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

126 Foucault's Writings on the Iranian Revolution
government, it might have aroused less attention. But it was Foucault's misfortune
that it appeared in March 1979, after the women's demonstrations
and the first executions of homosexuals.
On March 29, soon after Iran: The Revolution in the Name of God appeared,
a review in Le Monde raised further questions about Foucault's position on
Iran. The reviewer, Paul-Jean Franceschini, praised the book as a whole for
having summed up the Islamist movement in Iran as well as the grievances
ofIranians against Western imperialism and Western stereotypes of their culture.
However, Franceschini concluded,
To the caricature of the West, the Iranian Revolution responded with a blaze
of fundamentalism that was itself just as much a caricature, one that became
from then onwards quite powerful. Human rights cannot be split apart. The
bloody encounter of a country with its past, its identity, its religion, does not
justify the excesses that Mr. Bazargan is trying to bring to a close. In this regard,
the attempt by Michel Foucault to read these events, which concludes the
book, appears questionable. (Franceschini 1979)
This review set the tone for most of the others that were to follow. 11
A week later, on April 7, Catherine Clement published a review of Iran:
The Revolution in the Name of God in Le Matin that defended Foucault's views
on Iran. Clement saw Foucault's interview as a most prescient analysis of the
situation on the eve of the fall of the shah: ''This dialogue with Michel Foucault
. .. has already spilled a lot of ink because, the three of them, including
Briere and Blanchet, tried to discern what has escaped our intellectual expectations
in this story. After this book-but only after it-and that is now,
come the questions regarding freedom and social contradictions" (Clement
1979c). Clement's review stressed that for millions of Iranian revolutionary
women, the chador was "the symbol of a veiled Iranianism that was opposed
to Westernization."
Clement also argued that the notion of universal human rights could not
be applied to Iran, linking the events there to China's Cultural Revolution:
No disillusionment, no schema, including that of "Human Rights " within
our tradition, can be applied directly to this country, which makes its revolu·
tion from its own culture . . . . Cultural revolution-we know the enthusiasm
and the reversals of that. Nonetheless, it makes one think. And to think
about it truly, in silence and without ethnocentrism, Iran: The Revolution
in the Name of God is undoubtedly the best point of departure. (Clement
1979c)