foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Visits to Iran and Controversies with " Atoussa H." and Maxime Rodinson 99
This of course turned out to be a serious error of political judgment, albeit
one shared by many others on the Left, both inside and outside Iran.
However, one could argue that there was an equally important theoretical
problem in the above passage, not unconnected to Foucault's overall philosophical
stance. In referring to "forms oflife unchanged for the last thousand
years, " Foucault seemed to fall into what Sartre had once called "the rejection
of history."22 There were also some unfortunate overtones here of the
Orientalist discourse of an unchanging "East."
Foucault recognized the global potential of the Islamist movement and
the possibility that it would become an example for many other predominantly
Muslim countries of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.
The Iranian Revolution was "perhaps the first great insurrection against global
systems, the form of revolt that is the most modem and the most insane"
("Mythical Leader, " app., 222). He deemed the Iranian Revolution "insane,"
because it transgressed the Western borders of rationality. Perhaps, as Foucault
had expressed the hope in Madness and Civilization, such a transgression,
not only in the realm of discourse, but also in reality, could break down the
binary logic of modernity. Finally, a question arises concerning his characterization
of the Islamist movement as "the fonn of revolt that is the most
modem." Was he attempting to redefine and reappropriate the concept of
modernity by suggesting that there could be alternative forms of modemitynot
the Western (or communist) ones that had become "archaic, " but new
Eastern ones that were rejoining spirituality and politics?
Maxime Rodinson's Critique of Foucault: Khomeinism as a "Type of
Archaic Fascism"
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 with the Islamists against the secular Marxist or nationalist
Left. Others with more background in Middle East history were less
sanguine altogether, notably the leading French specialist on Islam, Maxime
Rodinson. A historian who had worked since the 1950s in the Marxian tradition,
Rodinson was the author ofthe classic biography Muhammad (1980)
and ofIslam and Capitalism (1973). He had strong leftist credentials and was
also one of the most prominent French supporters of the Palestinian cause. 23
Rodinson's prescient three-part article entitled "The Awakening ofIslamic
Fundamentalism (IntegrismeJ?" appeared on the front page of Le Monde beginning
on December 6, 1978, and was later published in English as "Islam
Resurgent?"24 As he indicated some years later, in this article he "wanted to