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

Appendix 239
A Powder Keg Called Islam
First published in Corriere della sera, February 13, 1979.
Tehran95-On February II, 1979, the Iranian Revolution took place. I have
the impression that I will read this sentence in tomorrow's newspapers and
in the history books of the future. It is true that in the strange series of events
that have marked the past twelve months of Iranian politics, a known fig­
ure finally appears. This long succession of festivities and mourning, these
millions of men in the street invoking Allah, the mullahs in the cemeteries
proclaiming revolt and prayer, these sermons distributed on cassette tapes,
and this old man who, every day, crosses the road in a suburb of Paris in
order to kneel down in the direction of Mecca; it was difficult for us to call
all this a "revolution."
Today, we feel as though we are in a more familiar world. There were
the barricades; weapons had been seized from the arsenals; and a council
assembled hastily left the ministers just enough time to resign before stones
began shattering the windows and before the doors burst open under the
pressure of the crowd. History just placed on the bottom of the page the red
seal that authenticates a revolution. Religion's role was to open the curtain;
the mullahs will now disperse, taking off in a great flight 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, and so forth.
Is this so certain?
One did not have to be a great prophet in order to notice that the shah,
last summer, was already politically dead, nor in order to realize that the army
could not constitute an independent political force. It was not necessary to be
a seer in order to ascertain that religion did not constitute a fo rm of compro­
mise, but rather a real fo rce, one that could raise a people not only against
the monarch and his police, but against an entire regime, an entire way of
life, an entire world. But things today seem rather clear, permitting a retrac­
ing of what needs to be called the strategy of the religious movement. The
long demonstrations-sometimes bloody, but incessantly repeated-were as
much juridical as political, depriving the shah of his legitimacy and the po­
litical personnel of their representativeness. The National Front bowed out.
Bakhtiar, 96 on the contrary, wanted to resist and to receive from the shah
a legitimacy that he would have deserved for having guaranteed the shah's
irrevocable departure. In vain.
The second obstacle, the Americans, seemed formidable. They yielded,
however, due to powerlessness and also by calculation. Rather than support