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

102 Foucault's Writings o n the Iranian Revolution
leadingstraightto despotism. Islamism had similarities not to progressive nationalism
but to fascism: "The dominant trend is unquestionably a type of archaic
fascism. By this I mean a wish to establish an authoritarian and totalitarian
state whose political police would brutally enforce the moral and social order"
(ibid., 33; . emphasis added).
Citing the well-known historian of Iran Nikki Keddie,27 Rodinson contrasted
Sunni Islam, long dominated by the state, with Iranian Shi'ism. Already
in the 1 906 Constitutional Revolution, clerics had sided for a period
with secular revolutionaries against the state. The opposition to the shah, as
well as similar movements for democracy in other Muslim lands had again
become interested in an alliance with the clerics. Rodinson termed this "a
provisional alliance against One form of despotism which usually numbered
among its members people dreaming of another form of despotism" ("Islam
Resurgent? " app., 235). He pointed to specific ways in which the ideology of
an Islamic state carried with it many reactionary features:
the minimum Muslim fundamentalism, according to the Quran, requires
the cutting off of a thiefs hand and the halving of a woman's inheritance. In
returning to tradition, as the men of religion require, anyone caught drinking
wine must be whipped, and an adulterer either whipped or stoned. . . .
Nothing is easier or more dangerous than this time-honored custom of
dubbing your adversary an "enemy of God." (Ibid., 235-36)
He concluded by addressing the notion of an Islamic Left. The problem with
such a notion was that the same ideology that opposed America or the West
also exerted "pressure to maintain an archaic moral order" (ibid., 238). 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" (ibid., 237).
These articles by Rodinson were published not in specialist journals but
on the front page of Le Monde and were thus available to the broad French
public. They, and the doubts expressed by others about the events in Iran,
would have a strong effect on the future response within France to Foucault's
writings on Iran. However, most French commentators continued to be far
more sanguine about the revolution. On December 30, the same day that
Bakhtiar accepted the prime ministership, the historian Jacques Julliard published
an opinion piece on religion and politics in Le Nouvel Observateur, of