was
witnessing." Elsewhere in the English-speaking world,
where Foucault's writings on Iran have been only
selectively translated and the contemporary French
responses to him not translated at all, his Iran
writings have been treated more kindly. His last two
articles on Iran, where he rather belatedly made a few
criticisms of the Islamic regime in the face of the
attacks on him by other French intellectuals, have
been the most widely circulated ones among those that
have appeared in English up to now. They are the only
examples of his Iran writings to be found in the
three-volume collection, The Essential Writings of
Michel Foucault, issued recently by the New Press
(Foucault 2000).

Foucault's problematic treatment of Iranian Islamism
was partly due to the fact that he ignored the
warnings of Iranian and Western feminists as well as
secular leftists, who, early on, had developed a more
balanced and critical attitude toward the revolution.
This undercut what were in other respects some
valuable analyses of the nature of the shah's regime
and its Islamist opposition.

Foucault carried out a probing analysis of the shah's
regime in his October 1978 article for Corriere della
Sera, "The Shah Is One Hundred Years Behind the
Times."1 He wrote that in Iran, "modernization" took
the form of the shah's authoritarian policies.
Situating himself in a postmodern position, he argued
that the shah's plan for "secularization and
modernization," handed down by his father Reza Shah, a
brutal dictator known for "his famous gaze," was
itself retrograde and archaic. Here one can discern
echoes of his Discipline and Punish, published three
years earlier. The Pahlavi shahs were the guardians of
a modernizing disciplinary state that subjected all of
the people of Iran to the intense gaze of their
overlords. Most notably, Foucault was criticizing the
surveillance methods and disciplinary practices
adopted by the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah and his
notorious secret police, the SAVAK, whose methods and
practices remained brutal and retrograde.

Later, in February 1979, just after Khomeini had
assumed power, Foucault made an astute prediction in
his article, "A Powder Keg Called Islam," also in
Corriere della sera. He mocked the hopes of French and
Iranian Marxists, who had believed that Khomeini would
now be pushed aside by the Marxist Left: "Religion
played its role of opening the curtain; the Mullahs
will now disperse themselves, taking off in a big
group of black and white robes. The decor is changing.
The first act is going to begin: that of the struggle
of the classes, of the armed vanguards, and of the
party that organizes the masses, etc."

In ridiculing the notion that the secular nationalist
or Marxist left would now take center stage and
displace the clerics, Foucault made a keen assessment
of the balance of forces. Indeed, he exhibited quite a
remarkable perspicacity, especially given the fact
that he was not a specialist on either Iran or Islam.
Even more importantly, he noted, a new type of
revolutionary movement had emerged, one that would
have an impact far beyond Iran's borders and would
also have major effect on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict: "But perhaps its historic importance will
not hinge on its conformity to a recognized
?revolutionary' model. Rather, it will owe its
importance to the potential that it will have to
overturn the existing political situation in the
Middle East and thus the global strategic equilibrium.
Its singularity, which has constituted up until this
point its force, consequently threatens to create its
power of expansion. Indeed, it is correct to say that,
as an 'Islamic' movement, it can set the entire region
afire, overturn the most unstable regimes, and disturb
the most solid. Islam — which is not simply a
religion, but an entire way of life, an adherence to a
history and a civilization — has a good chance to
become a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds
of millions of men."

While Foucault's insight into Islamism's global reach
was surely prescient, this was undercut by Foucault's
uncritical stance toward Islamism as a political
movement. In October 1978, during the period when the
first nationwide strike was taking place in Iran, he
decided to publish his views on Iran in French for the
first time in an article entitled "Of What Are the
Iranians Dreaming?" for Nouvel Observateur. Foucault
described the current struggle in mythic terms: "The
situation in Iran seems to depend on a great joust
under traditional emblems, those of the king and the
saint, the armed sovereign and the destitute exile,
the despot faced with the man who stands up
bare-handed and is acclaimed by a people."

As to the saintlike Khomeini's advocacy of "an Islamic
government," Foucault was reassuring. He noted that
"there is an absence of hierarchy in the clergy" and
"a dependence (even a financial one) on those who
listen to them." The clerics were not only democratic;
they also possessed a creative political vision: "One
thing must be clear. By 'Islamic government,' nobody
in Iran means a political regime in which the clergy
would have a role of supervision or control.... It
is something very old and also very far into the
future, a notion of coming back to what Islam was at
the time of the Prophet, but also of advancing toward
a luminous and distant point where it would be
possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain
obedience. In pursuit of this ideal, the distrust of
legalism seemed to me to be essential, along with a
faith in the creativity of Islam."

Foucault also attempted to reassure his French readers
concerning the rights of women and religious/ethnic
minorities. His sources, who were close to the
Islamists, assured him: "With respect to liberties,
they will be respected to the extent that their usage
will not harm others; minorities will be protected and
free to live as they please on the condition that they
do not injure the majority; between men and women
there will not be inequality with respect to rights,
but difference, since there is a natural difference."
He concluded the article by referring to the crucial
place of "political spirituality" in Iran and the loss
of such spirituality in early modern Europe. This was
something, he wrote, "whose possibility we have
forgotten ever since the Renaissance and the great
crises of Christianity." Already poised for the sharp
responses he knew such views would receive in the
highly charged world of Parisian intellectual debate,
he said that he knew that his French readers would
"laugh" at such a formulation. But, he retorted, "I
know that they are wrong."

Islam as a Political Force

FOUCAULT'S SUGGESTION THAT HIS Nouvel Observateur
article would stir up controversy turned out to be
correct, perhaps more so than he had anticipated.
Nouvel Observateur published, in its November 6 issue,
excerpts of a letter from the pseudonymous "Atoussa
H.," a leftist Iranian woman living in exile in
France, who took strong exception to Foucault's
uncritical stance toward the Islamists. She declared:
"I am very distressed by the matter of fact
commentaries usually made by the French left with
respect to the prospect of an ?Islamic' government
replacing the bloody tyranny of the shah."2 Foucault,
she wrote, seemed "deeply moved by ?Muslim
spirituality,' which, according to him, would be an
improvement over the ferocious capitalist
dictatorship, which is today beginning to fall apart."
Why, she continued, alluding to the 1953 overthrow of
the democratic and leftist Mossadeq government, must
the Iranian people, "after twenty-five years of
silence and oppression" be forced to choose between
"the SAVAK and religious fanaticism?" Unveiled women
were already being insulted on the streets and
Khomeini supporters had made clear that "in the regime
they want to create, women will have to adhere" to
Islamic law. With respect to statements that ethnic
and religious minorities would have their rights "so
long as they do not harm the majority," Atoussa H.
asked pointedly: "Since when have the minorities begun
to ?harm'" the majority?

Returning to the problematic notion of an Islamic
government, Atoussa H. pointed to the brutal forms of
justice in Saudi Arabia: "Heads and hands are cut off,
for thieves and lovers." She concluded: "Many Iranians
are, like me, distressed and desperate about the
thought of an ?Islamic' government. . . . The Western
liberal left needs to know that Islamic law can become
a dead weight on societies hungering for change. They
should not let themselves be seduced by a cure that is
perhaps worse than the disease." Foucault, in a short
rejoinder published the following week in Nouvel
Observateur, wrote that what was "intolerable" about
Atoussa H.'s letter, was her "merging together" of all
forms of Islam into one and then "scorning" Islam as
"fanatical." It was certainly discerning on Foucault's
part to note in his response that Islam "as a
political force is an essential problem for our epoch
and for the years to come." But this prediction was
seriously undercut by his utter refusal to share any
of her critique of political Islam. Instead, he
concluded his rejoinder by lecturing Atoussa H.: "The
first condition for approaching it [Islam] with a
minimum of intelligence is not to begin by bringing in
hatred." In March and April 1979, once the Khomeini
regime's atrocities against women and homosexuals
began, this exchange would come back to haunt
Foucault.

While many prominent French intellectuals had become
caught up in the enthusiasm of the Iranian upheaval in
late 1978, none to our knowledge followed Foucault in
siding so explicitly with the Islamists against the
secular Marxist or nationalist left. Others with more
background in Middle Eastern history were less
sanguine altogether, notably the leading French
specialist on Islam, Maxime Rodinson. An historian who
had worked since the 1950s in the Marxian tradition
and the author of the classic biography Muhammad
(1961) and of Islam and Capitalism (1966), his leftist
credentials were very strong. Rodinson's prescient
three-part article entitled "The Awakening of Islamic
Fundamentalism?" appeared on the front page of Le
Monde in December 1978.3

As he publicly revealed some years later, in this
article Rodinson was responding to Foucault's earlier
evocation of a "political spirituality." However, in a
time-honored tradition of Parisian intellectual
debate, Rodinson chose not to name Foucault. For those
in France who had followed Foucault's writings on
Iran, however, Rodinson's references in this December
1978 article were clear enough, as they undoubtedly
were to Foucault himself. Rodinson poured cold water
on the hopes of many on the left for an emancipatory
outcome in Iran. He pointed to specific ways in which
the ideology of an Islamic state carried with it many
reactionary features: "Even a minimalist Islamic
fundamentalism would require, according to the Koran,
that the hands of thieves be cut off and that a
woman's share of the inheritance be cut in half. If
there is a return to tradition, as the men of religion
want, then it will be necessary to whip the wine
drinker and whip or stone the adulterer
Nothing will
be easier or more dangerous than this time-honored
accusation: my adversary is an ?enemy of God'."
Bringing to bear the perspectives of historical
materialism, he wrote: "It is astonishing, after
centuries of common experience, that it is still
necessary to recall one of the best attested laws of
history. Good moral intentions, whether or not
endorsed by the deity, are a weak basis for
determining the practical policies of states." What
lay in store for Iran, he worried, was not a
liberation but "a semi-archaic fascism."

By spring 1979, these controversies came to a boil. At
the March 8, 1979 International Women's Day
demonstration, the repressive character of Iran's new
Islamist regime suddenly became quite apparent to many
of the Iranian Revolution's international supporters.
On that day, Iranian women activists and their male
supporters demonstrated in Tehran against an order for
women to re-veil themselves in the chador worn in more
traditional sectors of society. The demonstrations
continued for five days. At their height, they grew to
fifty thousand in Tehran, women as well as men. Some
leftist men formed a cordon around the women, fighting
off armed attackers from a newly formed group, the
Hezbollah or "Party of God." The demonstrators chanted
"No to the Chador," "Down with the Dictatorship," and
even the occasional "Down with Khomeini." One banner
read, "We made the Revolution for Freedom, But Got
Unfreedom," while others proclaimed "At the Dawn of
Freedom, There Is No Freedom." For their part, the
Hezbollah chanted "You will cover yourselves or be
beaten," but their response was mainly nonverbal:
stones, knives, and even bullets. After support
demonstrations also took place in Paris, Simone de
Beauvoir issued a statement of solidarity on March 19:
"We have created the International Committee for
Women's Rights (CIDF) in response to calls from a
large number of Iranian women, whose situation and
whose revolt have greatly moved us
We have appreciated
the depth of the utter humiliation into which others
wanted to make them fall and we have therefore
resolved to struggle for them."

On March 24, a highly polemical article directed
against Foucault appeared in Le Matin, a leftist daily
that had editorialized forcefully against what it
called Khomeini's "road toward counter-revolution and
moral regulation." Entitled "Of What Are the
Philosophers Dreaming?"4 and written by the feminist
journalists Claudie and Jacques Broyelle, it derided
Foucault's enthusiastic praise of the Islamist
movement: "Returning from Iran a few months ago,
Michel Foucault stated that he was ?impressed' by the
?attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics'
that he discerned in project on an Islamic government.
Today there are little girls all in black, veiled from
head to toe; women stabbed precisely because they do
not want to wear the veil; summary executions for
homosexuality; the creation of a ?Ministry of Guidance
According to the Precepts of the Koran;' thieves and
adulterous women flagellated." Alluding to his
Discipline and Punish, they referred ironically to
"this spirituality that disciplines and punishes." The
Broyelles mocked Foucault's notions of "political
spirituality" and asked if this was connected to the
"spiritual meaning" of the summary executions of
homosexuals then taking place in Iran. They also
called upon Foucault to admit that his thinking on
Iran had been "in error." Foucault's response,
published two days later, was in fact a non-response.
He would not respond, he wrote, "because throughout
?my life' I have never taken part in polemics. I have
no intention of beginning now." He wrote further, "I
am ?summoned to acknowledge my errors'." He hinted
that it was the Broyelles who were engaging in thought
control by the manner in which they had called him to
account.

Unproblematic Sympathy

AT THIS POINT THE CONTROVERSY was fueled by the
appearance of Claire Brière and Pierre Blanchet's book
Iran: la Révolution au nom de Dieu, published at the
end of March. It included a lengthy interview with
Foucault by the two authors that discussed the events
in Iran. The interview, which appears to have been
conducted before Khomeini assumed power in February,
was entitled "Iran: The Spirit of a Spiritless World."
Unfortunately for Foucault's reputation, this
enthusiastic discussion of Iran's Islamist movement
was mentioned frequently in reviews of the book, which
appeared in the immediate aftermath of the March
women's demonstrations and amid the growing reports of
atrocities against gay men, Baha'is, and Kurds. The
book achieved a certain notoriety because of its
timeliness and months later, it was still the most
prominently displayed title on the Iranian Revolution
in Paris bookstores.

In the interview, Foucault began his analysis of Iran
by complaining that "the Iranian affair and the way in
which it has unfolded have not aroused the same type
of unproblematic sympathy as Portugal, for example, or
Nicaragua." He deplored the Western left's "unease
when confronted by a phenomenon that is, for our
political mentality, very curious." In Iran, he added,
religion offered something deeper than ideology: "It
really has been the vocabulary, the ceremonial, the
timeless drama into which one could fit the historical
drama of a people that pitted its very existence
against that of its sovereign." Because Shi'ism had
been part of the Iranian culture for centuries, and
because the revolutionary drama was played out through
this religious discourse, Foucault believed that
Shi'ism, "a religion of combat and sacrifice," would
not play the role of a modern ideology, one that would
"mask contradictions." What Foucault perceived as
Iran's unified historico-cultural discourse system
seemed to override those "contradictions" with which,
he acknowledged in passing, "Iranian society" was
"shot through."

What's more, when Blanchet warned of uncritical
euphoria with respect to the events in Iran, referring
to his and Brière's experience in China during the
Cultural Revolution, Foucault refused the implications
of a more questioning, critical stance. Disagreeing
directly with Blanchet, Foucault insisted on the
uniqueness of the events in Iran vis-á-vis China: "All
the same, the Cultural Revolution was certainly
presented as a struggle between certain elements of
the population and certain others, certain elements in
the party and certain others, or between the
population and the party, etc. Now what struck me in
Iran is that there is no struggle between different
elements. What gives it such beauty, and at the same
time such gravity, is that there is only one
confrontation: between the entire people and the state
power threatening them with its weapons and police."
Here, Foucault's denial of any social or political
differentiation among the Iranian "people" was
absolutely breathtaking.

Finally, about nine-tenths of the way through the
interview, after more prodding by both Blanchet and
Brière, Foucault acknowledged a single contradiction
within the Iranian Revolution, that of xenophobic
nationalism and anti-Semitism. We can quote these
statements in full, since they are so brief. First, he
noted: "There were demonstrations, verbal at least, of
virulent anti-Semitism. There were demonstrations of
xenophobia, and not only against the Americans, but
also against foreign workers [including many Afghans]
who had come to work in Iran." Then, somewhat later,
he added: "What has given the Iranian movement its
intensity has been a double register. On the one hand,
a collective will that has been very strongly
expressed politically and, on the other hand, the
desire for a radical change in ordinary life. But this
double affirmation can only be based on traditions,
institutions that carry a charge of chauvinism,
nationalism, exclusiveness, that have a very powerful
attraction for individuals."

Here, for the first time in his discussions of Iran,
Foucault acknowledged that the religious and
nationalist myths through which the Islamists had
mobilized the masses were full of "chauvinism,
nationalism, exclusiveness." At the same time,
however, and what continued to override the
possibility of a more critical perspective, was the
fact that he was so enamored by the ability of the
Islamists to galvanize tens of millions of people
through such traditions that he ignored the dangers.
Strikingly, in the entire interview, Foucault never
addressed the dangers facing Iranian women, even after
Brière recounted, albeit with a big apologia for the
Islamists, an incident in which she had been
physically threatened for trying to join a group of
male journalists during a 1978 demonstration.

At the end of March, soon after Iran: la Révolution au
nom de Dieu appeared, a review in Le Monde emphasized
the interview, calling Foucault's position
"questionable." Days later, another critique of
Foucault appeared in a review in Nouvel Observateur by
Jean Lacouture, the veteran journalist and biographer.
Lacouture argued that the book "poses important issues
with a rather abrupt simplicity that becomes most
apparent in the concluding conversation between the
two authors and Michel Foucault." The biggest problem
with the book and with Foucault's contribution,
Lacouture added, was the way in which "the unanimous
character of the movement" was emphasized in a
one-sided fashion. Something similar to this so-
called "unanimity" for Islam was also observed,
erroneously it turned out, during China's Cultural
Revolution of the 1960s, he concluded. Still another
attack on Foucault soon appeared in L'Express, a
mass-circulation centrist weekly, in which the
prominent journalist Bernard Ullmann wrote that
Foucault's interview "did not have the same prudence"
as the rest of the book in assessing the possible
dangers of an Islamist regime in Iran.

Foucault never responded directly to these various
attacks on him in the reviews of Iran: la Révolution
au nom de Dieu. Unlike some of the previous attacks on
his writings, for example those by Sartre and de
Beauvoir on his The Order of Things (1966), hardly
anyone defended Foucault's Iran writings. One
exception was the post-structuralist feminist
Catherine Clément, who wrote in Le Matin that Foucault
had simply "tried to discern what has escaped our
intellectual expectations" and that "no schema,
including that of ?Human Rights' within our tradition,
can be applied directly to this country, which makes
it revolution from its own culture." Foucault
published two more articles on Iran in April and May
1979, one of them for Le Monde, in which he made a few
very mild criticisms of the revolution. Then he lapsed
into silence over Iran.

The Significance of Gender

IN THE TWO AND A HALF DECADES since 1979, the tremors
set off by the Iranian Revolution helped in no small
way to spark an international series of Islamist
movements. Radical Islamists have taken power or
staged destructive civil wars in a number of
countries, from Algeria to Egypt and from Sudan to
Afghanistan, in the latter case with U.S. support.
These regimes and movements have been responsible for
hundreds of thousands of deaths and for numerous
setbacks to women's rights throughout the Muslim
world. Islamism gained such power and influence during
a period when equally retrogressionist Christian,
Hindu, and Jewish religious fundamentalist movements
were also on the rise, all of them inimical to women's
rights. The September 11 attacks were a dramatic and
horrific example of the dangers of such religious
fanaticism.

Two questions for today emerge from Foucault's Iran
writings. First, were these writings aberrations,
largely the product of his ignorance of Iranian
history and culture? This is what Maxime Rodinson
suggested in his critiques of Foucault. We think not.
We note that de Beauvoir and other French feminists
took a markedly different stance, one that holds up
better today, although they had little specialist
knowledge of Iran. We suggest that Foucault's Iran
writings reveal, albeit in exaggerated form, some
problems in his overall perspective, especially its
one-sided critique of modernity. In this sense, the
Iran writings contribute something important to our
understanding of this major social philosopher.

A second issue for today concerns the whole issue of
religious fundamentalism, more important than ever to
debates over the crisis of modernity since September
11, 2001. The international left's failure to chart an
adequate response to religious fundamentalism is not
Michel Foucault's problem alone. It is ours today as
well. And this is no easy task, just as in past
decades it was not easy to chart a leftist perspective
independent of Stalinism and Maoism. As Maxime
Rodinson later wrote, with a measure of Gallic
humanism: "Those who, like the author of these lines,
refused for so long to believe the reports about the
crimes committed in the name of the triumphant
socialism in the former Tsarist Empire, in the
terrible human dramas resulting from the Soviet
Revolution, would exhibit bad grace if they became
indignant at the incredulity of the Muslim masses
before all the spots that one asks them to view on the
radiant sun of their hope. Michel Foucault is not
contemptible for not having wanted to create despair
in the Muslim world's shantytowns and starving
countryside, for not having wanted to lose hope, or
for that matter, to lose hope in the worldwide
importance of their hopes." And, as we have seen
above, hope needs to be tempered by a critical spirit
cognizant above all of the significance of gender in
an era of religious fundamentalism.

References

Afary, Janet and Kevin B. Anderson. Forthcoming.
Foucault, Gender, and the Iranian Revolution: The
Seductions of Islamism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

Colombel, Jeannette. 1994. Michel Foucault: La clarté
de la mort. Paris: éditions Odile Jacob.

Eribon, Didier. [1989] 1991. Michel Foucault. Trans.
by Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.

Foucault, Michel. 2000. Power. Volume III of The
Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984. Edited
by James Faubion. Translated by Robert Hurley et al.
New York: New Press.

Macey, David. 1993. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New
York: Vintage.

Miller, James. 1993. The Passion of Michel Foucault.
New York: Doubleday.

Minc, Alain. 2001. "Le terrorisme de l'esprit." Le
Monde (Nov. 7), pp. 1. 15

Rabinow, Paul, ed. 1984. Foucault Reader. New York:
Pantheon.

Notes

1. These and other quotations from Foucault's Iran
writings are from the appendix to Afary and Anderson,
where they are all translated, in most cases for the
first time.

2. This letter is translated in the appendix to Afary
and Anderson.

3. Rodinson's critiques of Foucault are translated,
some of them for the first time, in the appendix to
Afary and Anderson.

4. Beauvoir's statement, and Broyelle and Broyelle's
article, are translated in the appendix to Afary and
Anderson.

[JANET AFARY and KEVIN B. ANDERSON are the co-authors
of Foucault, Gender, and the Iranian Revolution: The
Seductions of Islamism (forthcoming). Janet Afary
teaches history and women's studies at Purdue
University and is the author of The Iranian
Constitutional Revolution, 1906-11: Grassroots
Democracy, Social Democracy and the Origins of
Feminism (1996). Kevin Anderson teaches political
science and sociology at Purdue and is the author of
Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study<.i>
(1995) and the co-editor of the Rosa Luxemburg Reader
(2004).