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

Debating the Outcome of the Revolution, Especially on Women's Rights
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. ("Iran: app., 259 and 260; emphasis
added)
Here, for the first time in his discussions of Iran, Foucault had 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 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 Briere 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 j ournalists during a
1978 demonstration.
In the conclusion of the interview, Foucault argued forcefully that the
events in Iran could not be grasped through traditional, especially Marxist,
categories. He then stressed the alterity of the Iranian people. Since they were
not Westerners, the Iranians "don't have the same regime of truth as ours,
which, it has to be said, is very special, even if it has become almost universal II
CIran," app., 259). He ended the interview on a similar note of absolute
difference:
Many here and some in Iran are waiting for and hoping for the moment when
seOllarism will at last come back to the fore and reveal the good, old type of
revolution we have always known. I wonder how far they will be taken along
this strange, unique road, in which they seek. against the stubbornness of their
destiny, against everything they have been for centuries, "something quite
different." (Ibid., 260)
In addition to the prediction that secular and leftist forces would not displace
the Islamists, there was also a certain exoticizing of Iranian culture as
an oppositionless collectivity defined by its absolute difference from modem
Western societies. Given the opposition to clerical rule that had emerged from
feminists, minorities such as the Kurds, and leftists, such a view was a grossly
inadequate theorization of Iran 's concrete social and political situation in
March 1979. Had this interview appeared in January 1979 or earlier, at a
time when the Islamists had not begun to implement their idea of an Islamic
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