Foucault on Iran
http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue37/Afary37.htm
The Seductions of Islamism Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson
[…]
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.
[…]
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.”
[…]
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.
[…]
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.
[…]