"The Philosopher and the Ayatollah"

Wesley Yang

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.

"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 wasn't just pontificating from an armchair in
Paris. In the fall of 1978, as the shah's government
tottered, he made two trips to Iran as a "mere novice"
reporter, as he put it, to watch events unfold. "We
have to be there at the birth of ideas," he explained
in an interview with an Iranian journalist, "the
bursting outward of their force; not in books
expressing them, but in events manifesting this force,
in struggle carried on around ideas, for or against
them."

While many liberals and leftists supported the
populist uprising that pitted unarmed masses against
one of the world's best-armed regimes, none welcomed
the announcement of the growing power of radical Islam
with the portentous lyricism that Foucault brought to
his brief, and never repeated, foray into journalism."As an Islamic movement it can set the entire region
afire, overturn the most unstable regimes, and disturb
the most solid," Foucault wrote enthusiastically.
"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."

Foucault penned seven dispatches for the front page of
the leading Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra as
well as subsequent articles in French. But until the
publication this month of Kevin Anderson and Janet
Afary's Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
(University of Chicago), which includes the first full
translation of Foucault's Iranian writings, few of the
English-speaking scholars who have otherwise pored
over everything Foucault wrote and said have dealt
with the episode at length.

Foucault's Iranian adventure was a "tragic and
farcical error" that fits into a long tradition of
ill-informed French intellectuals spouting off about
distant revolutions, says James Miller, whose 1993
biography The Passion of Michel Foucault contains
one of the few previous English-language accounts of
the episode. Indeed, Foucault's search for an
alternative that was absolutely other to liberal
democracy seems peculiarly reckless in light of
political Islam's subsequent career, and makes for odd
reading now as observers search for traditions in
Islam that are compatible with liberal democracy. But
at a time when religion is resurgent in politics and
Western liberals are divided between interventionists
and anti-imperialists, Foucault's peculiar blend of
blindness and insight about the Islamists remains
instructive.

When Foucault went to Tehran, he was France's dominant
public intellectual, famous for a critique of
modernity carried out through unsparing dissections of
modern institutions that reversed the conventional
wisdom about prisons, madness, and sexuality. In his
most famous work, Discipline and Punish, Foucault
argued that liberal democracy was in fact a
"disciplinary society" that punished with less
physical severity in order to punish with greater
efficiency. More broadly, his counternarrative of the
Enlightenment suggested that the modern institutions
we imagined were freeing us were in fact enslaving us
in insidious ways.

In the fall of 1978, an escalating series of street
protests and violent reprisals and massacres by the
Iranian police had placed the shah and the Iranian
populace on a collision course. The uprising consisted
of a broad coalition, including Communists, student
leftists, secular nationalists, socialists, and
Islamists. But by late 1978, the Islamists — directed
by Khomeini from Paris, long a center for Iranian
exiles — were the dominant faction. The shah abdicated
in January 1979, and Khomeini returned to rapturous
rejoicing on Feb. 1, 1979.

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.

The Iranian Revolution, Anderson and Afary write,
appealed to certain of Foucault's characteristic
preoccupations — with the spontaneous eruption of
resistance to established power, the exploration of
the limits of rationality, and the creativity
unleashed by people willing to risk death. It also
tied into his burgeoning interest in a "political
spirituality" (by which he meant the return of
religion into politics, a suspicious phenomenon in
rigorously secular France) whose rise was then still
obscured by the Cold War. These preoccupations made
Foucault both more sensitive to the power of political
religion, but also more prone to soft-pedal its
dangers. In his articles, Foucault compared the
Islamists to Savonarola, the Anabaptists, and
Cromwell's militant Puritans. The comparisons were
intended to flatter.

In an interview with an Iranian journalist conducted
on his first visit, in September 1978, Foucault made
plain his disillusionment with all the secular
ideologies of the West and his yearning to see
"another political imagination" emerge from the
Iranian Revolution. "Industrial capitalism," he said,
had emerged as "the harshest, most savage, most
selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could
possibly imagine." The failure of Communism, for which
Foucault had no great sympathy, left us, "from the
point of view of political thought," he argued, "at
point zero."

"Any Western intellectual with some integrity," he
continued, "cannot be indifferent to what she or he
hears about Iran."

To Anderson, a political scientist at Purdue
University, Foucault's reckless enthusiasm for the
Islamists seemed to contradict his public image. "We
think of Foucault as this very cool, unsentimental
thinker who would be immune to the revolutionary
romanticism that has overtaken intellectuals who
covered up Stalin's atrocities or Mao's," he said in a
recent interview. "But in this case, he abandoned much
of his critical perspective in his intoxication with
what he saw in Iran. Here was a great philosopher of
difference who looked around him in Iran and
everywhere saw unanimity."

The authors dissect the shortcuts and evasions that
led Foucault into his distinctive stance. For example,
he accepted at face value the idiosyncratic reading of
Islam promulgated by Ali Shariati, an Iran-born,
French-educated sociologist who promulgated a militant
Islamist ideology identifying martyrdom as the only
true path to salvation. He also spoke of an Islamist
ideology shot through with Western elements as if it
were a unified and absolute Other. He accepted a
mythological rendering of Shi'ism as a historical
religion of resistance, when, in fact, it was imposed
by authoritarian force upon Iran in the 17th century
and had collaborated with authoritarian power more
often than it had resisted it.

And Foucault never considers the rights of women in
Islam until his very last disillusioned missive, which
appeared in Le Monde in May 1979. When an Iranian
woman living in exile in Paris named "Atoussa H."
wrote a letter to Le Nouvel Observateur in November
1978 castigating Foucault for his uncritical support
of a solution that could prove to be worse than the
problem, he airily dismissed her claims as anti-Muslim
hate-mongering.

In the event, Foucault's enthusiasm for the revolution
rapidly turned to disappointment. Early on, Foucault
assured his readers that "by ‘Islamic government'
nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the
clerics would have a role of supervision or control,"
and that "there will not be a Khomeini government." A
month after the Iranian electorate overwhelmingly voted to designate Iran an Islamic republic under
Khomeini, the repression of women, political
dissenters, and non-Muslim minorities that would
characterize the regime was unleashed. In fall 1978,
Foucault had praised the revolution's distrust of
legalism. But in spring 1979, Foucault wrote an open
letter to Khomeini's Prime Minister Bazargan, urging
respect for the legal rights of the accused. . . .

Foucault, who died in 1984, refused to engage in
public mea culpas, despite the fierce debate that
broke out in France over his ideas about Iran. His
final word on the affair, a 1979 essay titled "Is It
Useless to Revolt?," acknowledged the revolution's
wrong turn but reaffirmed the principle of revolt.
Afary and Anderson, however, speculate that his later
engagement from public issues and his revision of his
earlier intransigence toward the Enlightenment were
the signs of a man chastened by experience.

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."

Other Foucault scholars also see an enduring value in
his turn toward political spirituality. James
Bernauer, a Jesuit priest who teaches philosophy at
Boston College and has written several books on
Foucault and theology, sees in the late Foucault's
embrace of spirituality a resource for thinking about
how to integrate politics and religion.

"Religious discourse has an enormous power to move
people to take action, to see beyond their immediate
self-interest," Bernauer says. "And Foucault had an
ability to see this, to see past the pervasive
secularism of French intellectual life, that was quite
remarkable. For better or worse, political
spirituality is with us, and Foucault was one who
helped us to focus our sights on it."

[Wesley Yang has written for The New York Observer,
Newsday, and The New York Times. ]