Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
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.
Foucault first
visited Iran in September
1978 and then met with Khomeini at his exile residence outside Paris in
October....
****************
...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."...
***********
...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... read the full article:
