"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.
